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When Australian physicist, Peter Ridd, lost his tenured position with James Cook University, he was called a ‘whistleblower’, ‘contrarian academic’ and ‘hero of climate science denial’. In this article, we examine the events surrounding his dismissal to better understand the role of science communication in organised climate change scepticism. We discuss the sophistry of his complaint to locate where and through what processes science communication becomes political communication. We argue that the prominence of scientists and scientific knowledge in debates about climate change locates science, as a social sphere or fifth pillar in Hutchins and Lester’s theory of mediatised environmental conflict. In doing so, we provide a model to better understand how science communication can be deployed during politicised debates.

Este trabalho debate o surgimento de novas autoridades advindas do processo de midiatização do catolicismo, religião predominante e de forte influência no Brasil. O ponto de partida é o reconhecimento, por parte da Igreja Católica, da importância da adoção de ferramentas e estratégias consolidadas pelos meios de comunicação para desempenhar sua função evangelizadora. Este mesmo processo, no entanto, também motiva a organização de movimentos que se opõem às atualizações promovidas desde o pontificado do Papa Paulo VI. É o caso do blog fratresinunum.com, que utiliza tecnologias digitais de comunicação e adota linguagem típica de veículos de mídia para congregar fieis conservadores e atacar as reformas implementadas pelo Papa Francisco. Além das pesquisas documental e bibliográfica, este trabalho adota estratégias de Análise Textual Discursiva para evidenciar o sentido da argumentação do blog estudado.

Crises times have an uncanny way of giving salience to struggles for democracy. The new coronavirus – also known as COVID-19 – became a global public health issue that stirred other democratic concerns from persons living with disabilities who wanted access to health information for their survival. People living with various types of disabilities have special communication and information needs, some of which require specific technologies, formats and language. The pandemic got people concerned about their safety and survival. This article contextualises and critiques US, Britain and Zimbabwean activists representing persons living with disabilities’ reactions to the manner their public authorities availed COVID-19 health messages to disabled constituencies via mainstream television. It compares how suitable was televised content from US, Britain, Zimbabwean and New Zealand stations for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, before exploring complaints and lawsuits from the disability constituency pertaining to access to COVID-19 health information.

This essay analyses Kenneth Lonergan’s television miniseries Howards End (2017, screenwriter Lonergan, director Hettie McDonald) and the film Margaret (2011, director and screenwriter Lonergan) as ...

Religious pluralisation entails interreligious contacts of different kinds and at various levels. At the same time, an increasing mediatisation affects the perception of and encounter with other re...

This work proposes a theory of ‘celebritisation of politics’. It assumes that celebritisation of politics takes shape once politics and political affairs are celebritised. It argues that in democratic countries, not merely individual celebrity turns into politician (celebrification of celebrity-politician), but also individual politician transmutes into celebrity (celebrification of celebrity-politician). The degree to which these celebrifications take place is likely determined by the country-, the media-, celebrity- and audiences-related factors. The first includes political party, government, media and election systems. The second incorporates mediatisation, representation and commodification of celebrity politician by the media and political economic structures of the media and cultural industries. The third consist of diversification and migration of celebrity politician and his/her personal and professional backgrounds. The fourth is connected with characteristics of the audiences addressed by the media and cultural industries, celebrity politician and political actor and organisation s/he associated with. Focusing on Indonesia’s democracy, this work reveals that establishments of the democratic political, media and election systems lead to celebrification of celebrity-politicians taking place in this country. In facing the parliamentary and local government elections, political parties recruited and commoditised substantial number of celebrities as candidates and represented them as political leaders to captivate the electorates and seek either parliamentary or local government offices. Some of them succeeded in such elections. They were migrating not merely across political parties, but also across the election arenas. Total number of those who turned into celebrity-politicians increased substantially, but none of them successfully came up as prominent politicians.

This paper seeks to show how male politicians can draw on performances of masculinity to appeal to voters. The paper is interested in former UK Prime Minister David Cameron as an example of how performances of masculinity interact with the opportunistic use of populist forms of rhetoric. It argues that while Cameron’s performances of populism are often situated in compatible policy initiatives such as the “big society” (Higgins, 2013; Alexandre-Collier, 2016), we can identify a more sustained use of masculine performance in producing what Moffitt (2016) describes as a “performance” of alignment with the people. Building on work carried out in relation to the mediatisation and personalisation of politics in the last 50 years, this paper shows how gendered performances of political leaders can be seen to mirror changes in society, whilst at the same time exploring how this is can be hazardous. Whilst the ‘new man’ who is a hands-on father might be seen to appeal to Western voters, this paper will show how David Cameron attempted to draw on this performance of masculinity in his first term as UK prime minister, but soon realised that there are limits to such appeal in age of austerity.

