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This thesis centrally considers the role of media in the formation and development of communities through a qualitative study of the African Caribbean community in Leicester. The project explores the maintenance of connections between family units and the social changes that impact the home and community, such as adult children moving away from home and reverse migration to the Caribbean. The project explores how these changes impact the community's survival and maintenance and mediatization in mitigating or compounding such developments. The study comprised ethnographic research conducted in 2018-19, with 21 participants within the community (13 first-generation and eight second-generation), seeking to illuminate individual experiences of multiplatform media within a new media environment. The research identified varieties of practices utilised within a diasporic Caribbean community and considered how these relate to the formation and development of Caribbean identities and migrant family experiences in the United Kingdom. Additionally, this research explores how social practices of the African Caribbean Leicester community have been shaped by the Windrush Generation, who arrived in the UK between the late 1940s through to the 1970s. Members of this community sought to maintain their connections with the Caribbean whilst simultaneously seeking to secure greater positive visibility in the face of negative stigmatization within the UK. Members of the UK's African Caribbean community were treated as 'outsiders' deemed to be distinct from a racialised norm of 'Britishness'. The specific, relational term 'outsiders' draws from Norbert Elias and John Scotson's work in their paradigmatic community study The Established and the Outsiders (1965). It is used in this thesis as a theoretical model to explore inter- and intra-group tensions in the formation of a diasporic Caribbean community. Exploring the various relationships within the Caribbean diasporas will help understand how they connect to homelands generationally and UK's experiences.

During the last two decades of upheaval in Sri Lanka (including civil war, ethnic violence and the current economic crisis), a new transnational movement of televangelist Buddhist monks, collectively part of the Mahamevnāva Monastery, has emerged encouraging followers to access nirvāṇa (liberation from suffering) in this lifetime. The movement encourages lay Buddhists to prioritize attaining nirvāṇa over material wealth and nationalist politics. To make the concept more accessible to a wider audience, the Mahamevnāva movement has built over fifty branch monasteries, known as asapu (hermitages) in urban settings in Sri Lanka and twenty worldwide since 1999. In their rituals, they use colloquial Sinhala instead of the traditional Pāli language and employ modern televisual technologies to create new ritual spectacles of nirvāṇa. This dissertation examines how Mahamevnāva Buddhists—both monks lay practitioners—are reforming Buddhist practice through innovative rituals and new linguistic and media forms to create a non-hierarchical, non-consumerist, non-nationalist religious movement focused on attaining nirvāṇa in this world. I furthermore explore how in doing so the movement has produced a new hierarchical form of nationalist religiosity for an urban middle-class of Sri Lankan Buddhists. This dissertation seeks to move beyond polarizing paradigms of either materialist consumerism or nationalist politics on the one hand and decontextualized religious liberation on the other, viewing it instead as a Post-Protestant Buddhist movement, a reformation of 19th century Protestant Buddhist practice through new techniques of mediation. Thus, this dissertation argues that non-materialistic religious identities can coexist with consumerist forms of media and nationalist language. In turn, the uptake of this accessible nirvāṇa, through new forms of media and linguistic registers of emerging ritual practices, contributes to a religious transformation and a new form of nationalism. Ultimately this research reveals that this religious reformation caters to the demand of modern individuals to access liberation amidst the embodied "evil" of neoliberalism, social hierarchy, and political uncertainty. As such, both new and traditional media formats make the previously inaccessible goal of liberation an attainable objective in this lifetime for trans-local and transnational Sri Lankan lay middle-class subjects.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the communication and media practices of Filipino Americans in Chicago. It investigates how their everyday encounters with diaspora media produce patterns of consumption and interpretation that locates identity, resistance and citizenship as discourses performed with and in media. Through interviews, participant observation and storytelling, the study argues that Filipino Americans’ active engagement with karaoke, the Filipino Channel, a transnational media platform and community newspapers activates becoming more Filipino in the diaspora, long distance activism and a performance of diasporic citizenship informed by cosmopolitanism. These media performances are not mere happenstances but are conscious acts informed by a logic of diasporic performativity that locates active engagement with media as an expression of human agency.

