Drawing on studies of gendered mediation and women's political representation, this study explores the implications of using gender quotas to facilitate women's political representation on their ...portrayal in the media. Focused on the coverage of Egyptian female members of parliament in the daily newspaper al-Masry al-Yawm, the study employs feminist content analysis to examine more than two thousand news articles across three parliamentary terms (2012–2022). The article reveals a heightened visibility that challenges patriarchal stereotypes and legitimizes women as political actors. However, this coverage exists within an authoritarian setting, where the media's compliance with government narratives subtly upholds the regime's image. This, in turn, may limit the empowering effect of such visibility, especially among regime critics, highlighting the complex role the media plays in mirroring and molding power relations and in the negotiation of gender perceptions.
Aim/Purpose: This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the media portrayal of Ph.D. programs in the Czech Republic. Specifically, it explores how doctoral study programs, their students, and the ...Ph.D. degree are represented across various topics and social actors over an 18-month period. Background: The societal perception of Ph.D. studies, especially at the postgraduate level, is significantly shaped by media representations, including their connections to science, academia, and broader social life. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the portrayal of the Ph.D. phenomenon in the media. The Czech Republic provides a relevant use case because of Central Eastern European (CEE) settings and amplified media coverage. The main factors are several political and social influences and governmental discussions regarding the legality of and against precarious conditions. Methodology: This study utilizes a qualitative method of conventional and directed content analysis to thematically categorize a corpus of 456 articles on Czech news platforms. A subset of these articles (thematic cluster about study conditions) undergoes further analysis to identify represented social actors. The results are clustered and interpreted using examples from the dataset. The instances of studied phenomena are quantified to provide an enumerated representation of individual themes and social actors. Contribution: The author contributes to research on doctoral studies by expanding the existing knowledge through media content analysis within the social constructivist paradigm. Moreover, the CEE region, often overlooked in doctoral studies and science communication research, is highlighted here. Finally, this article enriches the understanding of public relations strategies for higher-education institutions by focusing on earned media channels as opposed to solely owned ones. Findings: The analysis leads to the determination of 10 thematic clusters that can be succinctly categorized into four main areas: “Ph.D. Title,” “University Life,” “Study Conditions,” and “Controversial Issues.” The latter two categories are notably politicized, a fact underscored by the actor analysis, which shows a predominance of political figures in the media coverage. An unexpected result of the research is the significant underrepresentation of student voices in the analyzed sample of media outputs, except for those doctoral students who also hold positions such as student initiative chairs. Additionally, comparing the results to previous research on doctoral studies, it can be argued that many of the critical topics discussed by the research community, such as mental health issues or diversity of the student cohort, are not equally represented in media portrayals. Recommendations for Practitioners: Practitioners, especially communication professionals from higher education institutions and research centers, can leverage these insights to refine their communication strategy. This can help counterbalance prevailing media narratives and provide a more representative portrayal of study programs, focusing on areas currently underrepresented in media discourse. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers from other regions are encouraged to conduct similar studies using the presented framework to map the representation of Ph.D. in respective media outlets. It is advisable to consider the local context in the interpretative phase of the content analysis, as demonstrated in this study. Impact on Society: The findings elucidate the role of the Ph.D. within the national media landscape of higher education, potentially influencing policymakers, journalists, and science communication professionals to reconsider their approaches to media discourse. Lastly, as hinted above, science communication professionals can benefit from the results in terms of future development of media outreach strategy with a focus on targeted topics. Future Research: The presented work would benefit from a broader, multinational comparison and also a complementary audience analysis to understand how Ph.D. students and possible applicants interpret these messages and whether they correlate with their attitudes.
This article analyses the discursive construction of the limits of webcamming in terms of service agreements by BongaCams, LiveJasmin and Chaturbate, three of the world’s most popular webcam sex ...platforms. Through this analysis, the moderation practices in the webcamming industry are examined. Regulation of sexual platforms and its implications for representations of online sex work are still largely unclear. Through a critical discourse analysis of seven webcam platform terms of service documents, this article scrutinises the norms for camming as dictated by industry leading platforms. This analysis shows that these platforms, for legal and financial reasons, reject the idea of camming as sexually explicit or as (sex) work. Such a construction of camming limits sexual expression online, obstructs online sex workers’ labour rights and perpetuates sex work stigma. This article sheds light on how digital platforms can establish and maintain norms which regulate users’ online expressions, working conditions and representations.
