Using Twitter to Understand Public Interest in Climate Change: The case of Qatar

Climate change has received an extensive attention from public opinion in the last couple of years, after being considered for decades as an exclusive scientific debate. Governments and world-wide organizations such as the United Nations are working more than ever on raising and maintaining public awareness toward this global issue. In the present study, we examine and analyze Climate Change conversations in Qatar's Twittersphere, and sense public awareness towards this global and shared problem in general, and its various related topics in particular. Such topics include but are not limited to politics, economy, disasters, energy and sandstorms. To address this concern, we collect and analyze a large dataset of 109 million tweets posted by 98K distinct users living in Qatar -- one of the largest emitters of CO2 worldwide. We use a taxonomy of climate change topics created as part of the United Nations Pulse project to capture the climate change discourse in more than 36K tweets. We also examine which topics people refer to when they discuss climate change, and perform different analysis to understand the temporal dynamics of public interest toward these topics.Comment: Will appear in the proceedings of the International Workshop on Social Media for Environment and Ecological Monitoring (SWEEM'16

Mobile Voices: Projecting the Voices of Immigrant Workers by Appropriating Mobile Phones for Popular Communication

Mobile Voices, also known as VozMob (www.vozmob.net), is a digital storytelling platform for first generation, low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to create and publish stories about their communities, directly from cell phones. The project is a partnership between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit that organizes low-income immigrants in Los Angeles. Founded in 1984, IDEPSCA's programs are focused on education, economic development, health access and reform, popular communication, and worker rights. Currently IDEPSCA runs six day laborer and household worker centers and two day laborer corners where workers look for jobs in a more humane and dignified way while learning about their rights and gaining valuable leadership skills. The Annenberg School for Communication (the research partner) and IDEPSCA (the community partner) came together around the shared goal of designing communication systems and processes that promote media justice and help those without computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere. This chapter is a reflection on popular communication, participatory design, andcommunity-based multimedia practice from the Mobile Voices project team. It was collaboratively written by 13 members of the project and includes a project overview and an exploration of themes including the pedagogy of popular communication, participatory technology design, and the dynamic

New frontiers in QLR: definition, design and display

Research that is attentive to temporal processes and durational phenomena is an important tradition within the social sciences internationally with distinct disciplinary trajectories. Qualitative longitudinal research emerged as a distinct methodological paradigm around the turn of the millennium, named within the UK through journal special issues, literature reviews and funding commitments. In 2012-3 the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods funded a network for methodological innovation to map ’New frontiers of QLR’, bringing together a group of scholars who have been actively involved in establishing QLR as a methodological field. The network provided an opportunity to consolidate the learning that has developed in QLR over a sustained period of investment and to engage critically with what QLR might mean in new times. This paper documents the series of discussions staged by the network involving the definition of QLR, the kinds of relationships and practices it involves and the consequences of these in a changing landscape for social research. The series was deliberately interdisciplinary ensuring that we engaged with the temporal perspectives and norms of different academic and practice traditions and this has both enriched and complicated the picture that has emerged from our deliberations. In this paper we argue that QLR is a methodological paradigm that by definition moves with the times, and is an ongoing site of innovation and experiment. Key issues identified for future development in QLR include: intervening in debates of ‘big data’ with visions of deep data that involve following and connecting cases over time; the potential of longitudinal approaches to reframe the ‘sample’ exploring new ways of connecting the particular and the general; new thinking about research ethics that move us beyond anonymity to better explore the meanings of confidentiality and the co-production of research knowledge; and finally the promotion of a QLR sensibility that involves a heightened awareness of the here and now in the making of knowledge, yet which also connects research biographically over a career, enriched by a reflexive understanding of time as a resource in the making of meaning

Experiencing (in)securities in northern Norway : Narratives of emotion and extractivism

The role of emotions within extractive industries has been acknowledged and embraced in recent years, though security studies research on it remains limited. This article argues that to better understand narratives of everyday security, the role of emotions should be acknowledged. I focus on an Arctic locality in northern Norway, and on local experiences and emotions surrounding everyday securities and insecurities of having an oil and gas production site nearby. The Arctic oil and gas industry is important economically for local communities; however, it also accelerates global climate change. The article scrutinizes interviews collected from local people and concludes that security narratives are complex and conflicted, portraying various stories about having the petroleum industry in one's neighbourhood. The narratives express concern and worry for the environment while expressing gratitude to the economic benefits of the industry. The Arctic communities have been tied to the global oil and gas market while being forced to find new means to cope with the change. Contributing to the wider discussion on the local security impacts of extractivist projects, as well as further developing the concept of human security, I argue that the role of emotions cannot be ignored.Peer reviewe