Este artículo analiza el proceso de mediatización cultural de las celebridades tomando como caso de estudio la auto-presentación en la red social Instagram de la cantante Rosalía (@rosalia. vt). Para ello se ha realizado un doble análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de las 449 publicaciones que la cantante realiza entre el 1-1-2018 y el 31-7-2020, periodo en que alcanza fama internacional con el lanzamiento del álbum El Mal Querer. El análisis estadístico descriptivo de esta muestra permite determinar los patrones de publicación de la cantante, las categorías a las que asocia su imagen y el uso que hace de las potencialidades de esta red social. El análisis iconológico de la muestra permite determinar los referentes culturales que Rosalía asocia a su imagen, dentro de un contexto globalizado, urbano y de inspiración flamenca. Este estudio concluye que Rosalía aparece como un caso tipo de “celebritización”, ya que usa estratégicamente la lógica mediática de las redes sociales como una manera de afianzar su marca personal diversificándola más allá del ámbito de la música.

Miami-Dade County differs from other major metropolitan areas in the U.S., mostly because of the immense Latinx national origin diversity and its characterization as the most dialectally diverse Spanish speaking city in the world (Carter & Lynch, 2015). Sociologists have been concerned with how Spanish and shared cultural practices act as a unifying force in the maintenance of pan-Latinidad in Miami (e.g. Mahler, 2018). Linguists, however, have only recently begun to address such questions (cf. Fernández Parera, 2017; Valencia & Lynch, 2019). As a point of departure, this dissertation first examines how Cubanness, stemming from Miami’s historically dominant Latinx group (Nijman, 2011, inter alia) and pan-Latinidad, emerging in the last 60 years, become constructed in digital communities. This dissertation investigates how, as a result of globalization and mediatization (Blommaert, 2010), Miami-based social media accounts on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok represent what it means to ‘speak Miami.’ Results show that idioms (e.g. comer mierda ‘to be bored’) are indexical of Cuban Miami. The data suggest that Miami’s mediascape (Appadurai, 1996) reinforces a sociolinguistic imaginary, following Anderson (1983), with regard to Miami Cuban Spanish. The focus of the dissertation then turns to how the resemiotized language (Leppänen, 2014) collected through translocal new media (Androutsopoulos, 2014) are conceptualized in terms of neighborhood association. Young adult participants in Miami (N = 98) completed a perceptual dialectology survey in Qualtrics, which resulted in heat maps. That data were analyzed using Chi-square to test for significance among the neighborhood associations during the heat mapping tasks. Aggregate results show that the idioms are strongly associated with Miami’s Cuban American neighborhoods, Little Havana and Hialeah. The results also show differences of ‘associative specificity,’ where for Cubans and heritage speakers of Spanish the idioms represent Cuban Miami specifically and, for non-Cubans and non-heritage speakers, the idioms are indexical of a broader concept of Miami. The dissertation demonstrates how online communities add to linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) through the process of mediatization and argues for the concept of ‘perceptual communities’ in discussions of globalized speech communities.

A consideration of the ways in which post-digital influence impacts visual culture, and specifically arts publishing. The post-digital moment creates a unique opportunity for analog/digital crossover, which manifests in publishing practices and publications. This thesis aims to dedicate a space for discourse concerning these contemporary practices. Focusing on self-reflexive sources about arts publishing, this study analyzes the hybridization of media, pointing to mediatization as a result of our contemporary moment and its integrated digital influences. I address design and object composition of publications and artistic publishing practices using visual analysis to evaluate the tangible (or non-tangible) aspects of the publication and assess the multidisciplinary reach of arts publishing. This type of analysis supports the ideas of arts publishing as artistic practice, and allows us to develop a literary and aesthetic commentary about contemporary arts publishing and the latest developments in this field. I look at these primary sources as artistic objects and critique them also as conceptual pieces. While art objects are usually the focus of most art historians, the recent boom in arts publications and reflections on publishing practices in the arts warrants special attention and a thorough academic examination to consider how arts publishing functions alongside other, more-recognized media of the art world. Academic and communications design specialist Brad Haylock speaks to the lack of attention for this subject in DISTRIBUTED, an anthology published in 2018: “I enjoy curating exhibitions; editing a multi-authored volume gives me the same kind of buzz. Clearly, there are a great many parallels between the two types of practice, but, while the discipline of curating has received much attention in recent years, the aesthetics of editing is too rarely discussed.” Arts publishing is an important intersection of the visual and conceptual that provides a way for us to historicize the dissemination of some of the most important contemporary theory, texts, and interdisciplinary design that is foundational to our discipline. This thesis provides an expansion of the traditional art history subjects by considering the digital humanities and visual culture as fundamental to post-digital analyses of the arts.