This article offers an insight into the relationships between deep mediatisation and the preservation, maintenance and promotion of First Australian cultural heritage by exploring three related themes. First, it provides an up-to-date analysis of the theory of mediatisation from a theoretical perspective, including the leading research and methodological perceptions of mediatisation. Second, it highlights First Australian creativity and innovation in their adoption of new media technologies, using the frameworks of mediatisation to establish sustainable new revenue streams in the global digital economy. Finally, it discusses how mediatisation helps to promote and strengthen community connections by focusing attention on social and cultural affairs in a First Australian context.

This article examines modal resources in the mediatised discourse of social transformation in Nigeria with a view to showing how they are strategically used to code interpersonal meanings for enhanced and impactful delivery of messages of social transformation in the nation. Data for the study comprises texts on aspects of social transformation campaigns in Nigeria in the context of democracy, anti-corruption crusade, insecurity and domestic violence compiled as small corpora. The data comprises texts produced by government and non-governmental actors consisting of speeches, radio commentaries, jingles, printed texts, interviews, tweets and online newspaper comments and covers the period from March 2013 to March 2018. The five-year span was informed by the wide gamut of negative realities in the nation during the time frame which led to increased mediatisation of social transformation messages. Corpus-assisted critical discourse approach was employed for data analysis, using Fairclough’s (1989, revised 2015) dialectical relational approach, the corpus linguistic tool of Antconc, chi-square test on R-Studio and normalised relative frequencies. Data analysis revealed that the different participants in the discourse characteristically used different modal resources to reflect their power on the one hand and resistance on the other and to capture the intensity of their views and feelings on the actions required for Nigeria to experience genuine social transformation. The study concludes that even though the discourse is largely ideational, modal resources are deployed for emphasising the urgency and seriousness of the issues in the ideational contents of the discourse.

A partir d’une enquete de terrain monographique dans un village francais, ce texte montre ce qu’une innovation politique doit a la position sociale de ceux qui la portent. La campagne electorale, puis la mise en place d’une gestion municipale collegiale et participative, constitue a bien des egards une opportunite de se distinguer pour une petite bourgeoisie culturelle. Bien que ses discours pronent une autre facon de faire de la politique, les logiques sociales maintiennent malgre tout a l’ecart les classes populaires.

Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, and Barack Obama. How have ‘traditional’ politicians like ‘Mutti Merkel’, who embody the opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as ‘mediatisation’, ‘personalisation’, and ‘celebritisation’ explains the emergence of charismatic media personalities, but fails to explicate the success of ‘conventional’ politicians within systems of mediatised politics structured according to a celebrity logic. Based on an analysis of newspapers and both historical and contemporary political actors, this article argues that celebrity politics produced an antithesis, the ‘anticelebrity’. This political figure constitutes an ‘authentic’ alternative to the supposed mediatised ‘superficiality’ of celebrity politicians, but could not have the same appeal without the latter superficiality to contrast itself with. The text constructs an ideal type of the anticelebrity figure within different political and media systems, distinguishing between ‘reactionary anticelebrities’ and ‘natural anticelebrities’. By focussing on the anticelebrity concept, the article shows the photographic negative of the celebrity politician, which also enables us to see the contours of the notoriously blurred phenomenon of celebrity more distinctly. (Less)

The Global South is a postcolonial imagined community that bears the potential to imagine powerful south-south solidarity between the struggles for decoloniality of diverse populations across the world. To prepare our field’s pan-global future, this year-in-review overrepresents literature on gender, sexuality and language from/on the Global South. This decolonial move aims to notice and promote southern tactics of resistance, southern epistemologies and southern theories and evaluate what can be learnt if we look southward on our way forward. Some literature from the Global North will be considered too. The review is structured using three overlapping foci: (1) embodied and linguistic resistance, (2) mediatisation and scale and (3) fragile masculinities. I conclude by suggesting that our research should stay locally situated and globally radical.

