Political Communication and Deliberation takes a unique approach to the field of political communication by viewing key concepts and research through the lens of deliberative democratic theory. This ...is the first text to argue that communication is central to democratic self-governance primarily because of its potential to facilitate public deliberation. Thus, it offers political communication instructors a new perspective on familiar topics, and it provides those teaching courses on political deliberation with their first central textbook. This text offers students practical theory and experience, teaching them skills and giving them a more direct understanding of the various subtopics in public communication.
Sitting at Baldwin’s Table Swindall, Lindsey R.
James Baldwin review,
09/2019, Letnik:
5, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Last year, in the dispatch “There Is No Texting at James Baldwin’s Table,” I began to assess the ways in which audiences were engaging with Baldwin’s writing at several public discussions that I ...co-facilitated with NYC actor/comedian Grant Cooper. Based on the initial reaction to two five-part Baldwin conversations at a high school and middle school in Manhattan, I posited that a need for meaningful communion is drawing people to discuss the writer. As I wrote that article, I was busy scheduling seven new Baldwin discussions in communities across New Jersey and another five-part series in Manhattan. Having completed those sessions, I am pleased to report that Baldwin’s welcome table is indeed a powerful vehicle for engaging in impactful dialogue. This dispatch will demonstrate that discussing Baldwin not only opened an avenue for productive sharing but went further by inspiring people to ask how they could contribute to hastening positive social and personal transformation. Three questions will frame this analysis of putting the welcome table into practice: How many people want to sit at James Baldwin’s table? Can conversations about James Baldwin sustain more “welcome table moments”? Can these interactions create a sense of kinship that deepens personal interaction in the digital age?
We study the secret-key capacity in a joint source-channel coding setup-the terminals are connected over a discrete memoryless channel and have access to side information, modelled as a pair of ...discrete memoryless source sequences. As our main result, we establish the upper and lower bounds on the secret-key capacity. In the lower bound expression, the equivocation terms of the source and channel components are functionally additive even though the coding scheme generates a single secret-key by jointly taking into account the source and channel equivocations. Our bounds coincide, thus establishing the capacity, when the underlying wiretap channel can be decomposed into a set of independent, parallel, and reversely degraded channels. For the case of parallel Gaussian channels and jointly Gaussian sources we show that Gaussian codebooks achieve the secret-key capacity. In addition, when the eavesdropper also observes a correlated side information sequence, we establish the secret-key capacity when both the source and channel of the eavesdropper are a degraded version of the legitimate receiver. We finally also treat the case when a public discussion channel is available, propose a separation based coding scheme, and establish its optimality when the channel output symbols of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper are conditionally independent given the input.
How to make sense of the face-to-face public discussion of the distribution of public funds? In this article, I argue that physical co-presence of citizens in course of collective deliberation gives ...the underrepresented social groups opportunities to speak out their concerns and express their social positions. In a discussion that I co-organised with support of a few local cultural organisations, participants faced a possibility to practice critical debates regarding the decisions of the municipal, regional and central authorities. I present a case study that contributes to the literature by describing the "openings" in public indifference that have implications for practice and policies. I reflect on the public discussion as an opportunity to engage into a dialogue a general public, activists, scholars, officials and experts and imagine alternative ways for democratic deliberation. This article links together the problems of distribution of public goods and engaging public into the organisation of mega-events in the light of the predicaments of the capitalist urban development.
Clearly there is a unique hunger for Baldwin’s wisdom in this historical moment, as illustrated by Raoul Peck’s film, reprints of several Baldwin books, exhibits, and other events. This essay ...describes the genesis of two five-part public discussions on the works of James Baldwin that were co-facilitated by African-American Studies scholar Dr. Lindsey R. Swindall and actor Grant Cooper at two schools in New York City in the 2016–17 academic year. These discussion series led to numerous Baldwin discussion events being scheduled for the winter and spring of 2018. The surprising popularity of these programs prompted Swindall to wonder: Why do people want to discuss Baldwin now? The first of two parts, this essay speculates that many people in the digital age long for a conversational space like the one Baldwin created at the “welcome table” in his last home in France. The second essay—which is forthcoming—will confirm whether discussion events held in 2018 harmonize with the welcome table thesis.