This article focuses on otherness in the field of communications studies, within the social context of generalized mediatization. We argue that, on one hand, the new organizational dimension of communication, mediatization, based on information hybridism (Sodré, 2014), turns communication into a form of knowledge that is decisive for societal functioning. Yet, on the other hand, insofar as it integrates communication within information regimes –in particular, speed flows– mediatization seems to challenge the constitution of epistemological otherness within this field of knowledge. As a space in which synergy among different social fields is created, mediatization not only amplifies the discursive contiguity of knowledge-production and professional spheres, but also establishes the absence of duration as a common institutional premise. This phenomenon points to the retreat of time as a space of difference. Within the new regime of temporality, based on the virtual acceleration of time, a significant portion of communication theories seem to appear without any type of virtuality. In epistemological terms, one of the most acute consequences of dismantling time, as a space of intelligibility, is the constriction of the principle of autonomy that, at one time, more thoroughly grounded different fields of knowledge, especially within the humanities. Hence, the hermeneutic horizon becomes crucial to the development of social sciences. As a residual condition of discursive autonomy, hermeneutic resources shape an alignment of time and knowledge. In the end, understanding continues to constitute an existential quality

This paper presents an explanation proposal about the meaning links that are produced when there is interaction of Brazilian women with counterintuitive ads, which show Afro-American women as protagonists of their discourses. It is a qualitative investigation oriented by the theoretical interconnection of perspectives of symbolic interactionism and mediatization studies, as basilar theoretical referential, and through the constructivist grounded theory, as a methodological approach. The results of this research enabled the articulation of the representative theoretical model “The Interaction experiences of Brazilian women with counterintuitive ad", from which this paper presents the core category “The everyday pain of racism of Brazilian black women and the effect of counterintuitive ads for its reduction”.

As key institutions in Western democracies, parliaments have gained importance regarding foreign affairs issues in recent years. Their increasing role as moral tribunes and discussion forums on conflict prevention and resolution have led to the parliamentarization of international affairs. The examination of the parliamentary agenda and the actors who shape it constitutes a fundamental part of agenda-setting studies as applied to the media and political systems. Among these actors, mass media must be highlighted, taking into account the complex process of information gathering for members of Parliament, particularly in cases related to international violent conflicts. Moreover, in the specific situation of the Syrian Civil War, social media have become increasingly important due to the difficulties faced by traditional media in performing their job on the ground. In order to know the impact and roles played by social media in parliamentary debates, we applied a computer assisted quantitative content analysis to 3,249 minutes from the parliaments of United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and the EU, as well as a qualitative analysis. The results show that, during the first part of the conflict, social media were regarded by European parliaments as positive tools for the dissemination of information whereas, in the second phase, the diffusion of jihadist propaganda by such media completely altered the attitudes toward them.

This dissertation explores the interplay between diasporic life of transnational Indonesians in the United States and their use of media to engage in the long-distance politics of their home country. It aims to investigate how, and to what extent, that people in diaspora use media to perform mediatization of transnational-homeland politics. In this dissertation, I also exemplified the theory of mediatization of politics by examining the appropriation of various media platforms by Indonesian diaspora in two metropolitan areas, Washington, D. C. and Los Angeles, both in their electoral and non-electoral political engagement. Utilizing a multi-sited media ethnographic, which includes ten months of participant observations and thirty in-depth interviews between October 2014 and July 2015, I examine the complexity of Indonesian diaspora’s relationship with media and transnational politics. In my empirical chapters, in addition to the discussion of increasing availability of homeland media content in diaspora, I analyze how the presence of diaspora spaces enabled these displaced nationals to foster their sense of community, which eventually would help them to maintain their relationship with their country of origin’s matters, including politics. While Indonesian diaspora exhibited dual-nature of media use, accessing both host land and homeland media, it was the consumption of homeland political news that I found as the most prominent practice demonstrated by overseas Indonesian to mediatize their long-distance political participation. Furthermore, in various diasporic political engagements, media practice was not only amalgamated with non-media political activism, but to some extent, also was considered to be the preexisting condition of transnational Indonesians’ involvement in their home country’s political sphere. Finally, this dissertation argues that the degree of mediatization of transnational politics was amplified by both media and non-media factors. While media factors included structural and individual elements, such as media and audience availability, non-media factors were associated with the issues of homeland and host land conditions, where each factor should be understood as interrelated. Despite some variations, most of people in diaspora had an equal chance to participate in home country’s politics due to the availability of Indonesian political content, mainly through online and social media, which highlights the multifaceted mediatization of politics of diasporic community.

Theorists of globalization tend to presume the declining centrality of nationalism as an explanatory focus for understanding global power relations. This dissertation argues that far from declining in significance, nationalism encompasses both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, mediatized processes of power struggle, processes that draw increasingly from resources that are both internal and external to geographic domains of conflict, and in a manner that re-patterns power relations at the local, national, regional and global levels. This project examines the relationship between media, nationalism and globalization in Telangana and its relationship with marginalized groups in the region, with a particular focus on the media practices of Telangana activists such as production of pamphlets, use of online forums and access to mainstream television, radio, print media and social communication. This dissertation argues that despite not having a media of its own, and in spite of hostility of established Telugu media, the Telangana movement furthered its goals to strategic use of one-to-one and one-to-many media that operated in an oral culture. The success of the movement can be credited as much if not more, to bringing sections of Telangana society disaffected by globalization through nationalist mobilization since the mid-1990s as it could be the politically opportune moment in 2013 when the Telangana Bill was passed by the parliament. The movement is noted for being largely peaceful and employed non-violent strategies, although it can be argued that the suicides by young people were instances of self-inflicted violence.

Augusto Pinochet’s regime permanently altered Chilean politics during his seventeen years as dictator of Chile. By the late 1980s, Pinochet’s hold on power remained unyielding, political reconciliation with the military was unimaginable, and civil war seemed inevitable. Notwithstanding the lack of substantive political change, on March 11, 1990, Pinochet ceremoniously handed the presidential sash to the leader of his legal opposition, Patricio Aylwin, thus initiating a peaceful transition to civilian rule in Chile.My dissertation examines the context and content of the Franja de Propaganda Electoral of 1988. What loosely translates as “official space for electoral propaganda” - was a nationally televised, largely uncensored, 30-minute political program, representing the two sides of the 1988 Plebiscito; the NO campaign in opposition to the military regime, and the pro-Pinochet SÍ campaign.The Franja Electoral became a mediated space of Chilean politics, just beyond the repressive reach of the Pinochetista regime, within which a seemingly impossible transition was not only articulated, but also, through which, a transformation of Chilean political culture was engendered. To help explain this transformation, I draw from a conceptual framework known as mediatization theory, to examine the Franja Electoral as a sample case for the mediatization of Chilean politics. I propose that this case is best understood as an historical, political, and theoretical process, rooted in the cultural assimilation of an imagined political configuration. The mediatization of Chilean politics was a process that would ultimately help reconcile a contradictory relationship between what was politically viable as a social and historical course of action, with what was represented as acceptable in a mediated, televisual space of political culture.Furthermore, this project helps in the recovery of an exceptionally rare, complete collection of the 1988 Franja Electoral, and includes one of only a handful of content analyses performed on this important audio-visual material. Finally, my use of mediatization theory involves the incorporation of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), to analyze the Franja Electoral as an artifact of Chilean political culture - a mediated representation of an enduring qualitative alteration in the meaning of Democracy in Chile.

This study explores the relationship between media and the U.S. Senate by examining how senators and staff collect, study, and use media. Senators and staff study media to find out how they are portrayed by media. Their collection of news articles for study is an indicator of mediatization, a theory of how media shape society. Political actors study media to understand how media frame news about politics. Mediatization of politics occurs when loosely regulated media evolve from being intermediaries who deliver political news, to become active shapers of the government. The U.S. political system is influenced by the demands of media and their coverage. Political actors must adapt to the form of media they wish to use. Mediatization forces political actors to adopt media rules. To a political actor an altered message presented by media can redefine a career. Political actors cannot ignore media and they must study media. For this study, U.S. senators’ staffs were surveyed to understand why they collect media. The technology of radio, television, the Internet and social media allow media to be increasingly active in the governing process. Mediatization, a theory that describes media as playing a central, active role in society, is supported by this study. Allowing that senators collect media to understand, adapt to, and even counter news coverage illustrates how much influence media have in politics, and how the process of politics has become mediatized. Advisor: Mary Kay Quinlan