The article is devoted to the coverage of issues of religion and spiritual life of society in the modern media space. The authors note that the media and religion, being autonomous entities, are in a complex interaction, in which one can find both features of cooperation and competition. At the same time, in the media epoch, religious confessions recognize the capabilities of the media for adequate and effective preaching. In contrast, the media often make religion a target of scanning and broadcasting. Mediatisation of religious discourse is of particular importance in the post-Soviet space. To study this phenomenon, materials from a high-quality domestic publication “Izvestia” were used. It is becoming obvious that Russian society is now going through an active process of the formation of religious ideas, carried out mainly through the media. It can be concluded that most of the publications have an obvious newsbreak and are tied to specific events or dates based on the thematic variety of materials on the religious agenda. Although some topics about the Religious processes are covered in the newspaper, it should be highlighted a number of articles that addressed to journalists to create a more balanced and summarized presentation of the Religious agenda. Firstly, it is expanding the range of denominations covered by the newspaper to form an objective Religious landscape; secondly, it is the increase in the number of analytical materials on the presented topic that will lay the foundation for the analysis of religious processes by society.

Drawing on the concepts of mediatisation and celebrification, this paper analyses how the Nobel Prize is used as a proxy of excellence by the ‘Big Three’ university rankers and top-ranked u...

Pressure from the media affects the daily work of bureaucrats and induces ‘media stress’, with potentially critical effects on the quality of public policy. This article analyses how bureaucrats’ daily work has been adapted to the media (‘mediatised’) and which groups of bureaucrats experience the most media-stress. Reporting the results of an original and large-scale survey (N=4,655) this article demonstrates that levels of media-stress vary among different groups of civil servants. In turn, its analysis suggests that media-stress is more pronounced in the Netherlands than in Norway, is more concentrated in the lower rungs of administrative hierarchies and is related to media pressures on organisations. By untangling the underlying logic of mediatisation and the dynamics of media-stress, this article makes an important contribution to extant scholarship and also provides a series of practical recommendations.

Decision-making in public bureaucracies should be guided by rules and formal procedures, securing predictability, impartiality and fair decisions. Studies show that public bureaucracies are highly mediatised – but knowledge about media impact on political outcomes is scarce. In this article, we study if, how and why media affect agendas, resource allocation and case decisions within public bureaucracies. Empirically, we apply a mixed method approach to the case of Norway, utilising a comprehensive survey among civil servants in ministries and agencies, as well as in-depth interviews with civil servants and political leaders. The results clearly support the notion that media can influence agendas, resource allocation and decision-making in ministries and agencies. When media pressure and broad public support build up, action is particularly taken when the issues are deemed important by political actors, suggesting that both push and pull forces are involved when media influence public bureaucracies.

Although radio has historically been the most widespread media in Ghana and much of Africa, little is known about its news-making practices in political news. Given the rise of mediated politics in...

This article discusses the discursive strategies used in negotiating the social transformation agenda in Nigeria. Data for the study comprise advocacy texts that touch on anti-corruption crusade, entrenchment of democratic values and security of lives and properties. The data were drawn from speeches and jingles circulated by institutional agencies on television and radio stations and covered the period July 2013 to July 2018. The five-year span was informed by the wide gamut of negative realities in the nation at the time frame which led to increased mediatisation of social transformation messages in the nation. Fairclough’s (2015) dialectical relational approach constitutes the theoretical anchor for the study. Data analysis reveals that the discourse participants deploy framing, legitimation, rhetorical questions, linguistic nativism, metaphorisation of social transformation acts and accentuation of the repercussions of negative actions. The paper concludes that even though the discourse of social transformation in Nigeria is hinged on the desire to impact the society, it also reflects the power disequilibrium in the society which privileges the government and reflects in the construction of Nigerias problems and its solutions as citizen-oriented.

‘Passages of Inscription’ arises from the making of my film ‘UNFOUND’, commissioned to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme which took place during the First World War in 1916. Two questions concerned me in the making of the film: how could my approach to such a historically burdened subject avoid the closures of institutional historical memory and how could I deal then with the difficulty of any adequate representation. My answer was to frame the landscape of the Somme in the present through a series of durational image and sound episodes which eschew narrative development and denoument, instead focusing upon incidental details of daily life, seasonal change and industrial presences which encroach upon the Somme cemeteries. Stitched into these episodes are still images of text inscriptions on individual grave headstones, which themselves require constant re-engraving against the erosion of time. This structure is intended to give the viewer ‘breathing space’ to reflect upon the continuous production of multiple histories infused with subjective experience. This essay assembles a selection of personal writings and commentary on mediatisation of the war, written during the making of the work. The writing moves between sites connected to WW1 in southern England and the landscape of the Somme. Through an intertwining of printed text, carved inscription and photographic images, the style of the essay proposes that processes of memorialisation are produced through media which are themselves intrinsically subject to interruption, lacunae and illegibility. The essay concludes by suggesting that it is the material process of re-inscription itself which expands contextual reference and significance.

