735 research outputs found

    Fake News: Finding Truth in Strategic Communication

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    Fake news is an old phenomenon that has become a new obsession and a menace to society due to technological advancement and the proliferation of social media, which has changed traditional journalism norms. As the spread of false information has increased these past few years, it has become increasingly difficult for information consumers to distinguish between facts and fakes. A comprehensive systematic literature review to extract themes revealed the major factors responsible for spreading fake news. This qualitative interpretative meta-synthesis (QIMS) aims to better understand and offer solutions to combat fake news. This Ph.D. dissertation will serve as a guide for ethical communication practice and a reference for future research studies

    From abuse to trust and back again

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    oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:w7qv

    From Jane Austen to Meghan Markle: The Persistence of British Imperialism in White Popular Feminism

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    This dissertation traces the persistent threads and values of white womanhood from the nineteenth-century British Empire to modern American popular culture. The figure of the white woman was significant to upholding colonialism and empire in the literary mass media and culture of the nineteenth century, and I argue that this figure continues to be used in popular media and online content today to surreptitiously uphold white supremacy and obscure race and gender inequalities. This dissertation will explore the overlaps between nostalgia, historical revisionism, white womanhood, white supremacy, and white feminism in modern American popular culture. The connections between, and the popularity of this broader media is not accidental but part of a longer history of white supremacy using culture and women to surreptitiously reinforce hierarchies and establish white-centered norms. This dissertation builds on work on white popular feminism, white womanhood, and cultural ideologies from scholars like Sarah Banet-Weiser, Koa Beck, Jessie Daniels, and Rafia Zakaria, while reflecting on how Black and intersectional feminisms, articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Audre Lorde among others, offer more revolutionary and effective forms of feminism and empowerment. From the prolific and consistent remediation of Jane Austen and her centurial contemporaries to the obsession and controversies surrounding Meghan Markle’s inclusion in, and subsequent exclusion from, the British Royal Family, this dissertation takes seriously the often overlooked and dismissed media and popular culture made for and by women to trace the histories of empire and their entanglement with a white popular feminism and white supremacy. Chapter one analyzes the popularity and reception of period media from 2020, Bridgerton, Emma., and Enola Holmes, to explore how period media, even those that attempt to be diverse and more progressive, still cultivate a white nostalgia for a past that aligns with a popular, white feminism that is non-threatening towards capitalism and white supremacy. Chapter two uses two popular remediations of Jane Austen’s novels, Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary, to trace the combination of Jane Austen and period media with postfeminism. This fusion embedded nineteenth-century values of white womanhood into popular feminist media that continues to have influence today. Chapter three will use the media surrounding Meghan Markle’s in/exclusion from the British Royal Family as demonstrating the promise and influence of a white popular feminism beyond fictional narratives, but also its limitations and failures when it goes against white supremacist patriarchal systems. The conclusion will then briefly extend the argument made throughout the chapters into social media spaces to connect how historical fantasy, urban homesteading, and constant cycles of trendy femininity reflect the white popular feminism and romanticization of imperial womanhood online. This dissertation takes seriously the narratives of idealized white womanhood that extend through recent centuries, and while media like Bridgerton and Enola Holmes may make it seem like a distant past, these imperial values of white womanhood are very much still present and influential within white popular feminism that guides larger discussions of inequality, justice, and white supremacy in our present moment

    Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference

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    The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years

    TeorĂ­a y praxis de la conspiraciĂłn: Blogs y sitios de teorĂ­as conspirativas en castellano

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    Tesis de Doctorado para obtener el título de Doctor en Comunicación Social, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Córdoba.Fil: Moreira Alonso, Joaquín. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación; Argentina.A lo largo de la historia, las teorías conspirativas han tenido momentos de bastante relevancia, siendo una de las formas en las que se han expresado algunas posiciones políticas y sociales bastante relevantes y formando parte del discurso de sectores y líderes políticos marginales, pero también en algunos sectores y líderes importantes. En los últimos años, las teorías conspirativas ganaron bastante relevancia a partir de algunos acontecimientos sociales y políticos y del protagonismo que lograron ciertos movimientos. Un ejemplo muy claro de esto es el crecimiento de las ultraderechas reaccionarias en Europa, las cuales tienen muchos puntos en contacto en su ideario con las teorías conspirativas, siendo a veces explícitamente conspiracionistas.Fil: Moreira Alonso, Joaquín. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación; Argentina

    Twilight of the American State

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    The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian. How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today. Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit

    Intelligence Oversight In Times of Transnational Impunity: Who Will Watch the Watchers?

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    This book adopts a critical lens to look at the workings of Western intelligence and intelligence oversight over time and space. Largely confined to the sub-field of intelligence studies, scholarly engagements with intelligence oversight have typically downplayed the violence carried out by secretive agencies. These studies have often served to justify weak oversight structures and promoted only marginal adaptations of policy frameworks in the wake of intelligence scandals. The essays gathered in this volume challenge the prevailing doxa in the academic field, adopting a critical lens to look at the workings of intelligence oversight in Europe and North America. Through chapters spanning across multiple disciplines–political sociology, history, and law–the book aims to recast intelligence oversight as acting in symbiosis with the legitimisation of the state’s secret violence and the enactment of impunity, showing how intelligence actors practically navigate the legal and political constraints created by oversight frameworks and practices, for instance by developing transnational networks of interdependence. The book also explores inventive legal steps and human rights mechanisms aimed at bridging some of the most serious gaps in existing frameworks, drawing inspiration from recent policy developments in the international struggle against torture. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, sociology, security studies, and international relations

    Investigating the relevance of teaching general communication skills for vocational programmes in the context of Polytechnic level education in Singapore

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    The launch of the Industry Transformation Programme (Ministry of Trade and Industry, n.d.) led to the start of the new initiative, SkillsFuture that sparked a series of changes in funding for training schemes, programmes in professional training and relooking at the role of technology and automation in the professional environment in Singapore. In response to this change, the institution of this study introduced a set of fundamental communication subjects which aims to prepare students to be effective communicators in the workplace. This research investigates issues the researcher identifies in the list of fundamental communication subjects and questions the need and possibilities of teaching general communication skills in vocational-based programmes. The method for this study includes semi-structured interviews, surveys, and discourse analysis of target texts. In addition, I evaluated the role of context in teaching written communication skills by examining the importance of and aspects in a specific genre existing within the early childhood education professional environment - teacher lesson plans. The findings confirmed the complexities of transferring general communication skills across dissimilar contexts and suggest that communication skills for the workplace should be taught within, if not close to, authentic environments. Recommendations included the introduction of varied contexts and genres existing in practice within the curriculum, possible collaborative efforts between language and learning experts with discipline-specific teachers and guiding learners on how to learn genres
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