The role of the media in electoral behaviour: A Canadian perspective

This work, divided in four sections, is a critical assessment of Canadian perspectives on the role of the media in electoral behaviour, notably on the roles media play in setting or responding to the agenda in the heat of election campaigns. The first section of the article highlights important Canadian methodological and empirical contributions to behaviouralism. The second section of the article, on culture, ideology, and discourse, illustrates general patterns of contrast between the Canadian and American political cultures through an exploration of the comparative role of negative and attack advertisements in election campaigns. The third section of the article illustrates how facets of the Political Economy of Canada exert an impact on media/campaign interactions. The fourth and final section of the article undertakes the task of situating media/campaign interactions within the legal-institutional regulatory context of the Canadian state. Here, while the potential impact on media content is apparent, the critical approach to the role of the media incorporates both the unacknowledged conditions and the unanticipated outcomes of the regulatory apparatus

Dialogical approaches to psychology and ethics

A dialogical conceptualisation of the self was originally developed in psychology by Hermans and colleagues (1992; Hermans, 2001) to provide an understanding of the self as multi-vocal and created in dialogue within the self and between the self and the other. Today, research in disciplines other than psychology has increasingly been influenced by this body of work. In particular, a strand of research analysing the dynamics of contemporary multicultural societies from a dialogical perspective is emerging (e.g. Bhatia and Ram, 2001; Harré and Moghaddam, 2003; Kinnvall and Lindén, 2010). Related to this work, a number of scholars are developing an approach to ethics where difference is seen as neither threatening nor abnormal but rather as a normal condition of being (e.g. Arnett, 2001; Nesbitt-Larking, 2009; Scuzzarello, 2009, 2010). Taken together, these studies point at possible linkages between psychology and politics, and they are good examples of what can be achieved within the framework of political psychology

Precarious life and the ethics of care: Subjectivity in an Indian religious phenomenon

This article relates certain figures of the subject in an emergent Indian pilgrimage. On the basis of ethnographic research and 15 in-depth interviews, I show that these religious subjectivities, phenomenologically immersed in highly precarious material conditions, are radically relational. Observations on the pilgrimage (en)counter the cognitivist assumptions of a body of scholarly opinion on contemporary religious practice. The analyst\u27s attention to pilgrimage rituals and narratives traverses sociological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories, and is, thereby, drawn to important questions of self, ethics, and time