Theses - Sociology

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The Norwegian Newspaper Industry in the Digital Age
Raabe, Tellef Solbakk; Raabe, Tellef [0000-0001-9412-5944]
The newspaper industry was profoundly affected by the digital revolution. Digitalisation made news more abundant and accessible, but the economic consequences for legacy media were severe. Advertising revenues plummeted, print circulation deteriorated, and most organisations have struggled to make readers pay for online news. Many newspapers in the Anglo-American world were forced out of business, and those managing to survive have found themselves trapped in an uncomfortable space between print and digital. Digital revenues are insufficient to justify abandoning print altogether, while digital news cannibalises print. The Norwegian newspaper industry has faced the same grand challenges as publishers globally, yet it possesses several unique and noteworthy characteristics. In this thesis, I set out to address the following question: How did Norwegian national newspapers and their owners respond to the challenges of the digital revolution? Inspired by Bourdieu and Thompson, I analyse Norwegian journalism as a structured field in which the positions and strategic capabilities of organisations are determined by the quantities of the different forms of capital they possess. This study principally investigates Norway’s five most prominent newspapers and four competing media groups to understand how publishers have sought to cope with the impact of digitalisation and generate new revenue streams from the monetisation of digital journalism. Drawing on 125 interviews with elite informants and copious quantitative data, I demonstrate that the economic downturn in the Norwegian newspaper industry, while substantial, was less severe than in any other country. I also show that most Norwegian newspapers were profitable throughout the so-called ‘media crisis’ and that the industry has rebounded significantly in recent years. Notably, subscription revenues increased by 45% between 2000 and 2022 when adjusted for inflation. The number of journalists employed by newspapers increased by 13% between 2018 and 2022, and newsroom employment is higher today than at the turn of the century. The number of newspapers in Norway has never been greater. My research emphasises the insufficiency of attributing industry resilience in the face of these transformations to government subsidies, media policies, macroeconomic conditions, and technological infrastructure alone. Consolidation, ‘coopetition’, innovation, and experimentation have been crucial factors in the industry’s economic resurgence. Norwegian newspapers have maintained print revenues to a large extent while simultaneously creating new digital revenue streams. They have become ‘phygital’ media organisations as they distribute and monetise both physical and digital news. Most publications in Norway have also shifted their business model from depending mainly on advertising to relying primarily on subscription revenues. Drawing on the experience of Norwegian newspapers, I nuance the concept of ‘paywalls’ by developing a typology of various methods for controlling access to digital content. Building on my concept of ‘controlled access’, I also introduce ‘the phygital distribution model for newspapers’. This model effectively illustrates which strategies for controlling access to news are most compatible with various content and distribution forms. My models provide guidance for practitioners and a foundation for further research. I contend that there are important lessons to be learned from the Norwegian experience, particularly regarding technological development and business model innovation. Lastly, I argue that a strong public service broadcaster mitigates concerns regarding information inequalities.
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Breaking the Republic in Half? Black Worldmaking Practices in Contemporary France
Niang, Sophie Marie
This thesis explores black worldmaking practices in contemporary France. I define worldmaking as the ongoing efforts to bring about futures made impossible in the present. In the French national context, dominant republican universalism stifles the recognition of the very existence of race and racism. Against this background, this project asks how black postcolonial citizens resist their oppression in the present and sketch out alternative possibilities of being and belonging in France for the future. I excavate these two research questions across three main locations of analysis: rap, black women’s self-narratives in film and literature, and afrofeminist organising and theatre performances. First, I posit that French rap intervenes into discourses around the nation and belonging to make sense of identities constructed as contradictory or impossible. Understanding music as a site where identity is lived and produced, I show how rap constitutes a powerful counter-hegemonic discourse on colonial remembrance, and resists the erasure of black postcolonial citizens’ experiences and identities by making them tangible in its sound. Second, I explore how black women’s self-narratives work to resist the dominant representational landscape that produces Frenchness and blackness as mutually exclusive. These works challenge the status quo by de-naturalising blackness, refusing the negation of their interiority, and affirming community against the spectre of communitarianism. In doing so, they make blackness in France thinkable, by articulating specific modes of relating to blackness, displaying a dialogic construction of identity, and affirming the possibility of taking each other as audience. Together, these dynamics also open the door to new fictional representations. Finally, I explore how the concept of flamboyance is deployed in afrofeminist organising and theatre performances. I begin by interrogating flamboyance as a refusal of respectability, which translates into a refusal of universalist injunctions; of colonial forgetting; and of white space/white time. Then, I focus on the emerging futurities at work in my chosen case-studies, exploring the material prefiguration of alternative futures, the related centring of case, and flamboyance as black aliveness. Taken together, these examples make a case for flamboyance as a pedagogy of worldmaking. In answer to my first research question, I find that refusal is central to worldmaking practices deployed in all three sites of analysis. All the sites analysed in this thesis articulate a continued and overarching refusal of the negation of black postcolonial citizens’ existences. Given the centrality of this negation to the present assemblages, these lines of flight do threaten to break the Republic in half — and form new assemblages among its ruins. This project’s first contribution is therefore an empirical study of productive refusal as an essential element of worldmaking. In answer to the second question, it emerges that actors are not particularly invested in making a case for a “black Frenchness” or a “French blackness” that could include them. Instead, that they are French is taken as evident, and various claims about identity emerge, encouraging us to rethink the “thin/thick blackness” distinction that until now has dominated scholarship on blackness in France. Indeed, there is always an excess to resistance strategies. In resisting, people also sketched out an emerging hexagonal blackness as something deeper than the shared experience of antiblack racism. Together, these two contributions demonstrate the need to move beyond the study of racialised minority groups understood through a strict “racist oppression/antiracist resistance” binary. While it is imperative to account for and study these dynamics, we must also think much more expansively, to think of the production of identities that takes place through black oppositional practices.
