scholarly journals Solidarity in the Public Sphere: A Discourse Network Analysis of German Newspapers (2008–2017)

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wallaschek ◽  
Christopher Starke ◽  
Carlotta Brüning
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
The Public ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Policy Fields ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
Institutional Actors ◽  
German Newspapers

Multiple crises in the EU have sparked a renaissance of the concept of solidarity. However, discursive approaches to solidarity and the public understanding of solidarity have hardly received scholarly attention. Empirical research on solidarity is rather centered on welfare institutions as well as on individual attitudes and behavior. To shed new light on solidarity in public discourse, we investigate in which policy fields the term is most often used, which actors refer to it and how different types of solidarity are covered in the German public discourse. We investigate the coverage of solidarity in four German newspapers (<em>Die Welt</em>, <em>Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung</em>, <em>Süddeutsche Zeitung</em>, <em>Die Tageszeitung</em>) from 2008 to 2017. By deploying the discourse network methodology with 306 claims in 230 news articles, we analyze the co-occurrence of actors and issues over time. Our results indicate a varying set of issues in which solidarity occurs, a rather stable actor visibility, across time and a context-dependent use of different types of solidarity. Government actors, civil society actors as well as citizens drive the solidarity discourse showing that institutional as well as non-institutional actors make use of solidarity in their public actions regarding political protest, financial issues and migration. The study provides novel insights into the interdependence of actor and issue visibility and sheds new light on solidarity in media discourses.

scholarly journals The Diverging Presence of Youth in Public Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Youth-Related Debates Across Countries and Issue Fields

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 574-590
Author(s):  
Christian Lahusen ◽  
Johannes Kiess
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Policy Fields ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Criminal Matters

Youth is a recurrent topic of public debates, particularly because youth features in almost all issue fields discussed in mass media, ranging from educational and cultural to criminal matters. However, previous research has highlighted that youth is not necessarily actively involved in raising its own voice within the public sphere, which gives cause for concerns about the representation of youth in public discourses and thus in democratic opinion formation. This article wishes to critically assess the proposition that young people are objects of public discourses rather than active participants. For this purpose, it will analyze public statements reported in newspapers of nine countries (Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The analysis makes conceptual use of claims-making analysis and tries to identify contextual factors that determine the extent to which youth actors actively participate in public discourses. In particular, we wish to assess whether discursive inclusion or exclusion of youth is patterned along countries and/or policy fields. Our findings show that policy fields are the most important contextual factors. Moreover, considering claims and actors, public debates about youth are rather similar between the nine countries. This indicates that public debates about youth are patterned by a similar, cross-national differentiation along policy domains.

scholarly journals Satirizing international crises. The depiction of the Ukraine, Greek debt, and migration crises in political satire

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Cordula Nitsch ◽  
Dennis Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
International Crises ◽  
The Public ◽  
Orientation Function ◽  
Media Logic ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Migration

In international crises, the media’s information and orientation function is particularly important in the public sphere. While the news media’s crisis coverage has been well researched and often criticized, very little is known about the depiction of crises in political satire. This study examines how German satirical shows (n = 154 episodes, 2014–2016) covered the Ukraine, Greek debt, and migration crises and whether or not these depictions corresponded to news media logic. In its attention to the crises, satire follows news media’s conflict orientation. Parallels with news media logic also relate to the information function because the predominant frame elements in satirical shows mirror governmental positions. This is different regarding the orientation function. In their evaluation of the frame elements, satirical shows’ criticism of governmental positions and their support for minority positions create a counter-narrative for the crises. Thus, satirical shows provide added value for public discourse.