Smoking is the inhalation and exhalation of fumes of burning tobacco and other dangerous nicotine substances that endanger health. It is also a learned behaviour capable of causing addiction. The study examined civic engagement through digital media on health risks of smoking among drivers in Onitsha, Anambra State. The study focused on drivers of registered Mass Transit companies: Eastern Mass Transit and Onitsha South Mass Transit. The study was anchored on two theories: grounded theory of smoking decision which explains pre-and-post effects of smoking quitting, and mediatisation theory which examines the long-term structural change in the role of media in culture and society. The study adopted a survey of drivers of select Mass Transit companies in Anambra State. This was to ensure that these drivers were studied in their varying work atmospheres concerning smoking. Findings of the study showed that drivers of both companies make effective use of digital media for information on the dangers of smoking while driving and erring drivers are adequately penalised. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that media messages on the dangers of smoking tobacco or other dangerous substances on the wheel should be sustained. It equally recommended psychological tests on drivers before recruitment.

This book chronicled the representation of South African elections on television news. A nuanced form of mediatisation framed the elections on international channels even though journalists sought narrative depth to explain the complex South African voting patterns and democracy. Locally, the liberation narrative restricted information about the elections, resulting in avoidance of important and controversial information that could have developed a broader picture of the elections. Citizens and political leaders as sources were missing from the later election years on all channels in favour of pundits, a symptom of the swing towards media logic in mainstream political journalism worldwide. As the concluding chapter, it highlights these elements and compiles three suggestions in order to improve, enhance, and challenge the status quo in political journalism.

This chapter has three main objectives: first, to ascertain where Jamaicans obtain political information and second, to identify which of these sources are viewed as trustworthy. Thirdly, the study probes the mediatisation of politics and how this impacts the quality of information that is generated and shared. A key premise investigated is the relationship between information sources and knowledge production. The data were obtained from a national survey among the Jamaica’s voting age population, N = 910. The research shows that traditional media is the preferred source of political information and is the most trusted by Jamaicans, and that Jamaicans rely on social media sources for political information originating outside of the country. Social media is being used mostly by youth than adults, and by those with University level education.

Purpose This paper aims to focus on the re-presentation of the cultural phenomena hygge in Denmark and fika in Sweden in destination branding and address the inevitability of their essentialization through the branding process. Design/methodology/approach Three relevant semi-structured interviews with destination marketing organisation’s employees were conducted, as well as a content-based analysis of three social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). A total of 465 posts in total were analysed (140 Facebook posts, 109 Twitter posts, 216 Instagram posts). Findings This study demonstrates how, when communicated through social media, intangible cultural assets are transformed into tangible elements. It explains why the re-presentation and place branding processes necessarily simplify and essentialize the destination. Originality/value Destination branding scholars have traditionally criticised the flattening and essentialization of culture in destination branding and have called for a more nuanced approach to presenting a destination. This paper situates destination branding as a process that necessitates the manipulation of the presentation of the destination, which inevitably essentializes the place; this is intended. Critical destination branding researchers need to rethink their criticisms and acknowledge the inherent essentialization goal of destination branding.

In this chapter, we investigate the relations of political parties with established mass media and social media. In order to reflect parties’ own perceptions on this topic, we quote opinions from various party members. Though rarely used, such a perspective provides interesting insight into the mediatisation process, showing the media’s profound influence on Polish politics. We also focus on the role played by the media in the process of building trust in politicians and political parties. We want to present how politicians perceive the problem of trust under the conditions of an advanced mediatisation process and how media influence its relationship with voters.

This commentary article focuses on the emergence of synthetic media-computer-generated content that is created by employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. It discusses three of the most notable current forms of this emerging form of content: deepfakes, virtual influencers, and augmented and virtual reality (collectively known as extended reality). Their key features are introduced, and the main challenges and opportunities associated with the technologies are analysed. In all cases, a crucial change is underway: reality (or, at least, the perception thereof) is seen as increasingly less stable, and potential for manipulation is on the rise. In fact, it transpires that personalisation of (perceived) reality is the likely outcome, with increasing societal fragmentation as a result. Mediatisation is used as a broad-ranging metatheory that explains the permeation by media of everyday affairs to explain the degree of impact that synthetic media have on the society. In this context, it is suggested that we search for new and alternative criteria for reality that would be capable of accounting for the changing nature of agency and impact in today's world.

