Religious minorities in cyberspace: identity and citizenship among European muslims and Egyptian copts

The study explores how religious minorities can utilize the Internet in handling their hybrid identities and how the different online platforms can reveal the diverse perceptions within the same minority group. The case study qualitative method was adopted. European Muslims and Coptic Christian Egyptians were tackled as major models for analysis s. The study brought different historical and conceptual backgrounds to the discussion and tackled the case of the European Muslims by utilizing the researcher’s observations gleaned from her previous experience as an editor of IslamOnline’s European Muslims page, and by conducting descriptive and thematic analyses of selected websites of different European Muslim entities. The study tackled the case of the Egyptian Coptic Christians through conducting both in-depth interviews and thematic analysis of selected websites and Facebook pages. The study showed how both the European Muslims and the Egyptian Coptic Christians encountered the question regarding the circles of affiliation and how they reacted differently to this question while they were managing their online platforms. Despite the disparity among the online platforms studied regarding the levels of vision and content, the study showed how most of these minorities’ online platforms need to develop their discourses and tools in order to address the offline diverse stances. They also need to play a more prominent role in framing issues of citizenship and integration

Vaccine opposition in the information age: a study on online activism and DIY citizenship

Despite the growing prevalence of insufficient sleep among individuals, we still know little about the labour market returns to sleep. To address this gap, we utilize longitudinal data from Germany and leverage exogenous fluctuations in sleep duration caused by variations in time and local sunset times. Our findings reveal that a one-hour increase in weekly sleep is associated with a 1.6 percentage point rise in employment and a 3.4% increase in weekly earnings. The majority of this earnings effect stems from improvements in productivity, while the number of working hours decreases with longer sleep duration. We also identify a key mechanism driving these effects: the enhanced mental well-being experienced by individuals who sleep longer hours. Vaccination critics have been at the forefront of much recent media commentary, and ever more so after the spread of COVID-19 and the implementation of vaccination programmes to tackle the pandemic. However, vaccination critics had attracted the attention of academics, media commentators and public health institutions in the years preceding the pandemic. My research relies upon data collected pre-pandemic, focusing specifically on online activism targeting routine childhood vaccinations. While seeking to understand internet-mediated vaccine-critical activism, this thesis addresses the following research questions: how do online vaccine critics construct knowledge that feeds into vaccination controversies? What kind of values underlie vaccine critics’ policy demands, and how are these demands advocated for? How do critics understand and represent their collective identities? Finally, and most importantly for my study, how do online vaccine critics engage with their surrounding legal landscapes? Drawing upon an analysis of qualitative data from more than 700 posts linked to six vaccine-critical blogs, collected during nine months of fieldwork informed by an internet-ethnographic approach, I suggest that online vaccine-critical activism needs to be understood as a complex phenomenon embedded in its socio-legal context. While vaccine critics are often depicted as an anti-establishment force, I contend that their relationship with the law in particular is more complex than that. Rather than merely ‘resisting’ the law, vaccine-critical activists mobilise and co-opt different legal discourses and concepts in intricate and sometimes surprising ways. Vaccine-critical activism is an historically persistent phenomenon which if misunderstood risks further alienating current activists and potentially aggravating the issue of vaccine hesitancy. Investigating vaccine critics’ online practices and learning more about their shared worldviews is therefore important (and has become even more so in the light of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic) in order to frame effective public health communications about vaccine safety

"Blogging and collective action: The role of collective identity and social networks in engendering change."

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Spirit and the letter : trauma, warblogs and the public sphere

Includes bibliographical referencesThis research investigates the personal and political emancipatory potential of digital media, specifically the weblog, and asks the following question: How does individual trauma translate into public space? The research focus is the self-selected, unpaid and civilian bloggers forming the core of the Lebanese blogosphere during the 33-Day War between Israel and Lebanon in July and August 2006. Through the progression of their on-line narratives, I examine how traumatic events can be transformed into a narrative act. Blogging is a particularly apt medium for closing the ‘historical gap’ between an event and its reporting, and can facilitate the reflection and recovery necessary for cohesive individual and social identity after trauma. I conclude that this transformation, from traumatic memory to narrative memory, has social implications in any context in which the democratisation of voice is important. The blogosphere provides an intimate public space for memory work: digital social networking can inspire reciprocal connectedness with others, and blogs can therefore function both as healing platforms for individual survivors of trauma, and as expressions of communal political will. This mediation, through selfselected structures, can only strengthen democratic practice – an idea which resonates particularly in repressive contexts. Analysing the autobiographical records of ordinary people in the public domain requires a psychosocial approach drawn from literary criticism as much as from social sciences. This research therefore utilises aspects of both interpretive and critical approaches such as reader-response theory and constructivism, stemming from an underlying hermeneutic philosophy that promotes an empathic approach as well as the consideration of the influence of cultural and social forces that have been brought to bear in the context. This dialectic is essential for examining the relationship between blogger and reader, where the transmission of a first-person perspective to an engaged hearer-participant forms the key process. Socio-politically, the incorporation of context, complexity and diversity are considered in light of the recent developments in the Arab blogosphere, and the cultural, historical, and literary context of the Lebanese blogs themselves. This research is therefore situated within a qualitative framework, utilising a small but focused sample, and investigating the meanings of lived experiences. Perceived problems of reliability in this imprecise mode of analysis are countered by the fact that qualitative research tends to be exploratory rather than conclusive. This research necessarily concludes with critical social theory. I make recommendations for the further utilisation of the digitality of the medium, both in Lebanon and further afield, based on the urgent need for dialogue in multicultural societies, and the value of civil engagement in the rhetorical public sphere. The innovative potential of electronic public space for restitution after trauma, and the support of alternative narratives, is clear