Open Access
Extra-Institutional Science and the Democratization of Scientific Practice: DIY Biology in Canada, Great Britain, and Germany
Eireiner, Anna Verena
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) biologists set up their laboratories in garages, kitchens, or community spaces. They experiment with gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR, grow glow-in-the-dark plants and engineer colourful fungi. The DIY biology movement is a reminder that science is not a natural or essential entity; its boundaries are (re-)drawn in flexible and sometimes ambiguous ways (e.g., Gieryn, 1983). DIY biology’s professionalized research communities emerge outside, or ‘extra to’, institutional laboratories, which is why I theorise DIY biology as a case of ‘extra-institutional science’. This thesis sheds light on three core components of extra-institutional science: its visions, materialisations, and policy. This project’s core research questions are: “How do DIY biologists envision and materialise extra-institutional research spaces and communities?” and “How do states and their institutions envision, support and/or regulate DIY biology”. To answer these questions, this project utilises empirical data gained from a public policy document analysis, 32 personal interviews with DIY biologists and other stakeholders, and the 2021 DIY Biology Community Survey. This study contributes to scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that considers how innovation in science and technology is co-produced across different sociocultural contexts and in associated public policy. To do so, this project integrates a comparative dimension, investigating how three different countries, Canada, Great Britain and Germany, and their respective DIY communities, imagine themselves through extra-institutional science in keeping with their political cultures, goals and traditions. To unpack the rationale behind DIY biology as extra-institutional science, I introduce three socio-technical imaginaries that emerged through a thematic analysis of interview and survey data. First, DIY biology is envisioned to democratize the scientific enterprise. Second, DIY biologists argue that extra-institutional science allows for greater academic freedom than traditional academic research. Third, DIY biologists commonly imagine their movement as an avenue that allows for the exploration of socially relevant research agendas. These three themes guide my investigations into DIY biology’s roots and mission thereby shedding light on the fundamental tensions brought on by the boundary-challenging activities of DIY biologists. This project shows that while DIY biologists share these key imaginaries, how extra-institutional science is imagined and materialised diverges and converges across the different country-contexts. One of the key findings of this research project is that DIY biologists construct their movement outside of traditional research institutions, thereby challenging their authority, hierarchies, funding, and proprietary regimes. In doing so, DIY biologists carve out a space and identity outside of the increasingly neoliberalised institutional spheres of modern-day knowledge production, thereby demonstrating possibilities of doing science otherwise. Based on the empirical work, this project identifies potential topics to improve policy-decision making, which are then translated into a set of policy recommendations that may aid policymakers and other stakeholders in future decision-making on the topic of extra-institutional science.
Open Access
Recontextualising Viral Justice: Social Media, Feminist Connective Action and the 2021 Injection Spiking Incidents.
Lacey, Paula
Given the absence of attention to online virality within digital activism scholarship, this MPhil research project interrogates what it means for a social justice issue to “go viral” through the case study of the 2021 injection spiking phenomenon. In doing so, this work reconciles a novel appraisal of the participatory process through which social justice content spreads online with Ruha Benjamin’s (2022) Viral Justice, exploring whether Benjamin’s biological model for social change holds when applied to a social media context. Reports of the spiking incidents, and subsequent discussions of the pervasive rape culture in the UK, dominated online discourse for several months before largely disappearing, in what I term a viral social justice event. Through an adaptive digital ethnographic approach, conducted in the face of increasing restrictions on academic access to social media data, this work retrospectively reconstructed this viral event by collecting cross-platform multimedia corpora of posts made to Twitter and Instagram at the time, alongside in-depth interviews with young female social media users reflecting on the event and its impact on attitudes towards women’s safety. This method allowed this work to develop a framework of the sociality within virality, in which three interrelated dimensions of participation, connective witnessing and affect converge to co-constitute a phenomenon which, despite containing the potential for transformative change, falls short of becoming a sustained movement. Despite its fleetingness, this research suggests that viral social justice events may have an aggregative effect in the drive towards justice, particularly when they are viewed as an opportunity for activists to recast transient affective participation into durable solidarity, carving out a role for digital virality within Viral Justice.
Open Access
Coloniality, Violence, and Intergenerational Trauma among Displaced Syrians
Rana, Marya
Intergenerational trauma is a recognized outcome of situations of mass trauma involving violence, such as the Syrian displacement crisis. One pathway for the transmission of intergenerational trauma is through violence against children. A decolonial lens has been used to understand intergenerational transmission of trauma in Indigenous communities in the US (Brave Heart, 2003; Faimon, 2004; Walters & Simoni, 2002), linking present-day issues with histories of mass colonial violence. This paper sought to examine whether there is a process of learning between peripheral communities in the colonial world system around the question of intergenerational transmission of trauma, and investigated whether a similar decolonial lens is being used to contextualize instances of violence against children in displaced Syrian communities within histories of colonial violence. The paper did not use well-tested models that could lead to targeted therapeutics, but rather, used broad models that allow for a conception of current mental health issues within the context of community and history. It adopted a scoping review approach and screened 1,024 unique results from a systematic search of twelve psychological, sociological, and medical databases, and additional results from a grey literature search. No results fully addressed the research question, but eight results partially addressed it and were included in the analysis. Five of the results linked displacement/MENA identity to violence against children, two linked coloniality to displacement/MENA identity, and one linked colonization to violence against children. Three themes shared across these groupings were: lack of access to justice, creation of labels by colonial powers, and identity issues. This paper identified a large gap in the literature, revealing an urgent need to investigate further the ways that the colonial pasts of displaced Syrian communities can inform the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and identified an emerging public mental health field at the intersection of coloniality, displacement, and intergenerational trauma.
Open Access
Class, Neoliberalism, and Mental Health: a case study of the Cardiff Health Area.
Smith, Ryan
This research project deploys a multi-method case study approach to better understand the relationship between class, neoliberalism, and mental health in the Cardiff Health Area. Quantitative analyses reveal that class has a more statistically significant influence on the prevalence of mental ill-health than deprivation. Qualitative analyses situate phenomenological experiences of mental health and healthcare within the context of a neoliberal, class-divided society. This dissertation thus argues that, at the macro-level of society, neoliberal hegemonic forces individualise responsibility for the development and management of psychological distress. Individualising discourses are then propelled at the microlevel by the immunising model of governmentality, in interactions between service users and healthcare professionals, whereby psychological distress is framed as internal to individuals. Combined, these theories explain how the neoliberal paradigm of mental health is constructed and reproduced. The dissertation concludes that by circumventing the role of social inequalities, the neoliberal paradigm of mental health inhibits the development of critical, class consciousness. Future research which focuses on class and deprivation as determinants of mental ill-health could contribute to a paradigm shift in mental health discourses, away from individual responsibility and towards the root causes, i.e., the fragmentary nature of neoliberalism in a class-divided and unequal society.
Open Access
Iridescence on Screen: Media Stereotype and Representation of LGBTQ+ in South Korean Television Dramas
Bae, Jiyoung
This dissertation explores how Korean television dramas represent the LGBTQ+ community, including recent changes, prospects, and limitations. 25 television dramas with LGBTQ+ characters and narratives are selected to comprise the corpus, with Critical Discourse Analysis as the main Methodology. Each conceptual framework of ‘Visibility’, ‘Representation’, ‘Disclosure’, ‘Framing’, and ‘Sexuality’ constitutes the main chapters of the analysis. They serve as five different lenses to investigate whether there are queer characters on screen, and if so, who they are, how they are displayed, and why they appear in narratives. The aim is to conduct a comparative study to inspect the field from a wider perspective and incorporate recent changes in the media industry, along with their influences on the LGBTQ+ community. The analysis of the drama corpus elucidates five significant findings. Firstly, in terms of ‘Visibility’, both exposure and diversity have expanded over time, but most characters appear as supporting roles. Secondly, the ‘Representation’ is realistic as the dramas depict the detailed position of the characters within the narrative. Thirdly, there are several outing cases in ‘Disclosure’ and a limited spectrum of reactions after coming out, yet hopeful in that affirmative ones also exist. Fourthly, there remain limitations in ‘Framing’ after heteronormativity and stereotypes. Lastly, as for ‘Sexuality’, romance and intimacy are selectively manipulated and concealed. These five analyses assert the positive aspects of having more queer discourses on screen, but also acknowledge the drawbacks in that some still reinforce the dominant system. They become essential evidence in revealing the power dynamics and examining the realities of Korean society. Overall, this dissertation guides the Korean media industry on how to deal with media in the direction of fairly representing, and ultimately, going along with the LGBTQ+ community.
Open Access
Feminist Movements and Barriers to Participation: A sociological study of Ni Una Menos protest tactics and accessibility
Spangler, Claire
Progressive social movements that contend with issues of marginality, insecurity, and structural oppressions risk inadvertently replicating such power discrepancies in their activism and protest through exclusionary tactics and in-group practices. Protest tactics are differently accessible to intersectional identities, and different tactics and practices of participation risk excluding certain groups. This research seeks to understand how the accessibility of participation and perceptions of the costs of participating in social movements diverge based on intersectional identities. Analysing individuals’ decisions to participate will yield insight into participants’ agency in shaping protest tactics, and how tactics may exclude individuals due to differently perceived costs of participation. This research engages Ni Una Menos participants and non-participants. Ni Una Menos is the progressive social movement against femicide that originated in Argentina. It began with an unprecedented online presence and enormous march in Buenos Aires in 2015 with more than 250,000 participants. Its use of digital tactics and relatively accessible and popular physical protesting lowered barriers to participation. Its relative accessibility increased its potential for inclusion and widespread participation; however, certain exclusionary practices still mitigated participation. Survey and interview data yield an overview of the Ni Una Menos movement, demographics of research participants, participation methods and accessibility, and risks of participation. Moving beyond traditional top-down views of social movements, this research engages a bottom-up analysis that elucidates exclusionary practices from the ‘ingroup’ of the movement that mitigated participation for certain intersectional identities and men. Additionally, the low value attributed to digital tactics (both seen in research participant values and reflected theoretical research), in addition to their high risk of trolling, lessened digital participation. This likely affected both actual and perceived participation levels. Accordingly, this research expands understandings of social movements and protest tactics through a bottom-up and critical stance towards participation and considerations of protest tactics.
