Suchergebnisse

This paper is based on a case study of the media narratives of the neo-Nazi organisation the Nordic Resistance Movement(NRM) which situates this particular actor within the broader landscape of violent extremism in Sweden today.[i] The empirical data consists of a strategic sample of the organisation's online content (including web-TV, feature articles, and podcasts) all produced by and for members of the NRM and all presented as 'culture' and categorised under labels such as 'entertainment', 'pleasure', 'humour' and 'satire'[ii]. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis informed by the conceptual horizon of narrative inquiry, the paper examines various cultural expressions of neo-Nazi ideology in the organisation's extensive repertoire of online media. Theoretically, it turns to the work of Miller-Idriss (2018) and Teitelbaum (2018) to bring centre stage the role of popular culture and entertainment in the construction of a meaningful narrative of community and belonging built around neo-Nazism in Sweden today. The paper demonstrates how the organisation with their efforts to boost the culture and entertainment-end of their media repertoire seek to add to the ordinariness and normalcy of neo-Nazi discourse and the banalisation and defusing of its underlying ideologies. Further, the analysis of the convergence between different genres, styles and content into new borderline discourses illustrate how contemporary extreme right movements are complicating the traditional binaries with which scholars have operated such as fascist versus liberal, totalitarian versus democratic and mainstream versus extremist.

This paper is based on a case study of the online media practices of the neo-Nazi organisation, the Nordic Resistance Movement, conducted in the context of an ongoing project on contemporary forms of violent extremism in Sweden. Focusing on the activities of female "online influencers", the paper explores the contradictory discourses around the role of women as "race warriors" and "Nordic wives" as this is articulated both by the women in the organisation themselves and in the online universe of the organisation more generally. On the one hand, women's positions are determined and heavily policed by men in an organisation that openly propagates women's subordination to men and their natural and biological role in the realm of homemaking. On the other, the discourses produced by these women are saturated by ideas of female empowerment, sisterhood, emancipation and the importance of women in the reproduction of the white race. The content analysis of online propaganda produced by female activists about the role of women positions these contradictory pulls of "White femininity" inherent to the white supremacist movements at the current political juncture in which the extreme right is growing and actively looking to recruit women as part of a broader strategy to "mainstream" in Sweden and mobilise internationally.

This article examines video activism in a context where ubiquitous camera technologies and online video sharing platforms are radically changing the media landscape in which demonstrations and political activism operates. The author discusses a number of YouTube videos documenting and narrating the recurring, anti-capitalist demonstrations in Europe in the past decade. With the death of Ian Tomlinson in London during the 2009 G20 protests as an empirical starting point, the author raises questions of how video documentation of this event links up with previous protest events by juxtaposing representations of 'the moment of death' (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) of protesters in the past. This article suggests that these videos work as (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2) a site of commemoration in a online shrine for grieving, and (3) a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression. The author offers a re-articulation of the longstanding debate on visual evidence, action, and testimony in video activism. The results are suggestive of how vernacular commemorative genres of mourning and paying tribute to victims of police violence are fused with the online practices of bearing witness and producing visual evidence in new creative modes of using video for change.