Fascist ‘Snakeoils:’ A Burkean Rhetorical Criticism of Contemporary Ecofascist Manifestos

Ecofascism of the 21st century is a revival of centuries-old white nationalist fascism integrated with a concern for environmental issues from the last few decades. Designated by their writers as “manifestos,” three ecofascists have widely disseminated their documents online just before committing acts of racially motivated terrorism in three different countries. Furthermore, these manifestos provide a lens into contemporary ecofascist conspiracies as well as their own concocted “snakeoils” that present their ecofascist agendas in the form of rhetorical “curatives” to environmental issues of pollution. These “cures” are grounded in a new “green nationalism” that attempts to disguise the white supremacist foundations of their conspiracies. Kenneth Burke’s (1939) “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” compels rhetorical critics to participate in an anti-fascist “battle” against the distortions of religion and other Nazi-appropriated symbols, forms of commercialization, and Aryan white nationalism. Following suit, this thesis attempts to expose the ecofascist distortions from these three ecofascist manifestos: the Christchurch shooter in 2019, the El Paso, Texas shooter in 201,9 and the Oslo bombing and Utøya shooter of 2011. My project includes a focus on revealing these shooters’ “green” tactics and methods of appealing to wider audiences beyond their white nationalist core of followers. Exposing ecofascist rhetorical tactics also presents new challenges to environmental advocacy, and as Yamamoto and Lyman’s (2001) “Racializing Environmental Justice” argues, pushes environmental justice proponents to “examine white racism” in law, policy, and practice

Undocumented, Unapologetic, And Unafraid: Discursive Strategies Of The Immigrant Youth Dream Social Movement

This project centers on the advocacy of undocumented immigrant youth to realize the passage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a narrowly tailored bipartisan legislation that would provide qualifying undocumented youth a pathway to citizenship. Using a Latino/a Critical Race framework to address socio-political discourses surrounding the immigration debate, my analysis presents the ways undocumented youth communicated about their identity and agency and the ways they constructed their demands publicly in seeking passage of the DREAM Act during the years 2001 to 2010. This research purposefully departs from the traditional modality of research and conceptualizes political work as centered in the research process. To conduct this research, I spent eleven months of fieldwork participating with DREAM activist groups in California, New Mexico, and other states nationally. The data was drawn from an estimated 400 hours of fieldwork, 10 in-depth personal interviews of activists in leadership positions, and secondary accounts of the DREAM youth movement. This study\u27s findings point to three progressive phases of the DREAM social movement, with unique internal and external strategies used to advocate for social change. The first phase covers 2001 through 2007, where self-identification strategies were used to create a collective group identity that countered the negative dehumanizing typecast of illegal aliens by identifying DREAMers as exceptional students. During the second phase, from 2007 to 2009, self-representation strategies worked to unite undocumented youth through the creation of national coalitional organizations and through self-identification as undocumented and unafraid. During the third phase, spanning the months from May to December 2010, participating activists utilized strategies of self-reliance and self-identified as unapologetic DREAMers. The strategies of intervention included the use of civil disobedience tactics to petition for the legislation. This study points to a progressive sense of vocality, agency, and empowerment for the DREAM-eligible youth involved in this social movement. Finally, this study offers a discussion about the current state of the DREAM Act and includes suggestions and implications for the future of the social movement

Leveraging social relevance : using social networks to enhance literature access and microblog search