Open Access
Adoption in the USA: The racialised digital representation & monetisation of children
Higgins, Isabelle
In this thesis, I explore how children deemed eligible for adoption in the USA are represented and monetised by a range of digital ‘adoption advocates’, including governments, private adoption agencies and adoptive parents. Though there have been extensive studies on the racialised political economic forces that shape US adoption practices, and separate research into the racialised structures of digital technology, this thesis breaks new ground by considering how adoption practices are shaped by internet design and use. The thesis thus shows that the everyday realities experienced by children in the US adoption process are shaped by the intersections of racial, reproductive and digital forms of structural injustice. To make this argument, I draw on digital data collected over 12-month period, which I analyse using critical techno-cultural discourse analysis. Such analysis leads me to argue that digital ‘adoption advocacy’ is a diverse but sustained set of practices concerned with encouraging the placement of children, currently living in state care or with their birth families in a range of global locations, with adoptive parents in the USA. By using this framing, I connect the work of state governments (who share images and photographs of children in their care) to the work of adoptive parent social media influencers (who represent and monetise their everyday family life and their children’s perceived alterity). Drawing attention to the structural conditions of intersectional inequality that this representation and monetisation of children reflects and reproduces, I argue that the digital practices of ‘adoption advocates’ actively produce the inequalities that adoption in the USA relies upon. I show the significance of these digital practices by first placing them into a broader context, highlighting that representations of children of colour have been created by producers and for audiences occupying spaces of whiteness, throughout longer, non-digital histories. I then explore the relationship between ‘digital’ practices and the ‘non-digital’ material and embodied realities that such practices rely on and contribute to. The thesis does important work by showing the value of sustained engagement with an empirical case over time. It shows how structural forms of inequality shape the lives and experiences of a group of children whose personal information is repeatedly shared in the public domain, often without their knowledge or consent. In addition, by engaging reflexively with the power and inequality reflected in this empirical case, the thesis also explores the role that disciplinary social sciences can play in in identifying and challenging the reproduction of inequality.
Embargo
The Limits of Social Citizenship: Unemployment Insurance and the Reproduction of the South African Racial Capitalist State, 1937-2023
Hallink, Courtney
Three decades following the end of apartheid, racial stratification continues to be reproduced along historically constituted lines. In this dissertation, I ask how the institutionalisation of unemployment insurance during the periods of segregation (1910-1947) and apartheid (1948-1994) continues to affect the racialization of social citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. In other words, I ask how unemployment insurance legislation continues to undermine the democratization of social citizenship in the post-apartheid present. I use a historical sociological approach, engaging process-tracing while also drawing from historiographical literature and sociological theory. I draw extensively from legislative acts, parliamentary debates (Hansards), reports from various commissions of inquiry, and other relevant government and non-government materials. I draw heavily from secondary literature in order to contextualise the legislative changes made in the periods in question. Finally, I draw from a small number of interviews held with key informants on post-1994 social policy reform. I zoom in on five key episodes of policy building: the adoption of the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) in 1937; the 1946 amendments made under the Jan Smuts government; the 1949 amendments made by the newly elected National Party government headed by D.F. Malan; the amendments made following the declared ‘independence’ of the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and the Ciskei in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and, finally, the episode of policy reform following the democratic transition. The Union of South Africa, still under the British imperial arm, constructed an unemployment insurance system structured around the needs of the ‘ideal’ White worker to consolidate the South African racial capitalist state in the hands of the White minority. Drawing from Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s path-defining Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Commission and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, I demonstrate how the ‘deserving’ White was defined against the anti-black logic of the ‘poor White’. In defining what whiteness was not, the White supremacist state was simultaneously defining what whiteness was. The ideal worker came to represent the urban, formalised, skilled, White male breadwinner. The ideal worker then, was not only implicitly racialized, but also gendered and classed. Situating the institutionalisation of the UIF in its broader historical and political-economic context, reveals how the state’s interest in upholding White supremacy was sometimes at odds with the demands of capital. Over time, as the state responded to these contradictions, the explicitly racialized exclusions were removed from the legislation. As a result, the UIF came to be mistaken as having been de-racialized in the final years of apartheid. The incremental naturalisation of racialization in the UIF’s eligibility criteria, combined with the rise of neoliberalism and the increasing presence of American imperial capital interests, meant that the UIF in the democratic era maintained its core structure first articulated by the White supremacist government. This is not to suggest that individuals historically racialized as Black cannot enjoy the ‘full rights’ of citizenship, but rather, it is to argue that the arbitrary markers that determine the boundary between inclusion and exclusion continue to obey the logic of normative (patriarchal) whiteness. In other words, individuals who approximate ‘middle-class whiteness’ are the most likely to enjoy the full benefits of social citizenship. As a result, historically marginalized communities continue to face exclusion (and precarious inclusion) from the social rights associated with South African citizenship.