This thesis explores contemporary modes of video activism for a radical politics of the Left. It offers an analytical contribution to media and communication that promotes an understanding of radical online video as modes of political engagement in contemporary online environments. By focusing on YouTube as one of the most prevalent spaces in which radical video is screened and experienced today, the platform is considered emblematic of an ongoing reorganisation of political space and mediated modes of political engagement in contemporary liberal democracies. As an empirical entry point, YouTube provides a window onto examining the radical video practices emerging in relation to three recent political mobilisations in Europe: 1. The European Social Forum in Malmoe in 2008 2. The alternative COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 3. The G20 counter-summit in London in 2009 As three distinct, yet related protest events, these cases provide significant examples of the broad social movement mobilisations that over the past decade have sought to render the consequences of neoliberal politics and governance a visible social problem, and put Left alternatives on the political and public agenda. Through six articles based on the three case studies, this compilation thesis examines the dualities and tensions that characterise video activism on this political vector today. It describes and highlights the texts and contexts of video activism, in a time when the longstanding tradition of working with the power of the image in political portrayal and argument is increasingly reallocated to the mechanisms of social networking and corporate control in contemporary online environments. Part I of this thesis sets the scene by establishing the terrain of the research. As an initial analytical effort, this chapter proposes a typology for understanding radical online video as 'political mash-up genres', emerging in the context of an increasingly complex set of media practices and circuits across intertwined and hybrid communication networks. This chapter further extends the terms of analysis by offering an account of the history of video activism and suggests how an analysis of historical modes of video activism may help contextualise and understand social movement media practices today. The six empirical articles account for Part II of the thesis. Each on its own terms, the articles offer empirical contributions that promote an understanding of the various ways 'the political' is on display and radical politics are being forged on YouTube. In a dual vein of analytical enquiry, the articles examine radical online video as a range of media forms for political argument and portrayal and interrogate the possibilities and constraints offered by the 'architecture of participation' on YouTube to the specific groups and struggles represented in the three case studies. In doing so, the articles identify and analyse a set of tensions and dualities that characterise the ways in which individual and collective actors engage in radical video practice, through media forms that straddle the discursive registers of fact and fiction, art and document, information and entertainment, politics and popular culture. Together, the articles give shape to a range of social movement media practices across a historical, technological, political and aesthetic-discursive range. In the concluding considerations of Part III, I return to the issue of historical contexts to illustrate how close comparative attention to historical modes of video activism can help us understand the complexities and contingencies of online video recruited for radical politics today. The analysis exhibits how contemporary modes of video activism are characterised by practices in which the old and the new, the past and the present, clearly overlap. While we may recognise the incentives and dynamics behind contemporary video activism as well known to the trajectory of Left thinking and action, these insights are suggestive of how such media practices are re-organised and refocused in keeping with the emergence of new means of, and arenas for, political engagement.

Despite initial suggestions that the COVID-19 pandemic affected everyone equally, it quickly became clear that some were much worse affected than others. Marginalization—including poverty, substandard accommodation, precarious or no employment, reduced access to healthcare and other key public goods—was clearly correlated with higher rates of both contagion and fatality. For Sweden, COVID-19 inequality could be seen along clear racial and socio-economic lines, with some of the first high death rates seen amongst Somali communities, where individuals had contracted the virus through unsafe employment as taxi drivers transporting wealthier Swedes home from their winter holidays. At the same time, actors on the extra parliamentarian far-right in Sweden were quick to blame the country's relatively high per-capita fatality rate on persons born outside Sweden working in the healthcare and care home sector. Media frames affirming racial stereotypes grounded in cultural racism circulated across the ecosystem of alternative media in the country. In both healthcare and the media, we see growing forms of exclusion disproportionately affecting migrants. Such intertwined exclusions in Sweden, as the article argues, are a sign of a wider disintegration of Swedish society in which individuals lose trust in both the core institutions as well as across different parts of society. Drawing on Davina Cooper's understanding of the relationship between the state and other public institutions with individuals as based on "touch," the article explores how exclusionary practices impact this relationship. Our key argument is that, whilst ostensibly such practices often most materially hurt minority groups (e.g., migrants), they are indicative of—and accelerate—a broader disintegration of society through undermining a logic of "care" necessary to sustain social bonds.

ABSTRACT
This study examines the social, political, and fantasmatic logics involved in the production of contemporary discourses about Scandinavia as a symbolic site and imagined place of sexual and moral decay and as a gender dysphoric dystopia by actors in the global anti-gender movement. Empirically, we draw on a rich digital archive of multi-modal media texts from an ongoing research project on anti-gender movements in Russia and Germany – two countries which provide particularly poignant examples of sites in which this mode of anti-gender propaganda is currently on the rise. In the analysis, we explore the discursive workings of a particularly prominent node in the material – that of the vulnerable child – and show how this figure is construed and instrumentalised to add urgency and fuel outrage among domestic audiences in Russia and Germany.

This article examines civil society uses of Twitter to promote the climate crisis as an issue in the 2019 national election campaign in Denmark. Theoretically, we draw on Cammaerts's notion of the mediation opportunity structure and Wright, Nyberg, De Cock, and Whiteman's notion of climate imaginaries. Methodologically, we draw on Bennett and Segerberg's approach to studying networked interactions on Twitter. Our findings show that neither the legacy press nor MP candidates used climate-related hashtags promoted by civil society actors. MP candidates did frequently use climate-related hashtags. Nonetheless, these were mainly center-left candidates who mostly called for climate action to be propelled by green growth and technological solutions, while civil society actors called for climate action to be propelled by solidarity and systemic change. We discuss how these articulations of the climate crisis have implications for climate imaginaries and, ultimately, possibilities to act.