This chapter examines the potential corelation between technologically led changes in media ecologies and changes in mediated mobilisation compared to the traditional forms of citizen mobilisation, namely political protest mobilisation. Based on previous empirical research on the Aganaktismenoi movement (Zestanaki, 2019), I investigate the effect this new form of mass mobilisation has on participants' political sophistication with an emphasis on the measurable indication or political efficacy, a recognised political communication tool. I argue that mobilising large crowds within an ideological void enabled by the heavily mediatised current environment is becoming a challenging democratic endeavour. This approach opens new possibilities for a multiparadigm, more advanced research on media sociology and political communication, from a critical intellectual perspective.

Accounts of near-death experiences (NDE) are a subcategory of the growing beguilement with spectacular death in the academic and popular imagination. Memoirs by Christians, atheists, physicians, children, and ordinary people who claim to have hovered above their brain-dead bodies; toured heaven and hell; met with divinities, demons, and/or the deceased loved ones; and returned to life are bestsellers, and subjects for documentaries, films, and the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Focused on Western iterations of the phenomenon, scientific researchers propose biological materialist rather than supernaturalist-based explanations for NDE. Highly profitable, NDE accounts have been folded into the consumer–entertainment–celebrity industrial complex. Using content analysis of published interviews and memoirs, the chapter presents a study of 37 celebrity NDE, including Sharon Stone, Ozzy Osbourne, Jane Seymour, George Foreman, Christopher Reeve, Debra Winger, Tony Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Cash, and Tracy Morgan. The chapter investigates how celebrity NDE (1) features compare with academic findings; (2) are framed as transformative experiences, mythic quests; (3) are part of the mediation/mediatisation, commercialisation/commodification, re-ritualisation, and specialisation of death that are features of the age of ‘spectacular death’; (4) heighten the spectacularity of death, the dead, the undead, celebrity, and celebrity afterlives; and (5) challenge binaries established by modernity.

Not so many years ago, it was commonplace to describe death and grief as so-called ‘tabooed topics’ – something to be kept behind closed doors and not to be put on display or paraded in public. According to many researchers, this was the age of forbidden death and hidden grief. Something quite extraordinary has happened since then. In recent years – in social life, within popular culture and social research – grief has re-surfaced as a topic of much publicity and debate. If the 1990s was the decade of ethics and the 2000s was the decade of anxiety (in the post-9/11 world), then the 2010s is the age of grief and memorialisation. Grief is no longer a privatised and socially sequestrated phenomenon. Rather, grief, in many ways, has become spectacular. In this chapter, the authors document and discuss three main trends in the contemporary culture of ‘spectacular grief’: individualisation/singularisation, professionalisation/commercialisation and memorialisation/mediatisation. Firstly, in an age of individualisation and ‘singularity’ (Andreas Reckwitz’s notion), death and grief increasingly become a personal affront, an attack on the very core of being, that we individually have to deal with. Second, following this, processes of professionalisation/commercialisation have meant that grief is also increasingly becoming an ‘industry’ that is promoted and handled by a variety of interest groups supposed to help individuals cope with death and grief. Thirdly, in a culture of expressivity, grief is now an emotion that we are expected to share with, and show to, others through new commemoration and memorialisation practices, some of which are particularly connected to the rise of new information technologies and social media.

This article deals with the following question: How can Latin American media and communication theories help explain the mediatisation of populism and democracy? The article has a twofold goal: a) it contributes to the study of media, populism and democracy in the context of Latin America; b) it aims to raise awareness outside Latin America about the richness of Latin American media and communication theory for the analysis of the mediation of populism and democracy. The article introduces and engages with a variety of theories from Latin America that deal with globalisation, dependency, cultural imperialism, hybridity, and mediation, and reviews their potentials for explaining the mediatisation of populism and democracy. Theories or models of globalisation, dependency and cultural imperialism, and hybridity and mediation are reviewed analytically, as are some of their core critiques as drawn from various strands of thought, with emphasis on incorporating elements of populism theory. As interest grows in both academia and the media towards the ways in which populism is shaping the social and political spheres in the West, partly encouraged by the recent surge of populist leaders in Europe and the United States, past and current experiences and evaluation of Latin American populism can be constructive in understanding the phenomenon and its implications for communication, media and culture. This study finds that, following political shifts in the twenty-first century, Latin American populism represents a paradigm that is articulated to an important degree through communicative specificities and which can add analytical rigor to competing media and communication theories in the region.

Sport has had a symbiotic relationship with television for decades, as it has always been one of the most marketable visual products for the medium. The new visual media technologies that have been introduced since the 1970s have altered this relationship greatly by incrementally commodifying sport at each step. One of the most crucial aspects of this relationship is globalisation, which initially depended on satellite television and took sport’s hyper-commodification to a whole new level. Turkey, which went through a massive transformation to a neoliberal rule following a bloody coup d’etat in 1980 that practically razed the whole social and political structure, has since become an important example of the roles of sport and television in an aggressively neoliberal setting. This chapter aims to explain why televised sport has had a remarkable role in the sociopolitical transformation of Turkey since the 1980 coup.

This article analyses the dynamics of communication, specifically with regard to the significance of visualisations in urban planning between the two competing political regimes of East and West Germany in divided Berlin (1945–1989). The article will demonstrate the ways in which planners on either side of the Iron Curtain were confronted with matters unique to their own political contexts and conditions for public communication, as well as how they faced similar challenges in fields of urban renewal and negotiating public participation. The post-war decades in Berlin were marked by strong planning dynamics: large-scale reconstruction after WWII and the ‘showcase character’ of political confrontation and competition. In this context, new strategies of communicating urban planning to the public were developed, such as large-scale development plans, public exhibitions and cross-border media campaigns. Paradigmatic shifts during the mid-1970s generated new discourses about urban renewal and historic preservation. The new focus on small-scale planning in vivid and inhabited inner-city neighbourhoods made new forms of communication and public depiction necessary. In the context of social and political change as well as growing mediatisation, planning authorities utilised aspects of urban identity and civic participation to legitimise planning activities. The article traces two small-scale planning projects for neighbourhoods in East and West Berlin and investigates the interrelation of visual communication instruments in public discourses and planning procedures during the 1980s, a period that prominently featured the new strategy of comprehensive planning. Furthermore, the article highlights the key role of micro-scale changes in the management of urban renewal along both sides of the wall and the emergence of neighbourhood civil engagement and participation.

Coming out of Thurston’s experience with the writers’ collective and independent small press Information As Material, this chapter points toward five things. First, how we might distinguish certain kinds of self-publishing by the way in which they problematise the subject-status of the self at work. Second, how the digital mediatisation of writing technologies outside the context of the language arts is casting some kind of technical foreshadow in front of new writing generally. Third, what might be interesting about recontextualising our experiences of mediatised media as literature or art. Fourth, how those aesthetic possibilities beg the question, ‘but what kind of realism is it?’ And finally, how the critical frameworks with which we attend to acts of publishing need to shift from analysing objects to analysing processes.

This chapter contrasts two theories of communicative democracy and tries to establish which one better describes politics in the age of mass digital media. It begins with a discussion of deliberative democracy and describes how Habermas’ normative ideals were first applied to political communication on the internet. Having established issues with this early application, and considered reasons for them, this chapter moves on to an alternative: the violent struggle to signify political power through language wars. It describes several examples of political signification in 2019 and considers the role that mediatisation may have played in shaping that discourse. Finally, the chapter analyses the potential for logical equivalence between the digital and political systems. It seems likely that the logics of digital differentiation establish precedents that are at odds with the norms of analogue politics.

Mediatisation is the term used to refer to the pervasion of media in all areas of life and the accompanying changes in communication content and behaviour. This contribution explores the question of what this process of mediatisation means for documentation in early childhood centres, and the consequences emerging from this. The focus here is, in particular, on digital media, which are currently also being employed in documentation processes. Two examples will be used to illuminate these areas: first, the digital portfolio, and second, documentation on social network sites. The analysis makes clear that digital methods of documentation are attractive in many respects: because of their intuitive operation, they can be integrated simply and efficiently into daily life in the early childhood centre; the various technical features are combined in such a way that they enable a clear overview of the documentation; they give children and parents opportunities to participate, and teachers who have an affinity with digital media often enjoy using them. All these advantages lead us to expect a rise in the quality of documentation work. Digital documentation appears to be a perfect form of documentation—a super-documentation. The use of digital methods of documentation may lead to a perfect documentation which, however, by sacrificing children’s freedom and immediacy, may lead to the comprehensive monitoring of children (and adults).