Controlled Access
The Meaning of Being Independent: Precarities of Work and Lifestyles and Alternative-Seeking among Chinese Self-Employed Cultural Workers
Liu, Ruoxi
Notwithstanding the many emerging terms relevant to self-employed/independent workers, such as freelancers and flexible workers, and the growing discussion regarding new types of work and entrepreneurship, self-employed workers are still a minority in the Chinese labour market. Without an official definition and uniform categorisation, self-employed workers in Chinese society face an ambivalent situation in economic, social, and cultural terms. This thesis investigates the independent cultural workers, who constitute a significant population to study among the self-employed workers. They represent an important niche social group whose work ideally requires a high level of autonomy and creativity but who constantly face constraints from content regulation and censorship. Compared to other self-employed workers (such as gig workers and non-cultural digital workers) or those in other social contexts, independent cultural workers in China face challenges connected with being ‘independent’ in various aspects of sociality, culture, and gender. Contextualised in contemporary mainland China, a post-socialist society characterised by its own features of collectivism, individualisation, and neoliberal tendencies, this thesis studies the ‘independents’ who do cultural work to understand three sets of research themes from a sociological perspective: First, precarity and hope in independent cultural workers’ work and lifestyles; second, the politics of cultural production; and third, the individual-society-state relationship. The thesis adopts a mixture of qualitative methodologies (participant observation, in-depth interview, and solicited diary-keeping) throughout an 11-month period (from May 2020 to April 2021) of ethnographic fieldwork across a number of Chinese cities. Drawing on the testimonies of 111 interviewees, 16 diaries, and my own fieldnotes as a participant observer and engaging with the literature on precarity and hope in creative labour studies, the politics of cultural production, and individualism and individualisation, I first summarise their work and lifestyle practices, characterised by various precarities, not only in the normal sense as an aspect of work, but also from social, cultural, and gendered standpoints. I then investigate how they strive for self-realisation in part via negotiation at both individual and community levels, in response to the growing interest from the market and the state in self-employment. Last, I highlight their search for alternatives to various kinds of precarity and the increasing uncertainties created by the multiple players within China’s cultural politics. In particular, I identify their alternative practices in developing new modes of doing cultural work via self-organisation, cultivating alternative spaces, communities, and cultures, and pursuing a new, often non-confrontational cultural politics through everydayness and mobility-seeking. By pursuing three lines of enquiry, this research contributes to an understanding of the meaning of ‘being independent’ in an authoritarian society with residual collectivist, as well as neoliberal tendencies. I argue that ‘being independent’ in China starts with aspects of work but goes beyond it to also encompass cultural, social, and political aspects of life. I conclude by establishing workers’ reasons for being independent, which lie in achieving self-realisation, social withdrawal, and individualism, and the approaches to being independent, including disengagement from society and alternative-seeking. I finally position independent cultural workers as a drifting social group and reflect on the features of heterogeneity, in-betweenness, and temporality, shown in their work and lifestyle practices and status of being independent. Overall, this thesis furthers a more nuanced understanding of cultural/creative work, cultural/creative workers, and their communities; develops new insights into the individual-society-state relationship and contest individual agency at the grassroots levels in China; and provides a ‘cultural independents’-focused version of China’s individualisation process.
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An Analysis of Social Networks and Framing in the Catalan Independence Movement: Towards a Theory of Networked Nationalist Collective Action
Imperial, Miranda Carla
In 2010, the Constitutional Court of Spain struck down an enhanced Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia, refusing to give the territory extra provisions of nationality. This saw a new wave of Catalan pro-independence sentiment emerge, with ensuing demonstrations and online activism for Catalan nationalism. With this backdrop, my research seeks to bring an understanding to this new iteration of Catalan nationalist mobilisation by analysing the developments in Twitter-mediated collective action during 2012-2022. My main argument holds that Catalan nationalism during this decade is an example of a networked nationalist social movement: a prolonged mobilisation activity underpinned by relations between individuals, activist groups and even institutions collaborating together with nationalist activist aims, often those of greater self-determination and extending to independence and secession. This thesis identifies and addresses a glaring gap in the literature: a link between analysing nationalist mobilisation themes together with social movement organisational dynamics. Thus, my research undertakes a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative social network analysis and a qualitative content analysis focusing on interpreting activist frames that empirically brings together the two theoretical fields. In this way, I outline whether we can think of Catalan pro-independence as a social movement, how it has changed over time, who the key actors in the movement are, and how they have framed Catalan identities and reasons for mobilisation. My thesis reveals the existence of a mediated civic, liberal nationalist movement with prominent social movement organisations that focuses on grievances and oppositional framing. This understanding complicates civic and ethnic distinctions in nationalism theory, as well as previous understandings of Catalan nationalism. Ultimately, my findings shed new light on nationalism as a crucial, mobilising force, beyond individuals or institutions.
Open Access
The role of finance and intangibles in the financialised pharmaceutical sector
Hawksbee, Luke
The last few decades are widely believed to represent a ‘new economy’: for some, it is a high-tech or ‘knowledge-based’ economy; for others, one dominated by finance. Finance has certainly exploded, and we have seen huge breakthroughs in high-tech sectors like pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, these same sectors face intensified public scrutiny, over issues ranging from monopolisation to pricing, product safety, and more. The nature and institutional context of the contemporary pharmaceutical sector affords shareholders major pay-outs, sowing resentment among the public who are forced to pay its rents even in the face of apparently slowed innovation. This thesis explores and explains how contemporary pharmaceutical business models operate—in particular, how there are shaped by financial considerations and intangible assets. Mixed methods are used, bringing together quantitative analysis of ‘big pharma’ accounts with a qualitative case study. The former incorporates data from 20 global big pharma firms selected based on their revenue over time and headquartered in 3 regions, spanning the years 1991–2017 inclusive. The latter focuses on Martin Shkreli, (former CEO of 2 notable firms that acquired and hiked the prices of several drugs) and is based on news media reports and other publicly accessible documents, such as investor presentations. Financial holdings, engineering and rent-seeking seem less significant to big pharma than other sectors. Big pharma remains committed to innovation, despite its partial commodification and outsourcing through takeovers and markets for intangibles. However, financial thinking does inspire the adoption by some firms of novel and controversial business strategies and models. These findings challenge influential notions within the literature, such as the perception that big pharma has largely abandoned R&D, or that small start-ups are by their nature innovative. They also strengthen the case for understanding financialisation as an uneven and combined phenomenon, as well as contributing to the process of synthesising the literatures on financialisation and assetisation.
