Communication and the Body Politic: Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign in Philadelphia’s Latino Community

This dissertation contains a qualitative case study of how Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and her staff, created communication systems to contact Latinos during the 2016 presidential campaign and how these systems operated in Northeast Philadelphia. Three research questions guided these observations: How was political communication produced, disseminated, and decoded through interpersonal, mass, and digital communication by the Democratic candidate, her Latino communication staff, and Northeast Philadelphia Latino residents during the 2016 presidential campaign? What were the functions, norms, and values that structured the political communication systems among the Democratic candidate, her Latino communication staff, and Northeast Philadelphia Latino residents? What were the power relations that informed the interactions between the Democratic candidate, her Latino communication staff, and Northeast Philadelphia Latino residents in the political communication system? The dissertation employs the Political Communication Systems Model, a toolkit to observe and theorize on political communication. Under the grounded theory umbrella, two methods were used to collect data. First, Clinton's mediated campaign communication was monitored. Second, I worked as a volunteer in a field operations office that Clinton opened in Philadelphia and performed a participant observation. Clinton built a political communication machine to produce a campaign that used a hybrid media system. She hired a large staff to design and execute an air war (i.e., radio and TV ads and journalistic coverage), a digital campaign (i.e., distribution of information through websites, blogs, social media, newsletters and text messages), and a ground game (i.e., canvassing, phone banking, and online messaging). The Latino campaign was designed to promote liberal values such as globalism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and diversity, values that shaped her economic and political proposals. The ground game had three main objectives in Northeast Philadelphia: register new voters, create strategies to persuade undecided voters to support Hillary Clinton, and organize the "Get Out the Vote" (GOTV), which consists of convincing people to get out their houses, go to the polling station, and vote. A substantial part of the dissertation focuses on describing and analyzing the ground game in Northeast Philadelphia and offers two significant findings. First, political communication systems need material infrastructures operate. Clinton built a material infrastructure to communicate with residents. This infrastructure was made, primarily, of human bodies that were able to move around the territory and use other communicative technologies smartphones, tablets, and computers. Second, human bodies were also used as symbolic devices. Clinton recruited staffers and volunteers whose bodies embodied values such as diversity, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalism. The biographies and trajectories of these individuals projected these values, because they were persons from different parts of Latin America, with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds, and with different experiences of being a U.S. citizen or resident. Finally, the dissertation offers two main contributions. On the one hand, the dissertation expands the Political Communication Systems Model and suggests that the human body is the primary material unit in political communication infrastructures. On the other, this work illustrates how qualitative research can be employed for researching political communication in general, and presidential campaigns in particular.Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y TecnologíaSecretaría de Educación Públic

Nostalgia and iPhone Camera Apps: An Ethnographic Visual Approach to iPhoneography

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone and camera on social media. iPhoneography, the photography taken or edited with the iPhone, has set the trend of nostalgic photography on social media during the 2010s; thus, the iPhone, a high-tech camera, produces low-tech-looking images. This dissertation attempts to find out why iPhone photographers (iPhoneographers) take, edit, and share images that mimic photographs taken with analog photographic equipment. I argue that nostalgia allows iPhoneographers to use the iPhone as a creative tool and to belong to a community. Based on the arguments of Vilém Flusser—who suggested that photographers are more interested in the camera and the process of taking pictures than in the photographs produced—this work focuses first on the iPhone camera and the camera apps. (This work also considers the writings of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and W. J. T. Mitchell, as they pertain to photography and iPhoneography.) It traces the beginning of the nostalgic photograph style to 2008, when the Apple App Store offered apps that behaved like toy cameras and rendered images similar to those produced by toy and Polaroid cameras. The Hipstamatic app set the trend in 2009, and Instagram made it mainstream. Nostalgia is more a source of inspiration and creativity than a source of melancholy and longing for the past. The iPhoneography community on Facebook tends to form small groups that share and curate specific topics, such as clouds, portraits, flowers, and images produced with Hipstamatic. A small survey of the iPhoneography community shows that the community considers iPhoneography an art

Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact

Explores current methodologies for assessing social issue documentary films by combining strategic design and evaluation of multiplatform outreach and impact, including documentaries' role in network- and field-building. Includes six case studies

Literacies of Bilingual Youth: A Profile of Bilingual Academic, Social, and TXT Literacies

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua & Marshall, 2011; Freeman, Freeman, & Mercuri, 2002) in an academic setting. Yet, little was previously known about their linguistic skills in other language forms such as social and Txt. This research seeks to understand and document their abilities across language forms and modalities, painting a composite picture of non-traditional bilinguals students’ linguistic skills. The aims of this dissertation are achieved through three different approaches. The first is a quantitative study into participants’ literacy skills through the use of assessments measuring academic literacy and social language awareness across written, aural, and digital modalities. The second is an in-depth analysis of the features participants use when texting (communicating via SMS and iMessage). Txt is a relatively new language form, and the analysis presented in this dissertation identifies the features and patterns that illustrate its systematic and constrained nature. The third approach is a case study focused on the texting behavior between two prolific texters. The theories developed based on the texting patterns of all participants (except those two texters) are applied to this one conversation for validation. This conversation constitutes more than half of the text messages that students contributed to the project, highlighting just how important this language form is in the daily life of young adults. A final component of this dissertation is the public availability of the text messages as an anonymized corpus along with the code and methods used to analyze the data. The text message corpus is available at www.byts.commons.gc.cuny.ed

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

Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society

This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies. Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries

Metadiscourse analysis of digital interpersonal interactions in academic settings in Turkey

Rapid technological advances, efficiency and easy access have firmly established emailing as a vital medium of communication in the last decades. Nowadays, all around the world, particularly in educational settings, the medium is one of the most widely used modes of interaction between students and university lecturers. Despite their important role in academic life, very little is known about the metadiscursive characteristics of these e-messages and as far as the author is aware there is no study that has examined metadiscourse in request emails in Turkish. This study aims to contribute to filling in this gap by focusing on the following two research questions: (i) How many and what type of interpersonal metadiscourse markers are used in request emails sent by students to their lecturers? (ii) Where are they placed and how are they combined with other elements in the text? In order to answer these questions a corpus of unsolicited request e-mails in Turkish was compiled. The data collection started in January 2010 and continued until March 2018. A total of 353 request emails sent from university students to their lecturers were collected. The data were first transcribed in CLAN CHILDES format and analysed using the interpersonal model. The metadiscourse categories that aimed to involve readers in the email were identified and classified. Next, their places in the text were determined and described in detail. Findings of the study show that request emails include a wide array of multifunctional interpersonal metadiscourse markers which are intricately combined and employed by the writers to reach their aims. The results also showed that there is a close relation between the “weight of the request” and number of the interpersonal metadiscourse markers in request mails

Political communication

This review seeks to introduce political communication by showing the kinds of studies currently published. Of necessity not complete, it does not list every study nor does it include every possible approach to political communication, but only those published in the sample of journals—one hopes enough to indicate the scope of this wide area of communication stud

Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society

This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies. Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries