Leading from the Margins: The WNBA and the Emergence of a New Model of Sports Activism in the United States

After a first wave of activist athletes influenced the 1960s Civil Rights debates and faced negative professional and personal consequences, activist athletes largely disappeared from the American Politics landscape. The return of athlete activism in the last few years has been widely covered by journalists and scholars alike. In this dissertation, I argue that this trend is not a return to the activism of the past, but the emergence of a new model of sports activism. Building on recent developments in the persuasion literature, I show how in this new model, some leagues are in a unique and unprecedented position to generate business growth because, not despite, of their political activism. The dissertation defines the new model through the league that exemplifies it the most, the Women National Basketball Association (WNBA). In doing so, it improves our understanding of the mechanisms of persuasion by non-political messengers. While some leagues operate in this new model, others remain left in a model where activism often comes at a cost or fails to yield results. This explains the backlash faced by Colin Kaepernick after he knelt during the national anthem and the limited findings from the recent experimental research focused on the NFL. The dissertation explores the conditions under which this new model of mutually beneficial business and political successes can emerge for athletes and leagues. The new model, as defined throughout the dissertation, has three key characteristics: (i) it is emerging in leagues composed of largely minoritized athletes whose existence as athletes, because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, is inherently political; (ii) it provides opportunities for business and political successes to feed each other, but only when leagues fully embrace their political nature; and (iii) it both relies on and generates an alignment between the athletes’ and fans’ values. Chapter 1 introduces the new model and examines how it compares to the traditional model of sports activism. I discuss whether and how much a model emerging in the United States, and largely driven by women’s sports, can extend to other leagues and countries. Chapter 2 describes the recent business and political successes of the WNBA and documents how they only came after the league fully started acknowledging its players’ identities. This case study provides the groundwork for understanding the connection between the business and political models of sports leagues and how they are moderated by the identities of players and fans. In Chapter 3, I use survey experiments to show that persuasive arguments from WNBA players can change minds on policy issues, including voting rights and transgender inclusion, but only among people whose values are not in opposition to the ones carried by the WNBA. I also find evidence that the players’ arguments convince a larger audience when the identity of the players is not emphasized. When group cues are introduced, respondents in the identity-unaligned groups often end up supporting the policy less. When respondents see both persuasive information and group cues, the polarizing effects of group cues appear to overcome the “parallelizing” effects of persuasive information. While Chapter 3 focuses on athletes’ influence on political opinions, Chapter 4 investigates their impact on actual political events. I explore the role played by the WNBA in the 2020 Georgia Senate race through the lens of campaign donations, Twitter, and media coverage data. I find evidence that the WNBA had a short term effect on donations and served as an echo chamber, helping to keep the story of the race on issues that were favorable to Warnock, especially social justice. Finally, in Chapter 5, I use survey experiments to show that this commitment to activism does not come at a cost for the WNBA. I provide evidence that activism has the potential to bring new, like-minded fans to the league, while generating few risks of losing existing fans. This is especially true when players emphasize their identities and values, which suggest a trade-off in how players highlight their identities in this new model of sports activism. If the goal is to change as many people’s minds on the issues as possible, Chapter 3 shows that activist athletes are better off not emphasizing their identities, but, if the goal is to bring in new fans into the league, Chapter 5 shows that players are better off if they do. The reason for this trade-off is straightforward and well-grounded in the persuasion literature: there are more progressives to turn into new WNBA fans than there are WNBA fans to turn into progressives

Keep on Rolling Under the Stars

Beat Studies represent a vibrant field of intellectual inquiry, and this collection examines Beat culture as deeply infused with ecological themes. Allen Ginsberg invented the term "Flower Power" and Beat texts uncover the sources of our current existential climate predicament. This is the first edited collection to place the Beat Generation in conversation with the environment. A diverse number of contributors from Asia, Europe, and North America addresses essential environmental subjects and the deep ecological vision of the Beats