Embargo
Breaking the News: When Populists Turn Against the Media
Pniewsky, Ayala
November 7th 2016 found Ilana Dayan, a renowned Israeli journalist, exceptionally nervous. Nothing in her long career prepared her for this moment: she was about to read aloud a long smearing account of herself and her work on national TV. Like many reporters and news hosts worldwide, when Dayan entered the profession she could not imagine that one day she would be standing in front of the camera, telling the Israeli people that she was, allegedly, a traitor. But she did. For six long minutes, Dayan read out loud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s smearing reply to her investigative report. “The time has come to unmask Ilana Dayan”, she said, “because Dayan leads a concerted frenzy against Netanyahu. … Dayan has a problem not only with Netanyahu – but with the Israeli people”. The dramatic TV segment has quickly gone viral. This memorable moment demonstrates the unique challenges which journalists – and particularly women, people of colour, and religious/ethnic minorities – are now facing in various countries. My doctoral dissertation examines journalists’ coping strategies against populist attacks and online harassment. How do journalists cover populist smears targeting them, their colleagues, and their profession? How do these attacks affect their daily work? Which structural conditions enable them to fight back? And what role does social media play in this conflict? Through 45 interviews with leading journalists in Israel, large-scale public opinion surveys, and analyses of the populist rhetoric, its media coverage, and social media content, I explore four different coping strategies and their implications for democracy, equality, and the future of journalism. My work thus aims to contribute to the research on the relationship between journalists and publics, beyond questions of trust and credibility. It builds on media sociology literature – from Tuchman’s seminal work on strategic rituals of objectivity (1972) to Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (1988) – combined with contemporary political theory and political science – from Mudde’s work on populism (2004) to Muller’s theory of democracy (2016) – to develop theoretical concepts like “strategic bias”, “journalistic imagination”, and “rituals of loyalty”. It concludes by suggesting real-world research-based advice for journalists under attack. Studying anti-media populism in Israel is particularly urgent. Populist media bashing has turned journalists’ lives in the region upside down long before Trump’s victory and the Brexit referendum, which sparked booming academic interest in populism and media. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has always been a fierce critic of the press (Peri 2004). Moreover, the ramifications of phenomena like online harassment and mob censorship (Waisbord 2020) are extremely consequential in Israel and Palestine. As I demonstrate in one of the empirical chapters, leading Israeli journalists have often avoided discussing and covering the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, due to their fear of political attacks and their attempt to maintain the public’s trust and attention. This was not necessarily effective; it has, however, remained a pervasive strategy in the Israeli news industry. I would argue that, apart from the financial incentives and the intense competition with social media, it is the ethos of journalism itself that drives journalists to play into the hands of right-wing populists who seek to discredit them. To improve the relationship between audiences and journalists – as well as our information environment – this ethos must be reckoned with and reconsidered.
Controlled Access
Cyprus in the British Empire’s Time and Space: Documents, Objects, and Colonial Practices of Knowledge Production
Pissaride, Iris
This thesis traces the ways in which Cyprus is inscribed within the British Empire’s time and space by focusing on documents and objects composed and collected in the first thirty years of the British occupation. In so doing, it investigates practices of knowledge production in and for Cyprus — such as writing, photographing, collecting, mapping, surveying, displaying — and highlights how they engender bifurcations of belonging to history. The thesis adds to the research on colonial practices of knowledge production, and to critiques of imperial epistemologies by tracing how historical time in and of the West is written in and for Cyprus. Specifically, it implicates colonial archaeology within the imperial historical time wherein Cyprus is inscribed as a colonial space. Using a multi-layered approach to archival methods, the thesis traces genealogies and microhistories of power, while potentializing gaps and failures in colonialism’s nexus of narrating, documenting, and archiving. I first engage with materials of writing Cyprus from the beginning of the British occupation. These place Cyprus in the empire’s time, but outside of the empire’s space, through the concept and the object of the ruin. With abundance of ruins, Cyprus becomes a place of extracting the West’s history. This connects to an epistemological turn across Western disciplines, from the legitimacy of texts to that of objects, whereby ancient objects evidence bifurcations of East and West. Continuing from the macro to the micro, I then zoom-in on the archives of Francis Hill Guillemard, a British academic who visited Cyprus, collected objects for what he called “museum-stuffing”, and co-established the Cyprus Exploration Fund which excavated the island. Through his diaries and memoirs I trace the proliferation of “the collection” and “the knower” of history. I proceed by following another colonial agent through the archive: Horatio Herbert Kitchener — the mapmaker of Cyprus. I trace how Cypriots and their landscape were mapped and surveyed, eliminating Ottoman social relations and religious syncretism through documentation. I follow the process of fixation as various concepts of ascribing difference are tried out by colonial administrators to reach the ethnoreligious. I then track Cypriot lifeworlds left out: those that are not registered in the map and census, but are found in petitions and complaints filed-away in archives. As syncretic lifeworlds are dismissed, I trace how colonial pathways to modernity are displayed. They are displayed in the present as pathways to “progress” in the Colonial Exhibition; and in the past, through the archaeological Cyprus Museum, that, I argue, acts as a storage-room for Britain’s institutions. Finally, I zoom in again, this time on an object that was discussed and photographed intensely until it failed the discourse of collectable ancientness: a perforated monolith. I trace how this “failure” to enter Western history can potentialize ways of unlearning imperialism following Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s work. I conclude by suggesting the concept of imperial timescape to explain how Cyprus is used as a landscape of extractable time, and how it enters the West through a useful-for-the-empire ancient, rather than recent, past.