This is the second part of a two-part paper on information-theoretically secure secret key agreement. This part covers the secret key capacity under the channel model. In this model, multiple ...terminals wish to create a shared secret key that is secure from an eavesdropper with unlimited computational resources. The terminals are all connected to a noiseless and authenticated but insecure channel, called the "public channel." Furthermore, the terminals have access to a secure but noisy discrete memoryless broadcast channel (DMBC). The first terminal can choose a sequence of inputs to the DMBC, which has outputs at the other terminals and at the eavesdropper. After each channel use, the terminals can engage in arbitrarily many rounds of interactive authenticated communication over the public channel. At the end, each legitimate terminal should be able to generate the secret key. In this paper, we derive new lower and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity. In each case, an example is provided to show that the new bound represents a strict improvement over the previously best known bound. This part of the paper is not standalone, and is written under the assumption that the reader has access to Part I, which is published in the same issue.
This study aims to investigate the complex relationship among entertainment contents, networked publics, and politics by offering an overview of literatures in the fields and suggests that the ...emotional dimensions are the key to understand the political possibilities of mediated public discussion. By analyzing the online comments of YouTube channel WIGS’s web series Lauren, this article reveals that audiences interpret and discuss this web series through mediated feelings of connectedness and thus are able to engage in public debate and political deliberation. I argue that, the connective affordances of YouTube and the emotional realism of the web-drama facilitated the web space of Lauren to function as an “emotional public sphere” where social solidarity was strengthened, political criticism was developed, and political activity could be motivated. Overall, this study reconceptualizes the place of entertainment media in democracy and everyday life and contributes to political communication and feminist media studies.
We consider a group of m trusted and authenticated nodes that aim to create a shared secret key K over a wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper Eve. We assume that there exists a ...state-dependent wireless broadcast channel from one of the honest nodes to the rest of them including Eve. All of the trusted nodes can also discuss over a cost-free, noiseless and unlimited rate public channel which is also overheard by Eve. For this setup, we develop an information-theoretically secure secret key agreement protocol. We show the optimality of this protocol for "linear deterministic" wireless broadcast channels. This model generalizes the packet erasure model studied in the literature for wireless broadcast channels. Here, the main idea is to convert a deterministic channel into multiple independent erasure channels by using superposition coding. For "state-dependent Gaussian" wireless broadcast channels, by using insights from the deterministic problem, we propose an achievability scheme based on a multi-layer wiretap code. By using the wiretap code, we can mimic the phenomenon of converting the wireless channel into multiple independent erasure channels. Then, finding the best achievable secret key generation rate leads to solving a non-convex power allocation problem over these channels (layers). We show that using a dynamic programming algorithm, one can obtain the best power allocation for this problem. Moreover, we prove the optimality of the proposed achievability scheme for the regime of high-SNR and large-dynamic range over the channel states in the (generalized) degrees of freedom sense.
Russian media have recently (re-)gained attention of the scholarly community, mostly due to the rise of cyber-attacking techniques and computational propaganda efforts. A revived conceptualization of ...the Russian media as a uniform system driven by a well-coordinated propagandistic state effort, though having evidence thereunder, does not allow seeing the public discussion inside Russia as a more diverse and multifaceted process. This is especially true for the Russian-language mediated discussions online, which, in the recent years, have proven to be efficient enough in raising both social issues and waves of political protest, including on-street spillovers. While, in the recent years, several attempts have been made to demonstrate the complexity of the Russian media system at large, the content and structures of the Russian-language online discussions remain seriously understudied. The thematic issue draws attention to various aspects of online public discussions in Runet; it creates a perspective in studying Russian mediated communication at the level of Internet users. The articles are selected in the way that they not only contribute to the systemic knowledge on the Russian media but also add to the respective subdomains of media research, including the studies on social problem construction, news values, political polarization, and affect in communication.
PDF