This article discusses how democratic evaluation can manage threats to democracy, democratic renewal, and the mediatisation of public policy and governance. It considers the readiness of five democratic evaluation orientations to deal with current threats and discusses how to develop them. It demonstrates that democratic evaluation is poorly prepared to manage current threats to democracy or the mediatisation of public policy. Progressive evaluation is the only approach offering some new keys to addressing certain current threats and challenges. The other orientations have some capacity to manage threats to democracy and support democratic renewal, but need further development. The article suggests that democratic evaluation could be a constructive tool for maintaining and developing democracy in an increasingly polarised and mediatised society if evaluators gain knowledge of threats to democracy, democratic transition, and democratic renewal and, informed by mediatisation and democracy research, develop the necessary awareness and competence to deal with these challenges.

The chapter is a commentary which discusses and offers perspectives on the nine previous chapters of the book. First, the general tendencies of standardization within Europe are discussed, and then the discussion is broadened to the present volume. Britain concludes that the collection has both alerted us and sensitised us to a range of sites where we should investigate obsolescence-in-progress beyond the usual, but essential, variationist descriptions of dialect structure from sociolinguistic interviews. Furthermore, it is argued that the volume has enriched our understanding of the broader sociolinguistic context in which obsolescence occurs, demonstrating clearly how language attitudes and ideologies; local discourses about dialect and place; the use of dialect in the media, older and newer; and stylisations and performances of dialect interact with actual dialect use. Finally, the chapters together demonstrate how sociolinguistic change—social changes which have knock-on implications to the sociolinguistic and language ideological order, such as geopolitical reconfigurations, mediatisation, and so on—affects the terminal stages of linguistic change. The commentary concludes by stating that even though Denmark may not be celebrated for its dialect diversity, the volume demonstrates how productive it can be for our understanding of linguistic change to examine communities where diversity is more moribund.

La dinámica del capitalismo ha sido poco investigada en los estudios dedicados a pensar la mediatización. Este artículo pretende contribuir a llenar algunos vacíos tomando en cuenta una perspectiva crítica de la economía política en el análisis de los procesos de mediatización. El interés está centrado en analizar las condiciones bajo las cuales se practica el periodismo actual y cómo estas condiciones alteran la mediatización de la política. El artículo sostiene que el entorno neoliberal en el que operan los medios está reconfigurando el papel del periodismo: en lugar de expresar preocupaciones críticas y orientarse para representar el interés público, o las perspectivas de la sociedad civil y otras instituciones de rendición de cuentas, existe una gran presión para que los medios trabajen como agentes de colonización interna del neoliberalismo. Se argumenta que, como productores de significado, los medios refuerzan y naturalizan las políticas neoliberales en beneficio de la cosmovisión de las élites políticas y económicas que promueven dichas políticas.

Cities have become stages for (inter)national conflicts over political and religious identity, democratic values and ownership of place. These 'glocal urban conflicts' challenge local actors to respond immediately and effectively in ways that prevent escalation and strengthen democratic relations. The theory of agonistic democracy provides a valuable model that celebrates difference and inclusiveness to foster democracy. There is, however, little understanding of how these agnostic ideals are practiced in rapidly unfolding situations. This article provides a case study to further our understanding of dealing with conflicts where global tensions are enacted at the street level. It proposes an interpretative approach that brings into focus how a decentred network of local professionals practice agnostic democracy in action. The local government of The Hague was challenged to 'govern the global locally' when young Muslims waved flags allying with ISIS on the streets of the Schilderswijk neighbourhood. A series of local demonstrations required appropriate responses in a highly mediatised conflict. The analysis provides three 'critical moments' that function as a lens to study governance practices that underscore diversity as a political resource. Practices of 'governing meaning' and 'governing the street' addressed concerns about security, ownership and local grievances.城市已经成为围绕政治和宗教认同、民主价值观和地方所有权的全国性（国际性）冲突之舞台。这些“全球地方性的城市冲突”促使地方行动者立即有效地作出反应，防止其升级并加强民主关系。论争民主理论提供了一个崇尚差异和包容性以培育民主精神的有价值模式。然而，如何在快速发展的形势中实现这些论争理想，学界却鲜有理解。本文提供了一个案例研究，以进一步了解如何在街道层面处理全球紧张局势带来的冲突。文章提出了一种解释方式，重点关注分散化的当地专业人士网络如何用行动来实践论争民主。当年轻的穆斯林在史欧德斯维克 (Schilderswijk) 街区的街道上挥舞着与 ISIS 结盟的旗帜时，海牙地方政府面临着“在当地治理全球”的挑战。一系列地方示威需要在高度斡旋的冲突中作出适当的反应。本文的分析给出了三个“关键时刻”，透过这些“镜头”，可研究将多样性作为政治资源的治理实践。“意义治理”和“街头治理”实践应对了对安全和所有权的担忧，也应对了地方不满。.