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Agents in Crisis: Theoretical Studies on Agency, Meaning and Time
Raza Mejia, Sebastian
The concept of crisis has become a staple in describing the current state of the social world. In the last decades, sociological theorists have retrieved the notion in connection with its cognate idea of critique. This retrieval comes hand in hand with recognising a dual character of crisis situations. On the one hand, crises are produced by causal dynamics and mechanisms, which a naturalistic approach to social structures can account for. On the other hand, crises are made sense and transformed from within, which demands a more interpretivist approach to human agency. This thesis is a theoretical intervention in the latter dimension of crisis with the aim of building specific analytical models and a general theoretical framework that can account for how agents make sense, interpret and transform a crisis situation. Taking a step back from sociology to phenomenology, Part I of this thesis reconstructs the experience of a crisis. First, I argue that crises represent a particular type of action problem marked by ‘inchoateness’, differentiating them from risks, emergencies, puzzles and akin action problems. Inchoateness refers to a situation in which its organising framework is experienced as problematic, for it fails to orient agents to relevant facts and normative considerations. Second, I argue that organising frameworks – i.e., ‘the background’ – must be construed in normative and hermeneutical ways: it is constitutive by strong values and is open to interpretation. Crisis situations are opaque, normatively unintelligible and factually illegible, and relate to ‘hermeneutical gaps’ at the level of the framework. Third, I argue that the transformative resolution to inchoate situations shares the phenomenological structure of insights. An insight embodies a non-cumulative and non-linear solution which hinges on the transformation of the ways of seeing and ultimately frameworks. In Part II, in dialogue with hermeneutics, practice theory and different sociological approaches, this thesis argues that, in order to account for the situated and transformative sense-making of crisis situations made evident through phenomenology, sociological theory must take a threefold turn in its theorisation of agency, culture, and time. First, theories of agency must encompass the notions associated with the concept of the person – i.e., value-orientation and self-guided projectivity – without dismissing the situated and practical nature of human agency by granting self-interpretation and value-attunement a central role. Second, it argues that theories of meaning and culture must take an expressivist turn capable of encompassing the whole range of symbolic forms (bodily enactment, symbols and concepts) through which agents access, make sense and transform their frameworks. Third, sociological theories must turn to the question of temporalisation, which I differentiate from the question of time. They must account not only for the different temporal orientations of agency (e.g., the past-oriented character of habits and the future-oriented character of imagination), but also for how agency temporalises itself, that is, how it creates critical, non-linear, and non-cumulative transitions in self-understanding. Building upon these discussions, Part II also offers analytical models to account for different types of inchoateness, transformative-interpretative patterns and modalities of temporalisation. Bodily enactment, symbolic figuration and narrative bootstrapping constitute three interpretative patterns through which agents transform their frameworks in moments of crisis and temporalise their self-understanding.
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IVF Journeys of No Return: A Sociological Analysis of Reproductive Ambivalence in Contemporary China
Huang, Tianqi; Huang, Tianqi [0000-0002-0489-1678]
This research presents an in-depth qualitative portrait of Chinese women’s in vitro fertilisation experiences (IVF) in the post-one-child era, providing a sociological analysis of reproductive politics in contemporary China. With the end of the one-child policy, the population policy in China has heralded a gradual retreat of anti-natalist policies and signalled a shift towards pro-natalism at the national level. However, at the individual level, the recent population policy does not seem to be embraced on a large scale, with people expressing unwillingness to have (or to have more) children and fertility anxiety about the high costs of childcare. Throughout this thesis, I argue that IVF journeys reveal multi-layered ambivalence around reproduction – with both pro-natalist and anti-natalist aspects – and that IVF also intensifies women’s ambivalence in their pursuit of fertility. I employed a multi- sited ethnography for this study combining participant observation at a family hostel for IVF patients from across China in Beijing with in-depth semi-structured interviews with 29 women, 2 clinicians and 1 bioethicist. I also visited several IVF clinics following women’s treatment trajectories and collected information from online IVF forums, group chats, media representations, and population policy documents. In my analysis of the data, I develop the concept of *ambi-natalism* to refer to the interplay of multiple ambivalent factors regarding reproductive culture and practice, including both pro-natalist and anti-natalist aspects. Three data chapters elaborate on aspects of the IVF journeys that characterise *ambi-natalism*. I start with how an IVF decision was negotiated within a family, move on to how women tried their best to navigate a successful IVF treatment, and finally explore how women reflect upon their IVF journeys and their motivations. This thesis draws on the sociology of reproduction, feminist IVF research, the sociology of the family, especially with regard to the ongoing individualisation process in China, and the sociology of population governance. The concept of *ambi-natalism* contributes to confounding the tidy dualism between pro-natalism and anti-natalism. On the one hand, it explains the coexistence of both pro-natalist and anti-natalist beliefs and practices regarding reproduction in contemporary China. On the other hand, *ambi-natalism* addresses the tensions between pro-natalism and anti-natalism in today’s China, pulling and pushing reproductive practices whereby bringing more ambivalence that is borne by women. Furthermore, I suggest that IVF encompasses *ambi-natalist* values and norms in contemporary China while participating in shaping a latent uncertainty about the state’s demographic future. Additionally, my work offers policy recommendations for building a more gender-equal and fertility-friendly society.
