An Investigation into Factors Which Explain the Scores and Voting Patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual international television song competition. Participating countries send a group or individual artist to perform an original song at the competition. The winner is decided by all participating countries using a voting system that incorporates both a public televote and an expert jury vote. Countries are excluded from voting for their entry and the country with the highest score wins. A high scoring performance and the voting patterns of the ESC can be explained by a complex set of factors. These factors can be divided into three groups; performance factors, competition factors and external factors. Performance factors relate to the performance itself, such as the song and the music. Competition factors relate to the way the competition is run and organised, such as the type of voting method used and the order of appearance for the performers. External factors encompass the social, cultural and political factors that influence voting at the Eurovision. The research presented here focuses on among other factors, whether voting blocs, music factors derived from Echo Nest services and migration patterns can explain the points and voting patterns of the 2016 ESC. The data was stratified into three datasets based on the voting systems; combined vote, televote and jury vote. A multiple linear regression model was fitted to each dataset and the significance of the predictor variables in explaining the response variable Points were evaluated using T-tests. The results showed that both the voting blocs and migration patterns were significant in explaining the scores and voting patterns of the competition. With regards to the music factors, the most successful songs appeared to be more acoustic and less dance orientated

Russia’s Cultural Statecraft

This book focuses on Russia’s cultural statecraft in dealing with a number of institutional cultural domains such as education, museums and monuments, high arts and sport. It analyses to what extent Russia’s cultural activities abroad have been used for foreign policy purposes, and perceived as having a political dimension.Peer reviewe

Russia’s Cultural Statecraft

This book focusses on Russia’s cultural statecraft in dealing with a number of institutional cultural domains such as education, museums and monuments, high arts and sport. It analyses to what extent Russia’s cultural activities abroad have been used for foreign policy purposes, and perceived as having a political dimension. Building on the concept of cultural statecraft, the authors present a broad and nuanced view of how Russia sees the role of culture in its external relations, how this shapes the image of Russia, and the ways in which this cultural statecraft is received by foreign audiences. The expert team of contributors consider: what choices are made in fostering this agenda; how Russian state authorities see the purpose and limits of various cultural instruments; to what extent can the authorities shape these instruments; what domains have received more attention and become more politicised and what fields have remained more autonomous. The methodological research design of the book as a whole is a comparative case study comparing the nature of Russian cultural statecraft across time, target countries and diverse cultural domains. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Russian foreign policy and external relations and those working on the role of culture in world politics

Russia’s Cultural Statecraft

This book focusses on Russia’s cultural statecraft in dealing with a number of institutional cultural domains such as education, museums and monuments, high arts and sport. It analyses to what extent Russia’s cultural activities abroad have been used for foreign policy purposes, and perceived as having a political dimension. Building on the concept of cultural statecraft, the authors present a broad and nuanced view of how Russia sees the role of culture in its external relations, how this shapes the image of Russia, and the ways in which this cultural statecraft is received by foreign audiences. The expert team of contributors consider: what choices are made in fostering this agenda; how Russian state authorities see the purpose and limits of various cultural instruments; to what extent can the authorities shape these instruments; what domains have received more attention and become more politicised and what fields have remained more autonomous. The methodological research design of the book as a whole is a comparative case study comparing the nature of Russian cultural statecraft across time, target countries and diverse cultural domains. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Russian foreign policy and external relations and those working on the role of culture in world politics

‘Party for everybody’? Interrogating the shaping of sexual identities through the digital fan spaces of the Eurovision Song Contest

This research critically examines Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) fandom to explore how sexuality is shaped within digital fan spaces. Transformations in social media technologies have revolutionised ESC fan practices and what it means to be an ESC fan. I make a case for ESC fandom as a sprawling context through which its digital practices intersect with the performance of sexuality. This research uses a mixed-method approach, that involves experimenting with social media platforms as tools for conducting qualitative research. This includes developing and applying WhatsApp ‘group chats’ with ESC fans and an auto-netnography of my personal Twitter network of ESC fans. I contribute to the geographies of social media, fandom and sexuality in the following ways: I provide the first comprehensive analysis of the digital ecosystem of ESC fandom by mapping the online and offline fan spaces where ESC fandom is practiced. I argue that ESC fan spaces are fluid and dynamic and ESC fans travel between them. I then explore two social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, to understand how ESC fans express, make visible, and negotiate their fan and sexual identities within and across these digital fan spaces. I demonstrate how digital practices of ESC fandom augment the performance of sexuality in new creative ways. Through a critical analysis of socio-sexual digital codes (such as text, images, GIFs), through the lens of queer code/space, I explore how social media ESC fandom simultaneously breaks down and challenges the queerness of ESC fandom. I then proceed to examine the ways straight male ESC fans experience and practice ESC fandom. I develop the theorisation of ‘the closet’, to conceptualising the ‘ESC closet’, to understand how straight men ‘come out’, ‘stay in’ and negotiate their ESC fan and straight identities in online and offline socio-spatial contexts. I conclude by suggesting two ways through which we can use social media technologies and internet-enabled objects to deepen our knowledge regarding the expression of identity

Current perspectives on communication and media research

Peer reviewe

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

In Our Country, but Outside Our Homeland: Identity and Diaspora Among Ukraine’s Internally Displaced Crimeans

In response to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, tens of thousands of Crimean residents have relocated to mainland Ukraine as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), including many ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, and indigenous Crimean Tatars. Deliberately choosing to remain Ukrainian rather than Russian citizens, Crimean IDPs have become emblematic of new discourses of Ukrainian civic and multicultural nationalism emerging in the wake of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests. While they are proud Ukrainian patriots, most Crimean IDPs also maintain a strong sense of regional identity tied to Crimea itself, and therefore understand themselves to be simultaneous “in place” and “out of place” within the Ukrainian mainland. This disjunctive sense of territorial belonging bears most of the hallmarks of a diasporic condition, except for the presumption of international migration that undergirds normative “transnational” theories of diaspora. Showcasing Crimean IDPs as a salient case study, this dissertation advances an alternative “translocal” theory of diaspora that is attentive to discourses of belonging and exclusion whether or not migrants have crossed an international border. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within Crimean IDP communities in the cities of Kyiv and Lviv, this dissertation traces the motivating factors driving internal displacement from occupied Crimea, unpacks the Ukrainian and Crimean identities that dialectically animate IDPs’ schismatic senses of territorial belonging, and analytically situates their varied experiences within a diasporic framework, disrupting the problematic epistemological binary of internal/international migration that hampers theories of diaspora

Popular Music and Public Diplomacy: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Perspectives

In the early years of the Cold War, Western nations increasingly adopted strategies of public diplomacy involving popular music. While the diplomatic use of popular music was initially limited to such genres as jazz, the second half of the 20th century saw a growing presence of various popular genres in diplomatic contexts, including rock, pop, bluegrass, flamenco, funk, disco, and hip-hop, among others. This volume illuminates the interrelation of popular music and public diplomacy from a transnational and transdisciplinary angle. The contributions argue that, as popular music has been a crucial factor in international relations, its diplomatic use has substantially impacted the global musical landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries