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The book thus addresses the extant gap in scholarship in the field and includes a chapter on impact evaluation, which current scholarship has either ignored or footnoted. In addition, the book uses case studies from both the global south and the global north to attend to complex and multidisciplinary concerns with participation, power and empowerment. The author brings in postcolonial perspectives to demonstrate that the use of MCD approaches emerged in response to the growing problems of underdevelopment, and not necessarily to western development theories. Using simple language that is at the same time theoretically engaged, he opens up the field to scholars across a large number of disciplines.

We have two new jobs available in the Communication and Media department
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Young media users increasingly engage with public affairs via social media such as YouTube, where content is increasingly produced by influencers who neither represent established professional news media nor political parties. Although the audience of these channels is already substantial in absolute terms and still growing enormously - making alternative influencers serious competitors to professional journalism - we still know little about their ways of attracting and monetizing audiences, the topics they emphasize, or the specific content they provide. To address this void, the present study examines political videos and their producers on YouTube in an explorative and comparative way for English- and German-speaking YouTube channels. We conducted a content analysis of the five most popular YouTube videos for each of the 20 most successful English- and German-speaking political influencers in 2020. Our analyses show that, although English YouTubers already appear to be more professionalized, similar patterns emerge in both language regions, particularly with regards to increasing efforts to manage microcelebrity status. In terms of content, two main types of political YouTube videos were identified: "partisan mockery" and "engaging education." Results will be discussed in terms of their implications for political discourse, youth participation, and established journalistic media.

Today's high-choice media environment allows citizens to select news in line with their political preferences and avoid content counter to their priors. So far, however, selective exposure research has exclusively studied news selection based on textual cues, ignoring the recent proliferation of visual media. This study aimed to identify the contribution of visuals alongside text in selective exposure to pro-attitudinal, counter-attitudinal and balanced content. Using two experiments, we created a social media-style newsfeed with news items comprising matching and non-matching images and headlines about the contested issues of immigration and gun control in the U.S. By comparing selection behavior of participants with opposing prior attitudes on these topics, we pulled apart the contribution of images and headlines to selective exposure. Findings show that headlines play a far greater role in guiding selection, with the influence of images being minimal. The additional influence of partisan source cues is also considered.

Technological platforms, such as social media, are disrupting traditional journalism, as a result the access to high-quality information by citizens is facing important challenges, among which, disinformation and the spread of fake news are the most relevant one. This study approaches how journalism students perceive and assess this phenomenon. The descriptive and exploratory research is based on a hybrid methodology: Two matrix surveys of students and a focus group of professors (n = 6), experts in Multimedia Journalism. The first survey (n = 252), focused on students' perception of fake news, the second (n = 300) aims at finding out the type of content they had received during the recent confinement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Results show that most of the students prefer online media as a primary source of information instead of social media. Students consider that politics is the main topic of fake news, which, according to the respondents, are mainly distributed by adult users through social networks. The vast majority believe that fake news are created for political interests and a quarter of the sample considers that there is a strong ideological component behind disinformation strategies. Nonetheless, the study also reveals that students do not trust in their ability to distinguish between truthful and false information. For this reason, this research concludes, among other aspects, that the promotion of initiatives and research to promote media literacy and news literacy are decisive in the training of university students.

"This volume brings to the forefront a variety of critical conflicts in the world and a wide spectrum of peace communication approaches. The volume provides an in-depth look at how intricate and intractable conflicts can be and how the communicative aspects of conflicts can be equally challenging. The volume includes an incisive review and guide to past and present knowledge in the field of conflict and peace communication. It features an outstanding team of scholars, practitioners and activists and is truly interdisciplinary in spirit. It is divided into five easy to naviagate sections titled Theory Development, Method Development, Traditional/Digital Media and Peace and Conflict, Case Studies, and Innovative Approaches. A key theme throughout the Handbook is the utilization of past conflict communication theory to posit workable and innovative peace communication strategies that inform today's conflicts and can be a vital register of such communicative practices for the future. The volume also focuses on strategies of peace communication from the margins that acknowledge and elevate solutions for and from those who are most vulnerable. This volume will be indispensable to the teaching, study and practice of conflict negotiation, peacebuilding, intercultural communication, positively affecting race relations and much more. This timely publication provides students, academics and practitioners tools to navigate more and more complex local and global conflict and peace communication issues in our world."--