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Environmental Movements in China’s Digital Age
Sun, Xiaokun
New media technologies have transformed environmental campaigns and activism in China. The social media affords both Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and local protester communities the opportunity to embrace the dynamics of environmental movements in the digital age, when flexible networks of communications among stakeholders are necessary and encouraged. The use of social media is these days redefining power arrangements and capital accumulation in China’s environmental movements. Environmental NGOs and local communities use different tactics to work using what the social media affords. In this thesis I explore environmental movements in China’s digital age. First, I critically assess how the social media is used differently by environmental NGOs and the loosely self-organised field of local environmental protester communities. By analysing 76 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, seven cases of localised small-scale protests, and three large-scale Anti-PX Protest Movements, I evaluate how the use of social media is shaping China’s environmental movements. Although analysing social media offers insights for understanding China’s environmental movements, it is not enough to attribute to new media technologies the ultimate influence on the logics of the local-communities-field and the environmental-NGOs-field. Rather, taking account of a 9-month internship in two environmental NGOs and subsequent empirical analysis, I provide insights into the ways that environmental NGOs, protester communities, the government, and traditional media journalists interact with the social media, and accordingly how different forms of capital are exchanged. Drawing upon a field approach, inspired by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I build the empirical investigation and extend the field theory in understanding social media and social movement research. The lessons learned have led me to propose a new form of capital: public capital. The findings of my research reveal how different forms of capital – including cultural, social, symbolic, economic, and now ‘public – environmental NGOs and local communities possess are changing in relation to social media affordances and use. Among the findings is that the use of social media has brought stakeholders of the environmental movement field a variety of chances and challenges to act and communicate with each other; the use of social media strengthens interactions among environmental NGOs and local communities; the social media has helped to expand the networks of environmental NGOs and activist communities; and the social media has blurred distinctions between NGOs and local community actions, albeit in limited ways. In a digital age of social media, environmental NGOs and protester groups not only shared resources; they were also able to take risks together. With the use of social media, environmental NGOs could secretly become involved in street activism, while local protesters learned alternative ways of public interest litigation to sue the polluters. However, the study reveals that face-to-face personal networks and traditional mass communication are still at the core of China’s contemporary environmental movements. Possible explanations for this include a huge digital divide, censorship and surveillance, and a lack of sufficient funds and qualified personnel among NGOs. The results reconsider how uncertainties, censorship, and the risks of surveillance and personal danger complicate any use of the social media for social movements.
Open Access
Civil Society and the Politics of Values: Social services and the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan
Weise, Madita
This dissertation analyses how the role of civil society organisations (CSO) in Jordan changed in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis between 2011 and 2019. CSOs are often the most important actors in the immediate aftermath of a crisis providing emergency aid and consolation for communities. However, they are also essential to the ability of a society to weather the medium-term impact of crisis by paving the way for and shaping social values and behavioural change in a country. Thus, crisis acts as an inflection point in which CSOs assume renewed or changed responsibilities. The case of CSOs in Jordan responding to the Syrian forced displacement crisis reveals that the mediation occurred in four ways. First, the CSOs changed their (i) objectives and (ii) their behaviour fostering values of social justice and community service. Second, the CSOs changed their relationship with (iii) the community and (iv) the government mitigating the impacts of the forced displacement crisis. The research offers implications for the debate of the role of CSOs in the Middle East and how to envision its continued development and progress. It also contributes to the discourse of CSOs as it embeds it in a crisis context. My research design builds on insights from phenomenology and interactionism to hone in on the subjective experience of the Jordanians who helped in the emergency response to the refugee crisis. Therefore, to answer these questions in my dissertation, I conducted interviews with CSO staff and volunteers, and a wider group of Jordanians involved in the response to the influx of Syrian refugees between 2011 and 2019. The text analysis of CSO motivational statements as well as secondary source analysis allowed me to assess the transformation of CSOs during crisis. The results of my research showed that CSOs change during crises in important ways with implications for understanding the societal trajectories of change. During the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, CSOs stepped in to provide social services to those in need. Shaped by the experience of working in this crisis harnessed social justice values of CSOs and their staff. These values generated, in a Bourdieusian sense, capital. These forms of capital propelled CSOs in the dynamic crisis context to assume political roles as the arbiter of transformed values of social justice. As a result, CSOs providing social services to Syrian refugees to help, became agents in the politicisation of the transformed values themselves. Thus, based on these findings, ongoing scholarly debates on civil society organisations in the Middle East may further investigate how the evolving role of CSOs impact the dynamics of social change in the region at large and how CSOs themselves evolve because of crisis contexts.
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Installectualism: Public Intellectuals in a Digital World
Shanti, Ehab
The emergence and exploitation of new communications tools gave birth to an entirely new breed of public intellectuals for which existing sociological and theoretical frameworks do not suffice to capture the nuanced yet unrestrained facets of the phenomenon and its transformative capacity. The thesis presents a new theoretical framework by building on a foundation of interdisciplinary inquiry into the major trends that constitute the communications revolution. Respectful of the three most salient features that make this an entirely new phenomenon (i.e., speed, contagion, and superficiality), the thesis advances the concept of Insta-llectualism (e.g., “insta” as in insta-success or Instagram) as a more apt definition of this new breed. The thesis crystalises three major components that constitute this emergent phenomenon using interdisciplinary research methods such as natural language processing (NLP), deep learning (DL), and network analysis. First, intellectuals as social media influencers and digital entrepreneurs. Secondly, how new mediums allowed for positioning and discourse that is more engaged, rapid, and viral, albeit often superficial and occasionally belligerent. Finally, how, through a complex algorithmic system of recommendations and reinforcement learning, machines have galvanised the phenomenon, established ego-centred network chambers, and created clusters of polarised communities.