L'objectif principal d'un système de recherche d'information est de sélectionner les documents pertinents qui répondent au besoin en information exprimé par l'utilisateur à travers une requête. Depuis les années 1970-1980, divers modèles théoriques ont été proposés dans ce sens pour représenter les documents et les requêtes d'une part et les apparier d'autre part, indépendamment de tout utilisateur. Plus récemment, l'arrivée du Web 2.0 ou le Web social a remis en cause l'efficacité de ces modèles du fait qu'ils ignorent l'environnement dans lequel l'information se situe. En effet, l'utilisateur n'est plus un simple consommateur de l'information mais il participe également à sa production. Pour accélérer la production de l'information et améliorer la qualité de son travail, l'utilisateur échange de l'information avec son voisinage social dont il partage les mêmes centres d'intérêt. Il préfère généralement obtenir l'information d'un contact direct plutôt qu'à partir d'une source anonyme. Ainsi, l'utilisateur, influencé par son environnement socio-cultuel, donne autant d'importance à la proximité sociale de la ressource d'information autant qu'à la similarité des documents à sa requête. Dans le but de répondre à ces nouvelles attentes, la recherche d'information s'oriente vers l'implication de l'utilisateur et de sa composante sociale dans le processus de la recherche. Ainsi, le nouvel enjeu de la recherche d'information est de modéliser la pertinence compte tenu de la position sociale et de l'influence de sa communauté. Le second enjeu est d'apprendre à produire un ordre de pertinence qui traduise le mieux possible l'importance et l'autorité sociale. C'est dans ce cadre précis, que s'inscrit notre travail. Notre objectif est d'estimer une pertinence sociale en intégrant d'une part les caractéristiques sociales des ressources et d'autre part les mesures de pertinence basées sur les principes de la recherche d'information classique. Nous proposons dans cette thèse d'intégrer le réseau social d'information dans le processus de recherche d'information afin d'utiliser les relations sociales entre les acteurs sociaux comme une source d'évidence pour mesurer la pertinence d'un document en réponse à une requête. Deux modèles de recherche d'information sociale ont été proposés à des cadres applicatifs différents : la recherche d'information bibliographique et la recherche d'information dans les microblogs. Les importantes contributions de chaque modèle sont détaillées dans la suite. Un modèle social pour la recherche d'information bibliographique. Nous avons proposé un modèle générique de la recherche d'information sociale, déployé particulièrement pour l'accès aux ressources bibliographiques. Ce modèle représente les publications scientifiques au sein d'réseau social et évalue leur importance selon la position des auteurs dans le réseau. Comparativement aux approches précédentes, ce modèle intègre des nouvelles entités sociales représentées par les annotateurs et les annotations sociales. En plus des liens de coauteur, ce modèle exploite deux autres types de relations sociales : la citation et l'annotation sociale. Enfin, nous proposons de pondérer ces relations en tenant compte de la position des auteurs dans le réseau social et de leurs mutuelles collaborations. Un modèle social pour la recherche d'information dans les microblogs.} Nous avons proposé un modèle pour la recherche de tweets qui évalue la qualité des tweets selon deux contextes: le contexte social et le contexte temporel. Considérant cela, la qualité d'un tweet est estimé par l'importance sociale du blogueur correspondant. L'importance du blogueur est calculée par l'application de l'algorithme PageRank sur le réseau d'influence sociale. Dans ce même objectif, la qualité d'un tweet est évaluée selon sa date de publication. Les tweets soumis dans les périodes d'activité d'un terme de la requête sont alors caractérisés par une plus grande importance. Enfin, nous proposons d'intégrer l'importance sociale du blogueur et la magnitude temporelle avec les autres facteurs de pertinence en utilisant un modèle Bayésien.An information retrieval system aims at selecting relevant documents that meet user's information needs expressed with a textual query. For the years 1970-1980, various theoretical models have been proposed in this direction to represent, on the one hand, documents and queries and on the other hand to match information needs independently of the user. More recently, the arrival of Web 2.0, known also as the social Web, has questioned the effectiveness of these models since they ignore the environment in which the information is located. In fact, the user is no longer a simple consumer of information but also involved in its production. To accelerate the production of information and improve the quality of their work, users tend to exchange documents with their social neighborhood that shares the same interests. It is commonly preferred to obtain information from a direct contact rather than from an anonymous source. Thus, the user, under the influenced of his social environment, gives as much importance to the social prominence of the information as the textual similarity of documents at the query. In order to meet these new prospects, information retrieval is moving towards novel user centric approaches that take into account the social context within the retrieval process. Thus, the new challenge of an information retrieval system is to model the relevance with regards to the social position and the influence of individuals in their community. The second challenge is produce an accurate ranking of relevance that reflects as closely as possible the importance and the social authority of information producers. It is in this specific context that fits our work. Our goal is to estimate the social relevance of documents by integrating the social characteristics of resources as well as relevance metrics as defined in classical information retrieval field. We propose in this work to integrate the social information network in the retrieval process and exploit the social relations between social actors as a source of evidence to measure the relevance of a document in response to a query. Two social information retrieval models have been proposed in different application frameworks: literature access and microblog retrieval. The main contributions of each model are detailed in the following. A social information model for flexible literature access. We proposed a generic social information retrieval model for literature access. This model represents scientific papers within a social network and evaluates their importance according to the position of respective authors in the network. Compared to previous approaches, this model incorporates new social entities represented by annotators and social annotations (tags). In addition to co-authorships, this model includes two other types of social relationships: citation and social annotation. Finally, we propose to weight these relationships according to the position of authors in the social network and their mutual collaborations. A social model for information retrieval for microblog search. We proposed a microblog retrieval model that evaluates the quality of tweets in two contexts: the social context and temporal context. The quality of a tweet is estimated by the social importance of the corresponding blogger. In particular, blogger's importance is calculated by the applying PageRank algorithm on the network of social influence. With the same aim, the quality of a tweet is evaluated according to its date of publication. Tweets submitted in periods of activity of query terms are then characterized by a greater importance. Finally, we propose to integrate the social importance of blogger and the temporal magnitude tweets as well as other relevance factors using a Bayesian network model