This article examines civil society uses of Twitter to promote the climate crisis as an issue in the 2019 national election campaign in Denmark. Theoretically, we draw on Cammaerts's notion of the mediation opportunity structure and Wright, Nyberg, De Cock, and Whiteman's notion of climate imaginaries. Methodologically, we draw on Bennett and Segerberg's approach to studying networked interactions on Twitter. Our findings show that neither the legacy press nor MP candidates used climate-related hashtags promoted by civil society actors. MP candidates did frequently use climate-related hashtags. Nonetheless, these were mainly center-left candidates who mostly called for climate action to be propelled by green growth and technological solutions, while civil society actors called for climate action to be propelled by solidarity and systemic change. We discuss how these articulations of the climate crisis have implications for climate imaginaries and, ultimately, possibilities to act.

An increasingly organized culture of hate is flourishing in today's online spaces, posing a serious challenge for democratic societies. Our study seeks to unravel the work-ings of online hate on popular social media and assess the practices, potentialities, and limitations of organized counterspeech to stymie the spread of hate online. This article is based on a case study of an organized "troll army" of online hate speech in Germany, Re-conquista Germanica, and the counterspeech initiative Reconquista Internet. Conducting a qualitative content analysis, we first unpack the strategies and stated intentions behind organized hate speech and counterspeech groups as articulated in their internal strategic documents. We then explore how and to what extent such strategies take shape in online media practices, focusing on the interplay between users spreading hate and users counter-speaking in the comment sections of German news articles on Facebook. The analysis draws on a multi-dimensional framework for studying social media engagement (Uldam & Kaun, 2019) with a focus on practices and discourses and turns to Mouffe's (2005) con-cepts of political antagonism and agonism to operationalize and deepen the discursive di-mension. The study shows that the interactions between the two opposing camps are high-ly moralized, reflecting a post-political antagonistic battle between "good" and "evil" and showing limited signs of the potentials of counterspeech to foster productive agonism. The empirical data indicates that despite the promising intentions of rule-guided counter-speech, the counter efforts identified and scrutinized in this study predominantly fail to adhere to civic and moral standards and thus only spur on the destructive dynamics of digital hate culture. ; Plattformen und macht deutlich, welche Möglichkeiten und Grenzen organisierte Counter Speech (Gegenrede) hat, um der Verbreitung von Hass im Internet entgegenzuwirken. Der Artikel basiert auf einer Fallstudie über eine organisierte "Troll-Armee" des Online-Hasses in Deutschland, Reconquista Germanica, und die Counter Speech-Initiative Reconquista Internet. Anhand der internen strategischen Kommunikationsdokumente beider Gruppen führen wir eine qualitative Inhaltsanalyse durch um zunächst die Strategien und erklärten Absichten organisierter Hate- und Counter Speech-Gruppen zu ermitteln. Anschließend untersuchen wir inwiefern solche Strategien praktisch umgesetzt werden indem wir das Zusammenspiel zwischen NutzerInnen untersuchen, die in Kommentarspalten deutscher Nachrichtenartikel auf Facebook Hass verbreiten und denen, die mit Counter Speech ent-gegenhalten. Die Analyse orientiert sich an einem mehrdimensionalen Rahmen zur Unter-suchung von Social Media Engagement (Uldam & Kaun, 2019) mit einem Schwerpunkt auf den Dimensionen Praktiken und Diskurse. Um letztere Dimension zu operationalisie-ren und zu vertiefen, stützt sich unsere Analyse auf Mouffes (2005) Konzepte des politi-schen Antagonismus und Agonismus. Die Studie zeigt, dass die Interaktionen zwischen den beiden gegnerischen Lagern stark moralisiert sind, was einen postpolitischen antagonisti-schen Kampf zwischen "Gut" und "Böse" zur Vorschau bringt, der nur in begrenztem Maße Anzeichen für das Potenzial von Counter Speech zeigt, produktiven Agonismus zu fördern. Die empirischen Daten deuten darauf hin, dass sich – trotz der vielversprechenden Praktiken von regelgesteuerter Counter Speech – die identifizierten und untersuchten Counter Speech Bemühungen überwiegend nicht an zivilgesellschaftliche und moralische Maßstäbe halten und auf diese Weise die destruktiven Dynamiken der digitalen Hasskultur nur weiter ankurbeln.