On Waxen Wings: Challenges to the Public Sphere in the Network Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Francoeur
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Multiple Viewpoints ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Communicative Space

There is a tendency, particularly among Western pundits and technologists, to examine the Internet in almost universally positive terms; this is most evident in any discussion of the medium’s capacity for democratization. While the Internet has produced many great things for society in terms of cultural and economic production, some consideration must be given to the implications that such a revolutionary medium holds for the public sphere. By creating a communicative space that essentially grants everyone his or her own microphone, the Internet is fragmenting public discourse due to the proliferation of opinions and messages and the removal of traditional gatekeepers of information. More significantly, because of the structural qualities of the Internet, users no longer have to expose themselves to opinions and viewpoints that fall outside their own preconceived notions. This limits the robustness of the public sphere by limiting the healthy debate that can only occur when exposed to multiple viewpoints. Ultimately, the Internet is not going anywhere, so it is important to equip the public with the tools and knowledge to be able to navigate the digital space. 

scholarly journals Introduction: Publics and Participation in Early Modern Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A. M. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Institutional Variation ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Important Shift

AbstractThe deconstruction of what is termed “the public sphere” in recent decades has resulted in an important shift in scholarly attention towards networks and forms of association. This article explores how greater sensitivity to the unstable and ephemeral nature of “publics,” combined with a stronger awareness of the role of cultural exchange, has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of early modern politics. Some analytical precision has, nonetheless, been lost. A justifiable emphasis on the artificiality of the territorial borders that have defined units of enquiry has occurred at the expense of deeper consideration of the cultural boundaries that dictated the terms on which people could participate in and shape public discourse. Study of the British archipelago can offer new ways of thinking about these problems. Linguistic and ethnic differences, the search for religious concord as well as the reality of confessional division, institutional variation, and the consequences of London's increasing dominance of the archipelago, are key facets of the reassessments undertaken here. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactions between varieties of “public” and other forms of association can nuance our understanding of early modern state formation.

scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING LAW AND RELIGION AS CULTURE: MAKING ROOM FOR MEANING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between law and religion in contemporary civil society has been a topic of increasing social interest and importance in Canada in the past many years. We have seen the practices and commitments of religious groups and individuals become highly salient on many issues of public policy, including the nature of the institution of marriage, the content of public education, and the uses of public space, to name just a few. As the vehicle for this discussion, I want to ask a straightforward question: When we listen to our public discourse, what is the story that we hear about the relationship between law and religion? How does this topic tend to be spoken about in law and politics – what is our idiom around this issue – and does this story serve us well? Though straightforward, this question has gone all but unanswered in our political and academic discussions. We take for granted our approach to speaking about – and, therefore, our way of thinking about – the relationship between law and religion. In my view, this is most unfortunate because this taken-for-grantedness is the source of our failure to properly understand the critically important relationship between law and religion.

scholarly journals The Digital Transformation of the Public Sphere, Its Features in the Context of Various Political Regimes, and Its Possible Influence on Political Processes

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 149-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexey Salikov
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Internet Communication ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

The question of how the digital transformation of the public sphere affects political processes has been of interest to researchers since the spread of the Internet in the early 1990s. However, today there is no clear or unambiguous answer to this question; expert estimates differ radically, from extremely positive to extremely negative. This article attempts to take a comprehensive approach to this issue, conceptualizing the transformations taking place in the public sphere under the influence of Internet communication technologies, taking their political context into account, and identifying the relationship between these changes and possible transformations of political regimes. In order to achieve these goals, several tasks are tackled during this research. The first section examines the issue as to whether the concept of the public sphere can be used in a non-democratic context. It also delineates two main types of the public sphere, the “democratic public sphere” and the “authoritarian public sphere,” in order to take into account the features of public discourse in the context of various political regimes. The second section discusses the special aspects of the digital transformation of the public sphere in a democratic context. The third section considers the special aspects of the digital transformation of the public sphere in a non-democratic context. The concluding section summarizes the results of the study, states the existing gaps and difficulties, outlines the ways for their possible extension, and raises questions requiring attention from other researchers.

scholarly journals A National Public Sphere? Analyzing the Language, Location, and Form of Newspapers in Finland, 1771–1917

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Jani Marjanen ◽  
Ville Vaara ◽  
Antti Kanner ◽  
Hege Roivainen ◽  
Eetu Mäkelä ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mass Medium ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Newspaper History

This article uses metadata from serial publications as a means of modelling the historical development of the public sphere. Given that a great deal of historical knowledge is generated through narratives relying on anecdotal evidence, any attempt to rely on newspapers for modeling the past challenges customary approaches in political and cultural history. The focus in this article is on Finland, but our approach is also scalable to other regions. During the period 1771–1917 newspapers developed as a mass medium in the Grand Duchy of Finland within two imperial configurations (Sweden until 1809 and Russia in 1809–1917), and in the two main languages – Swedish and Finnish. Finland is an ideal starting point for conducting comparative studies in that its bilingual profile already includes two linguistically separated public spheres that nonetheless were heavily connected. Our particular interest here is in newspaper metadata, which we use to trace the expansion of public discourse in Finland by statistical means. We coordinate information on publication places, language, number of issues, number of words, newspaper size, and publishers, which we compare with existing scholarship on newspaper history and censorship, and thereby offer a more robust statistical analysis of newspaper publishing in Finland than has previously been possible. We specifically examine the interplay between the Swedish- and Finnish-language newspapers and show that, whereas the public discussions were inherently bilingual, the technological and journalistic developments advanced at different pace in the two language forums. This analysis challenges the perception of a uniform public sphere in the country. In addition, we assess the development of the press in comparison with the production of books and periodicals, which points toward the specialization of newspapers as a medium in the period after 1860. This confirms some earlier findings about Finnish print production. We then show how this specialization came about through the establishment of forums for local debates that other less localized print media such as magazines and books could not provide.

scholarly journals Coming up for Air: On Reading in a Global Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Aparna Tarc
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Teaching Of Reading ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.

scholarly journals “De-centre-ing” sexual difference in public and ecclesial discourses on marriage

2008 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
Biological Difference ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Knowledge ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Heterosexual Marriage

Public and ecclesial discourses influence opinions on the institution of heteronormative marriage. The term “discourse” indicates that private knowledge and experiences are made known in the public sphere. Against this background the article focuses on three postmodern approaches to a theology of marriage with regard to the significance or insignificance of the biological difference between femaleness and maleness. The first approach is that of marriage as a linguistic expression of intimacy in a relationship. According to this view, heterosexual marriage is not seen as the only possibility for expressing the intimate relationship between God and human beings. The second approach assumes that love and caring, supposedly inherent to heterosexual marriage, can also exist in other relationships. This implies that marriage as institution should also be available to people in relationships other than heterosexual. The third approach emphasizes marriage and sexuality as being embedded in community. Such a view makes sexual difference and procreation peripheral to sexual ethics. The aim of this article is to suggest a further option for consideration, namely the “de-centreing” of sexual difference in the theology of marriage. This postmodern option pleads for a respect for privacy with regard to sexual intimacy, also in ecclesial and public discourse.

scholarly journals Hidden participation in the public sphere: Understanding Malaysian university students’ public discourse practices in cyberspace

First Monday ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei-Yuit Chan ◽  
Shameem Rafik-Galea ◽  
Ngee-Thai Yap
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public University ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
The Public Sphere

A recent development in Malaysia was the unprecedented rise in young Malaysians’ participation in the country’s social and political affairs, facilitated almost entirely by the Internet. This phenomenon caught many by surprise considering that university students in the country had been barred through legislation from active involvement in political activities for more than 30 years. Through a survey of 514 university students in a Malaysian public university, supplemented by interview data and samples of students’ writing, this study investigated in which ways Malaysian tertiary students are participating in the public sphere through the Internet. Following Hauser’s (1999) conception of public discourse as personal, interactive, informal, and distributed voices among the citizenry, we argue for a perspective that explains how online interactions in the friendship frame among young people represent their participation in the public sphere in the context of contemporary society.

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