Populism in Journalistic Photographs : Political Leaders in Venezuelan Newspaper Images

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was renowned for his media skills and public appearances. In this study, his visual media representations are compared to those of other politicians in a framework of populism. The data includes articles by two Venezuelan newspapers representing opposing political views, and is analysed using content analysis and visual rhetorical interpretation. The focus is on the ways in which the sense of belonging, including its affective aspects, are visually constructed in journalistic photographs. It was found that, as a signifier, Chávez was constructed using many different techniques in the government-leaning newspaper. In this way, the image of Chávez was constructed by depicting him as someone special and authentic, distinct from other politicians, powerful yet at one with the people at the same time, and both evincing and generating emotion. The anti-Chávez newspaper, on the other hand, depicted the opposition leader in a more traditional and less emotional way, and despite an arranged photo opportunity, the newspaper was able to put its own slant on the Chavista politicians. The article contributes to the scarce literature of visual aspects of Venezuelan politics under Chávez’s presidency, and understudied affective and performative dimensions of populism.Peer reviewe

Legal Education and the Reproduction of the Profession: Critical scholarly responses to the crises of legal education in the United States in the 1930s and 1960s–1970s, and in Finland in the 1960s–1970s

This article examines the criticism that legal education faced in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s. !e purpose is to demonstrate that the criticism of legal education reflects broader social currents as well as changes in scholarship in general. Although no fundamental change ever occurred, the criticism, when it is as widespread as it was during the periods under examination, always pushes forward some ideas and contributes to the changes in legal education. Thus, persistent critical analysis of legal education as well as its relationship with society is important in order to reveal problems in law and society and to keep legal education up to date

The optical and magnetic properties of redox-active d-block metal complexes with non-innocent ligands

Redox-active metal organic complexes with ‘non-innocent’ ligands are promising candidates when it comes to developing novel homogenous catalysts. The related complexes have gained interest since they could be utilized as affordable base-metal containing compounds instead of expensive and scarce noble metal containing complexes. The complexes with non-innocent ligands undergo readily one- or multielectron oxidation/reduction processes, which are vital in catalytic processes. Therefore, the complexes have been studied for biomimetic model compounds for metalloenzymes. These redox-active complexes have low-lying, intramolecular charge transfer processes that enable the compounds to absorb strongly electromagnetic radiation at low frequency range, namely, in the near-infrared range. In addition, the complexes possess interesting magnetic properties which are potentially influenced by photon excitation. Some of the redox-active complexes bear unpaired spins on the orbitals of the organic ligands. Redox-active complexes, in some cases, do exhibit bistability and are known to go through valence tautomerization process, where the sum of the electrons within the complex remains, while their locations and orientations vary. This may result in differing spin states within the complex and thus differing physical (optical and magnetic) properties between the tautomers. These features are the key in order to use these complexes in various sensing applications or in molecular memory. Because of their intense absorptions, the redox-active complexes have also been considered as dye sensitizers in a titanium dioxide-based dye sensitized solar cells and other photovoltaic applications. The present thesis exhibits the synthesis, characterization and the redox-active, optical and magnetic properties of first-row d-block metal complexes with non-innocent ligands

Faceless government : civic action in media photographs during the Venezuelan anti-governmental protests of 2017

Visual media representations of protests are a part of politics in general. A protest is about creating a mediated political event with its own performative bodily and emotional aspects, and cultural memory, each of which affects a sense of citizenship. This article discusses how protest photographs serve as resources for political struggle by examining the visual media stream during the 2017 anti-governmental protests in Venezuela. The data consist of (social) media content and prominent photographs. The selected photographs are then discussed using five functions of iconic photographs proposed in Hariman and Lucaites’ (2007) book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, with the argument being that the context of the pictures should also be carefully considered when analysing specific photographs because it provides essential information about them. Since the pictures represented daily life and likewise had a special ‘truth effect’ and transmitted affect, they supported the opposition’s and anti-governmental protesters’ discourse on the government as a faceless enemy. This also gave room to the protesters to construct through performativity an emotional juxtaposition to the faceless power and, in this way, emphasize their humanitarian struggle. In particular, the article contributes to how visual representations function in terms of performing citizenship and the role of media photography within the context of an authoritarian government.Peer reviewe

Detecting Relevance during Decision-Making from Eye Movements for UI Adaptation

This paper proposes an approach to detect information relevance during decision-making from eye movements in order to enable user interface adaptation. This is a challenging task because gaze behavior varies greatly across individual users and tasks and groundtruth data is difficult to obtain. Thus, prior work has mostly focused on simpler target-search tasks or on establishing general interest, where gaze behavior is less complex. From the literature, we identify six metrics that capture different aspects of the gaze behavior during decision-making and combine them in a voting scheme. We empirically show, that this accounts for the large variations in gaze behavior and out-performs standalone metrics. Importantly, it offers an intuitive way to control the amount of detected information, which is crucial for different UI adaptation schemes to succeed. We show the applicability of our approach by developing a room-search application that changes the visual saliency of content detected as relevant. In an empirical study, we show that it detects up to 97% of relevant elements with respect to user self-reporting, which allows us to meaningfully adapt the interface, as confirmed by participants. Our approach is fast, does not need any explicit user input and can be applied independent of task and user.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally to this wor

"Authentically" Maintaining Populism in Hungary : Visual Analysis of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Instagram

The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is considered to be one example of the rise of populism during the 2010s in Europe. During the decade that he has been in government, Hungary has been a forerunner in terms of democratic decline. In parallel, throughout this period, political communication has increasingly shifted online, and politicians are now actively using social media to gain political capital. Despite the growing literature on online political communication, visual political communication remains underrepresented. Orban's case offers a unique opportunity to examine what authoritarian populism and maintenance of illiberalism look like when a regime has been in power for more than 10 years. Using visual discourse analysis, we analyzed 131 visuals of Viktor Orban's Instagram from 2019. We argue that by using the symbols of nationalism and masculinity, Orban attempts to embody the features of an "ordinary man" and also simultaneously conveys statesmanship through outlining "us" in ethno-nationalistic terms, in an effort to strengthen his party's message, renew its hegemonic position, and to remain in power. This is in stark contrast to the communication of the Hungarian government, which relies heavily on "othering" and the construction of "them" in legacy and social media.Peer reviewe

Active agency, access and power

© The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Applying Absorptive Capacity Construct to Customer-related Knowledge Processing

The importance of customer-related knowledge as a source of competitive advantage has been addressed by several researchers during the last decade. However, only a little is known about the processes through which firms learn to know their customers organization-wide. In this article we propose that one possibility to study how firms process customer-related knowledge, and thus learn about and from their customers organization-wide, is to apply absorptive capacity construct originally developed in the context of innovation activities. By building on previous literature on absorptive capacity, customer knowledge management and relationship marketing, we introduce a conceptual framework of customer-related absorptive capacity, and discuss the external and internal antecedents to the construct. We propose that customer relationship performance could at least partly be explained by the capability of the supplier firm to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit customer-related knowledge

Media in Authoritarian Contexts : A Logics Approach to Journalistic Professional Resistance in Cuba and Venezuela

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