The European Union in British news discourse from 2014 to 2015 : b a dialectical-relational critical discourse analysis

PhD ThesisThis thesis investigates how the European Union is represented in British news coverage and identifies why news coverage of the EU takes this character. Using a dialectical-relational framework of critical discourse analysis, EU-related articles and stories from five high-circulation newspapers and two prominent TV news broadcasts, collected in the run-up to the 2014 European Parliament and 2015 General Election, are analysed. Semi-structured interviews with British media professionals and EU press officers complement textual analysis. The thesis finds that news media only cover a narrow range of the EU’s activities, and focus on the UK context. Coverage tends to emphasise negative rather than positive aspects of the EU. Negative representations often draw on dominant, historical discourses about the relationship between the British Isles and mainland Europe. Where positive aspects are communicated these are principally limited to economic benefits. Grammatical, rhetorical, and intertextual features of coverage feed into and reinforce those patterns. The trends – with some differences between outlets– are observable throughout the sample. Interviews with media professionals show that general trends and differences between news outlets can be explained with reference to perceptions of the journalistic role, organisational structures and pressures within newsrooms and relationships of journalists with EU press officers. In particular, financial pressures necessitate high sales numbers, leading to focus on attention-grabbing events, often reported from an angle perceived to be acceptable to the audience. Interviews feed into a theoretical model explaining the particularities of EU reporting in the sample and more generally. These findings help us understand some of the dynamics leading to the UK’s decision to leave the EU and are suggestive of future representations of the EU and its relations with the UK. The thesis therefore contributes to literature on media representations of the EU, to research on news production, and to literature dealing with UK-EU relations more broadly.Funds for Women Graduates for supporting me financially throughout the writing-up stag

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

Language variation, automatic speech recognition and algorithmic bias

In this thesis, I situate the impacts of automatic speech recognition systems in relation to sociolinguistic theory (in particular drawing on concepts of language variation, language ideology and language policy) and contemporary debates in AI ethics (especially regarding algorithmic bias and fairness). In recent years, automatic speech recognition systems, alongside other language technologies, have been adopted by a growing number of users and have been embedded in an increasing number of algorithmic systems. This expansion into new application domains and language varieties can be understood as an expansion into new sociolinguistic contexts. In this thesis, I am interested in how automatic speech recognition tools interact with this sociolinguistic context, and how they affect speakers, speech communities and their language varieties. Focussing on commercial automatic speech recognition systems for British Englishes, I first explore the extent and consequences of performance differences of these systems for different user groups depending on their linguistic background. When situating this predictive bias within the wider sociolinguistic context, it becomes apparent that these systems reproduce and potentially entrench existing linguistic discrimination and could therefore cause direct and indirect harms to already marginalised speaker groups. To understand the benefits and potentials of automatic transcription tools, I highlight two case studies: transcribing sociolinguistic data in English and transcribing personal voice messages in isiXhosa. The central role of the sociolinguistic context in developing these tools is emphasised in this comparison. Design choices, such as the choice of training data, are particularly consequential because they interact with existing processes of language standardisation. To understand the impacts of these choices, and the role of the developers making them better, I draw on theory from language policy research and critical data studies. These conceptual frameworks are intended to help practitioners and researchers in anticipating and mitigating predictive bias and other potential harms of speech technologies. Beyond looking at individual choices, I also investigate the discourses about language variation and linguistic diversity deployed in the context of language technologies. These discourses put forward by researchers, developers and commercial providers not only have a direct effect on the wider sociolinguistic context, but they also highlight how this context (e.g., existing beliefs about language(s)) affects technology development. Finally, I explore ways of building better automatic speech recognition tools, focussing in particular on well-documented, naturalistic and diverse benchmark datasets. However, inclusive datasets are not necessarily a panacea, as they still raise important questions about the nature of linguistic data and language variation (especially in relation to identity), and may not mitigate or prevent all potential harms of automatic speech recognition systems as embedded in larger algorithmic systems and sociolinguistic contexts