The safe standing movement in English football (1989-2019): Timescapes, tactics and networks

Twenty eight years after the Taylor report into the Hillsborough stadium disaster recommended that all Premier League and Championship football grounds in England and Wales should become all-seated, the UK Government Sports Minister Tracey Crouch, in June 2018, announced a government review into the safety of modern standing areas and whether new developments in stadium safety and spectator accommodation, might justify changing the current all-seating legislation to permit Safe Standing. In October 2019, the review concluded that their remains significant scope for further research to build an evidence base to trial different standing areas, alongside monitoring clubs taking different approaches to the management of standing. These recent events are the outcome of a thirty-year social movement in which a critical mass of football supporters, through the networks they formed, have built relational collective action across the neoliberal timescape of English football from 1989-2019. This thesis presents a social movement analysis of Safe Standing and in doing, produces a largely untold thirty year social history of English football supporter activism. To achieve this, it applies a relational sociology approach (Crossley, 2011; 2015) to capture the importance of football supporter networks, relationships and interactions which built this social movement across different temporal periods, or what Gillan (2018) refers to as multiple timescales. It offers an original contribution to knowledge of football supporter social movements through a rich micro-level analysis of the most important issue which fans collectively coalesce around, and the legacy of the worst sporting disaster in the UK, which has dominated public consciousness for thirty years. And as a social movement, I argue Safe Standing is one of the most important recent development in the game, because it evidences how supporters, who have been deeply affected by the all-seating legislation, are now in a position to affect the future consumption of English football. My analysis showed how this was achieved, and argued that a small core network of approximately 30 supporters, to which I gained insider access, stand to potentially impact and shape the consumption habits of a leisure practice all over the world. In doing so, the thesis represents the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the 30 year movement against the all-seating legislation and offers an important social history which informed both the focus of the government review and its primary conclusions

The politics of gamers: identity and masculinity in the age of digital media

Contrary to the popular belief that the Internet is a bodiless utopian space, I argue that gender is actually the most important tool of social organization in video game culture. I gather an archive that includes games, novels and films about gamers, press releases made by game developers, and blog and forum posts made by players to reveal how the gaming subculture rewards masculine presentations that emphasize control over the self, the environment, technology, and the effeminate “other.” On the other hand, women and queer gamers often find themselves occupying unexpected positions and forming strategic alliances with game producers to carve out spaces of their own on the masculinized virtual frontier. As gaming becomes embedded within in mainstream culture, the gendered system of self-representation enacted by gamers will shape popular ideas about what kinds of bodies are thought to be competent, legitimate actors

Australian Politics in a Digital Age

Information and communications technologies are increasingly important in the Australian political landscape. From the adoption of new forms of electoral campaigning to the use of networking technology to organise social movements, media technology has the potential to radically change the way politics is conducted and experienced in this country. The first comprehensive volume on the impact of digital media on Australian politics, this book examines the way these technologies shape political communication, alter key public and private institutions, and serve as the new arena in which discursive and expressive political life is performed. Employing a range of theoretical perspectives, empirical data, and case examples, the book provides insights on political behaviour of Australia’s elites, as well as the increasingly important politics of mirco-activism and social media. Energetic and fast-paced, the book draws together a wide range of Australian and international scholarship on the interface between communications technology and politics. Crossing several genres, the book will find a wide audience amongst scholars of both politics and communication, among public relations professionals, and with members of the media themselves