The article addresses the phenomenon of mass migration through an intersectional analysis, highlighting the interaction of discriminatory practices and exploring common exclusion mechanisms in the ...case of two minority groups: Muslim women and migrants/refugees. The starting point of the analysis is the media discourse on two legal documents addressing the ban of Muslim women’s headgear and the problem of illegal migration (the Marrakesh Declaration). The results of the research are applied to a broader reflection on the causes and consequences of discriminatory policies on minority and immigrant communities.
In this article, we examine protest of India’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) which spurred instances of physical and digital protest. We study ...the intersections of gender, political subjectivities, and digital activism among anti-CAA-NRC activists, specifically the “Women of Shaheen Bagh.” We discuss our data collection methods, description, and analysis of the protests in the context of larger questions, including how critical, feminist researchers may engage with data tools and how forms of gendered, transnational protest are mediated and represented via individual images, texts, and videos that make up social media data. We illuminate the formation of political subjectivities in the context of transnational, digital protest movements by re-appropriating computational and data tools. This article seeks to demonstrate an interdisciplinary engagement between critical, feminist approaches to knowledge and subject formation and data science approaches to social network analysis and data visualization techniques.
Although studies have remarked upon the increase in representation of kinksters and BDSM practices in mainstream media narratives, community voices indicate that these narratives do not provide an ...authentic portrayal of their community. This misrepresentation of kinksters results in stigmatization and forces the community to manage its minority stress. This article reflects upon the results from a series of interviews with Dutch poly-kink-identified participants about mainstream representations of their community. The participants agree on several main objections to this representation: mainstream media narratives ignore community norms, while they actively sensationalize and pathologize kink, and insist on stereotypical gender relations. Together, this representation undermines the transgressive potential of poly-kink relations and increases the stigmatization of this community.
Recent media attention aimed at migrant caravans at the US–Mexico border has increased interest from different actors in the political and social spheres. Parallel to traditional and mainstream ...media, social media has become the prime context where narratives about the border develop, molding broader societal perspectives on the immigration issue. Through a content and discourse analysis of 105 posts connected by the #MigrantCaravan or #CaravanaMigrante hashtags, we delved into how media representations of immigration on Instagram effectively establish otherness between the different characters involved in this phenomenon. The border wall emerges as one of the main components in these narratives and a symbol of the temporal and spatial stages of the migratory journey. Meanwhile, the voice of the main character, the migrant, is mostly absent, often conveyed through biased views, filtered by the opinions of posters about immigration and characterized by new narrative configurations enabled by the Instagram format.
This edited volume fills a gap in current research on asylum seekers and refugees. By focusing on two East Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, this volume offers material for comparison and reflection ...on an area of the world in which this theme is still relatively underdeveloped. By approaching the theme through the different perspectives of human rights, social construction through media representation and public opinion, and lived experiences, the book offers a multifaceted and sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon. The main aim of this collection is to expand current scholarship on refugee studies and offer policy recommendations on the timely topic of refugee and asylum seekers in East Asia. This is an open access book.
Subversion is at the heart of my knitting practice but how can the stereotypical image of the knitter, the kindly white-haired, white-skinned grandmother who knits out of love, be successfully ...subverted to change public perceptions of knitting? What will it take to challenge and ultimately change the stereotype? This article examines contemporary media representations of knitting and knitters from the UK, USA and Australia, revealing how deep-rooted the stereotype is. The media representations explore issues around activism, mental health, race, gender, age and sexuality as portrayed through acts of knitting. From the environmental activists known as Knitting Nannas, to artist Jameisha Prescod's, self-portrait, Untangling, of her knitting to manage her mental health during England's national lockdown, and gold medalist diver and campaigner for LGBT + rights, Tom Daley, knitting poolside during the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics in an attempt to relax and steady his nerves. It explores how the stereotypical view of knitters and knitting affects the way that it is received and valued, and challenges the supposedly "warm and friendly" nature of knitting, presenting the lack of diversity and representation that currently exists in the knitting community.
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