scholarly journals Elections in the Public Sphere: the Analysis of Lithuanian TV Debates „Lyderių Forumas“

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 166-188
Author(s):  
Aistė Valiauskaitė

The article analyses the information that spreads in the media during the election campaign. It looks at the aspect of promises made by politicians through an academic lens. The definition of a political promise is explained; some insights are devoted to an analysis of the reasons why some promises are more commonly fulfilled. The paper mostly concentrates on the role of the media, combining ideas of media theorists with the investigation of pre-election TV debates “Lyderių forumas”.Keywords: campaign, objectivity, parliamentary elections, political communication, professionalism, promise, tv debates.

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shimazono Susumu

Abstract Until the 1990s, a commonly held view in Japan was that Buddhism had withdrawn from public space, or that Buddhism had become a private concern. Although Buddhist organizations conducted relief and support activities for the people affected at the time of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, they were often seen to be out of place, and little attention was given to them by the media. However recently there are areas in which Buddhism can be seen as playing new roles in the public sphere. Religious organizations seem to be expected to perform functions in fields that lie outside the narrow definition of religion. These expectations are becoming stronger among Buddhist organizations as well. In this paper, I describe some areas in the public sphere in which Buddhist groups are starting to play important roles including disaster relief, support of the poor and people without relatives, provision of palliative care and spiritual care, and involvement in environmental and nuclear plant issues.


Author(s):  
María Velasco González ◽  
Ernesto Carrillo Barroso

This article forms part of a classic social science debate on the role of the media in the construction of social and political narratives. The object of the paper is to study the rise and fall of the concept of tourismphobia in the Spanish media. The case is analyzed in the light of public policies studies, especially those analyzing agenda-setting, the social construction of the definition of public problems and the struggles of coalitions seeking to impose their public policy narratives in the policy-making process. With this purpose, a database was used that collected more than 11,000 news items over a substantial period of time. Its analysis reveals that media attention rises sharply after active protest actions against tourist saturation and that the term is mostly linked to specific territories and cities and to certain political figures. It also allows us to observe how some political responses to the problem appear more in the media, while others are minimized. The conclusions indicate that the “tourismphobia” neologism was capitalized on – which is often the case with terms that circulate in the public sphere – by various groups attempting to highlight some of its semantic dimensions over others. The study also reveals that the media assume an active position in the construction of discourses in relation to tourism also as a political and not just an economic issue. Furthermore, it shows that the use of the term has greatly declined, either because the problem has become dormant or because it has been reformulated into other terms that are more in line with dominant narratives.


Author(s):  
Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla

OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child initiative, was accepted by just a few countries, including Peru. The largest acquisition of computers has produced a fairly low impact in education and is now being quietly phased-out. Peru's government decision to adopt the computers, back in 2007, was not contested or questioned by the political class, the media or even teachers, with just a rather small number of specialists arguing against it. This chapters discussed the political and argumentative processes that brought OLPC into the public sphere, through the use of a specific narrative, that of hackerism, i.e., the hacker attitude towards computers, and how social and political validation resulted in adoption. An assessment of the process of framing OLPC as a hacker product and the perils of such reasoning lead to discuss the need for a counter-narrative about the role of computers in society.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (55-56) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
John Lynch

This article examines three films by the Swedish director Ruben Östlund: Play (2011), Force Majeure (2014), and The Square (2017). It describes the role of mobile phones in the films, both on the level of content and in terms of aesthetics. Within the films, the failure of the phone to connect the protagonists to significant others is seen as symbolic of an alienation that leads them to points of crisis. Here, the mobile phone works as a device in two ways. First, as a significant communication technology, and second, as a plot contrivance to advance the dramatic conflict. Critically, the mobile phone opens an uncertain space where subjectivity becomes increasingly insecure, precisely as it becomes fundamentally intertwined with it. There is a cinematic tradition of mobilizing this ambiguity to which this process can be connected. Further, the form of these works is considered in relation to the notion of traumatic repetition, and how this expands into the wider contemporary image-culture and the key influence of YouTube within this. Here, the films are considered in relation to the changing dynamic of the public sphere in the light of the mobile recording capabilities, that have come to shape an emergent cinematic aesthetic evident in these films.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Márcia Detoni

In an age marked by multiple distribution platforms of content, oligopoly of media sectors and transnational nature of cultural industries it is not any longer enough for the Public Broadcast to inform, educate and entertain with independence and technical, ethics and aesthetics quality, as proposed by the British BBC in 1927. Public Radio and Television need to find a new social function that distinguishes them from the private media and justify state investment in communication. A rising number of scholars point out that this new function is the creation and strengthening of a broad media public sphere able to guarantee citizens a space for debate on common issues, a process that encourages citizen participation and transformative action. This article examines the role of Public Broadcasting in the twenty-first century according to the media theories influenced by the thought of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of the public sphere has become central in discussions about building dialogic media spaces.


2021 ◽  
pp. 2336825X2110291
Author(s):  
Vasil Navumau ◽  
Olga Matveieva

One of the distinctive traits of the Belarusian ‘revolution-in-the-making’, sparked by alleged falsifications during the presidential elections and brutal repressions of protest afterwards, has been a highly visible gender dimension. This article is devoted to the analysis of this gender-related consequences of protest activism in Belarus. Within this research, the authors analyse the role of the female movement in the Belarusian uprising and examine, and to which extent this involvement expands the public sphere and contributes to the changes in gender-related policies. To do this, the authors conducted seven semi-structured in-depth interviews with the gender experts and activists – four before and four after the protests.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gerardo Serra ◽  
Morten Jerven

Abstract This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses the role of the press in constructing the meaning and implications of the 1963 count. In contrast with the literature's emphasis on identification, categorization, and enumeration, our focus is on how the census results informed a broader range of visual and textual narratives. It is argued that analysing the multiple ways in which demographic sources shape debates about trust, identity, and the state in the public sphere results in a richer understanding of the politics of counting people and narrows the gap between demographic and cultural history.


10.1068/d459t ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haim Yacobi

This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with planning policy in general and in Israel in particular. The inherent dilemmas of the different NGOs' tactics and strategies in reshaping the public sphere are examined, based on a critical reading of Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. The main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent, and under which conditions, the NGOization of space—that is, the growing number of nongovernmental actors that deal with the production of space both politically and tangibly—has been able to achieve strategic goals which may lead towards social change.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 410
Author(s):  
Ian A. Morrison

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’.


2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Misztal

This paper's purpose is to exam Turner's (2006a) thesis that Britain neither produced its own public intellectuals nor a distinctive sociology. It aims to outline difficulties with the logic of Turner's argument rather than to discuss any particular public intellectual in Britain. The paper argues that Turner's claim about the comparative insignificance of public intellectuals in Britain reinforces the myth of British exceptionalism and overlooks the significance of the contribution to the public sphere by intellectuals from other disciplines than sociology. It discusses Turner's assumption that intellectual innovation requires massive disruptive and violent change and suggests that such an assertion is not necessarily supported by studies of the conditions of the production of knowledge. Finally, the paper argues that Turner's anguish at the absence of public intellectuals among sociologists in Britain is symptomatic of New Left thinking that models the idea of the intellectual on Gramsci. In conclusion, the paper asserts that Turner's idea of the intellectual fails to note the tension at the heart of the role of public intellectual–the tension between specialist and non-specialist functions.


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