Communication and Health: An Introduction -- Part I: Representing Health -- Beyond Representation: Media Frames and Communicating Health -- No Way to Live: Fat Bodies on Reality Television -- "Who Wants to Live Forever? You Want to Live Well": The Appeal to Health in Coverage of Anti-Ageing Science and Medicine -- Feeling by Looking: Public Health Handwashing Posters as Emplaced Vital Media -- Part II: Marketing and Promoting Health -- "Great Taste! Fun for Kids!": Marketing Vitamins for Children -- Imperial Tobacco Canada and Health Reassurance Cigarette Marketing during the 1970s -- Influencing Diet: Social Media, Micro-Celebrity, Food and Health -- Marketing Mental Health: Critical Reflections on Literacy, Branding and Anti-Stigma Campaigns -- Part III: Co-Producing Health -- Co-Authoring the 'Person' in Person-Centred Care: A Critical Narrative Analysis of Patient Stories on Healthcare Organization Websites -- The Branding of Movember and the Co-Production of Men's Health -- The Social Construction of 'Good Health' -- Part IV: Managing Health: Troubling Surveillance and Communicating Risk -- "You Don't Own a FitBit, the FitBit Owns You": A Taxonomy of Privacy Attitudes in the Context of Self-Quantification -- Cases and Traces, Platforms and Publics: Big Data and Health Surveillance -- Challenges in Vaccine Communication -- Critical Communication Studies and COVID-19: Mediation, Discourse, and Masks.

What kind of routine media and communication practices do Estonian civil society organizations enact in their everyday work? What sort of symbolic and physical spaces are used, created, and accessed by Estonian civil society organizations and informal citizen groups when engaging internally and with their target groups? How do these spaces and practices evolve over time? These are the questions this dissertation addresses, with the aim of understanding the ways in which already-established and evolving civil society organizations navigate the highly-mediated everyday through their routine media practices and the spaces in which these practices are situated. Theoretically, this study takes a cultural approach to political participation with the concept of 'civic cultures' (Dahlgren 2009, p. 103) in the centrum. In this dissertation, the civic cultures framework is concentrated into a focus on the everyday, on media practices, and on communicative spaces. The concepts of 'everyday' and 'spaces' are empirically accessed through a practice approach. To distill and explore the role of media in the everyday work of civil society organizations, this thesis borrows from "activist media practices" (Mattoni 2012, p. 159) framework. The empirical study is grounded in the wider geopolitical context of Eastern Europe and in the historical context of post-Soviet Europe, and more specifically in Estonian civil society. Using a multi-methods approach based on media ethnography, this study includes a nationally-representative survey, in-depth interviews with civil society organizations, and a longitudinal study of the Estonian Forest Aid movement. This study found that parallel to striving towards episodic visibility in physical spaces, in mainstream media, and in decision making, civil society organizations worked on constant visibility in the social media space. The most used social media platform, Facebook, proved to be an important space for developing civic cultures on an everyday level: it was used for campaigns, opinion ...

Since February 2020, the world has been facing a global pandemic of the SARS-CoV2 virus. All over the world, people have been urged to take protective measures. It is hoped that the implementation of widespread vaccination campaigns will defeat the pandemic in the long term. While many people are eager to be vaccinated against Covid-19, other voices in the population are highly critical of vaccination and protective measures, circulating much misinformation on social media. The movements opposing pandemic response measures are heterogeneous, including right-wing groups, spiritualists who deny science, citizens with existential fears, and those who equate vaccination with a loss of individual freedom. This study aims to map and compare the social media communication of anti-vaccination movements that defy social cohesion and circulate online misinformation in Germany and Brazil. By following a grounded theory approach suggested by Webb and Mallon (2007), we coded content from social media communication of opinion leaders on Twitter with extended narrative analysis methodology finding different narratives that were mapped within the inhomogeneous anti-vaccination movements. The results show that both countries' main narratives against vaccination are very similar, but the main difference stems from Brazil's stronger politicization of vaccines.

In the contemporary converged media environment, agenda setting is being transformed by the dramatic growth of audiences that are simultaneously media users and producers. The study reported here addresses related gaps in the literature by first comparing the topical agendas of two leading traditional media outlets (New York Times and CNN) with the most frequently shared stories and trending topics on two widely popular Social Networking Sites (Facebook and Twitter). Time-series analyses of the most prominent topics identify the extent to which traditional media sets the agenda for social media as well as reciprocal agenda-setting effects of social media topics entering traditional media agendas. In addition, this study examines social intermedia agenda setting topically and across time within social networking sites, and in so doing, adds a vital understanding of where traditional media, online uses, and social media content intersect around instances of focusing events, particularly elections. Findings identify core differences between certain traditional and social media agendas, but also within social media agendas that extend from uses examined here. Additional results further suggest important topical and event-oriented limitations upon the predictive capacit of social networking sites to shape traditional media agendas over time.