In 2014, more than 200,000 refugees and migrants fled for safety across the Mediterranean Sea. Crammed into overcrowded, unsafe boats, thousands drowned, prompting the Pope to warn that the sea was becoming a mass graveyard. The early months of 2015 saw no respite. In April alone more than 1,300 people drowned. This led to a large public outcry to increase rescue operations. Throughout this period, UNHCR and other humanitarian organisations, engaged in a series of largescale media advocacy exercises, aiming at convincing European countries to do more to help. It was crucial work, setting the tone for the dramatic rise in attention to the refugee crisis that followed in the second half of 2015. But the media was far from united in its response. While some outlets joined the call for more assistance, others were unsympathetic, arguing against increasing rescue operations. To learn why, UNHCR commissioned a report by the Cardiff School of Journalism to explore what was driving media coverage in five different European countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK and Sweden. Researchers combed through thousands of articles written in 2014 and early 2015, revealing a number of important findings for future media advocacy campaigns. Most importantly, they found major differences between countries, in terms of the sources journalists used (domestic politicians, foreign politicians, citizens, or NGOs), the language they employed, the reasons they gave for the rise in refugee flows, and the solutions they suggested. Germany and Sweden, for example, overwhelmingly used the terms 'refugee' or 'asylum seeker', while Italy and the UK press preferred the word 'migrant'. In Spain, the dominant term was 'immigrant'. These terms had an important impact on the tenor of each country's debate. Media also differed widely in terms of the predominant themes to their coverage. For instance, humanitarian themes were more common in Italian coverage than in British, German or Spanish press. Threat themes (such as to the welfare system, or cultural threats) were the most prevalent in Italy, Spain and Britain. Overall, the Swedish press was the most positive towards refugees and migrants, while coverage in the United Kingdom was the most negative, and the most polarised. Amongst those countries surveyed, Britain's right-wing media was uniquely aggressively in its campaigns against refugees and migrants. This report provides important insights into each country's press culture during a crucial period of agenda-setting for today's refugee and migrant crisis. It also offers invaluable insights into historical trends. What emerges is a clear message that for media work on refugees, one size does not fit all. Effective media advocacy in different European nations requires targeted, tailored campaigns, which takes into account their unique cultures and political context.

The article argues that contemporary protest movements are facing a convergence of what has traditionally been coined as mainstream and alternative media. Traditionally, the broad term 'alternative media' has been employed to embrace a wide range of oppositional media channels that can be considered to carry on the tradition of the early radical and party press: micro-media operating at the grassroots level, discontinuous, non-professional, persecuted or illegal. Today, heavily commercialised media and online communities such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace constitute a common part of the repertoire of communication channels for activists engaged in alterative politics and protest movements. Are these new media channels a necessary means in order to reach beyond the circles of the likeminded? Or, do the use of these media point towards a mainstreaming process of political cultures of resistance to the establishment, eroding their very raison d'être? Combining a theoretical discussion of the inherent paradoxes in the celebration of new media technology as a source of democratisation and empowerment of civic cultures with an empirical focus aimed at exploring the changing repertoire of communicative tools used by social movement actors, this paper analyses two cases of online media practices in contemporary Scandinavian protest movements: 1) A series of civil disobedience actions and mobilisations of mass demonstrations before and after the eviction and destruction of the Youth House (Ungdomshuset) in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007-2008; 2) The popular demonstrations in connection with the European Social Forum in Malmö, Sweden in September 2008.

This volume brings together a range of different specialists in the arts and cultural industries, as well as international academics and public intellectuals, to explore how media and communication practices for social change are currently being reconfigured in both conceptual and rhetorical terms

This volume seeks to connect the field of Communication for Development and Social Change to theoretical thinking on the changing notions of the public sphere. It offers a space for critical analysis of how media and communication practices for social change, on the one hand, and analytic conceptions of public spheres and participation, on the other, are currently being reconfigured in both conceptual and rhetorical terms. A range of different specialists in the arts and cultural industries, as well as academics and public intellectuals, has been assembled to link these multifaceted areas and arenas to the methodologies, themes and current theorizing in the field of Communication for Development and Social Change.