The article discusses an issue of intertextuality of “pictures” in Palaeolithic art, and colour as its constituent. An important concept in these regards appeared to be that of an open and interdisciplinary approach towards an image, derived from the anthropology of images. In my opinion, essential is an “acting” of an image, based on so called “interimaginal relations”. It is legitimate when referring to prehistory, as numerous images reveal interpenetrating traces of other representations. Either consciously or unconsciously, some solutions had been used repeatedly, copying other representations, including selection of colours as a kind of stereotype deeply rooted in cultural memory. In cave “pictures” there were one or two main colours used, rarely three or even four. It has been acknowledged that the most important features of Palaeolithic “pictures” were movement, colour, especially expressed by a contrast of black and red or yellow, and also an illusion. They were also interrelated with a sound. The world of colours of contemporary people was a significant constituent of cultural meanings and of images “acting” in “mediatisation” of important existential contents between past and present.

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood educat...

The mediation process is a relatively new form in the legal treatment of legal disputes in Albania. The mediation process is the forerunner of solving a conflict between the parties, and unites them for a unanimous request to the court. The media as the fourth power plays a powerful role in addressing many social and state processes. The role of the media in the overall development of society has already been highlighted, and today in the era of information technology, of course, the media for such delicate issues plays a huge role. The purpose of the article is to highlight the role of media treatment or mediatisation of the mediation process as well as the analysis of the consequences of this process. Mediated cases mediated in the media are accompanied by various reactions, both from the official side of the institutions, which are directly or indirectly affected, but also from the public opinion. Like the nature of legal conflicts, social conflicts are also endless. Often legal complications are even worse because of disagreements between individuals, even when they pursue the same goal.

Purpose The way in which criminologists understand, contextualise and theorise around the mediatised world has raised some critical new questions. The purpose of this paper is to report on qualitative research which looks at the ways in which some forms of social media are utilised by gang members. Gang research in the main is predicated on the notion that gangs are deviant products of social disorganisation; however, there is little written on the “specific” forms of expression used by those associated with gangs. Design/methodology/approach The lyrical content of three music videos has been analysed using narrative analysis. Findings Music videos have been used as a form of expression for decades. More recently in some cases they have been used as a tool to send threats, promote gang culture and flaunt illegal substances, which is fairly a new concept, in the UK at least. Social media and music videos are not the sole reason why there has been a rise in violence amongst young people; however, this paper aims to further explore some of these notions. Originality/value The authors suggest that this form of expression presents challenges in the understanding of gang activity in a mediatised world. The intention is not to further criminalise young people, but to seek understanding and explore the phenomenon of music videos and its position their gang research.

Since the genesis of democracy in South Africa, religious broadcasting has constituted an important national pedagogical site for presenting the state’s vision the character and function of...

Received 1 August 2018. Accepted 18 September 2018. Published online 30 September 2018. Siyakholwa is the first children’s multi-faith programme series to be screened on South African television. The programme foregrounds teaching about “religion, religions, and religious diversity” (Chidester, 2008, p. 278). This paper conceptualises Siyakholwa as a product of the 2003 Religion in Education policy, and consequently examines the extent to which the constitutional ideal of religious pluralism is mediated through the content of the programme. This paper argues that the example of Siyakholwa presents an opportunity to understand the ways in which religion in public education has been defined and redefined through the constitutional, cultural, and transformational aspirations of the post-apartheid state.

This paper investigates representations of castrated male characters in Chinese martial arts films. In my data, without exception, the castrated kungfu practitioners are villainous, powerful and extremely tenacious. After careful examination of the characterisations of these sexually unorthodox male martial artist characters in mainstream films, I find a strikingly simplistic equation that links the castrated male characters and their visual and linguistic representations. While the castrated males are some of the most physically capable martial arts practitioners in this genre, they are stereotypically presented as lacking masculinity, and in turn both feminised and dehumanised. Through layers of mediatisation, the fictional castrated male characters are shown to be freaks and monsters by being linguistically and visually queered.

The growth of PR in Scandinavia is linked both to the mediatisation of politics and to the decline of corporatism. Studies in Sweden and Norway suggest that one consequence of these changes is the increasing number of politicians who find new careers as lobbyists in the private sector. In this study, we have constructed a data set of all members of the Danish Parliament who have left politics from 1981 to 2015 (n = 613) and identified the number and type of job positions they have taken up subsequently (n = 1,094). We find that, especially from the 1990s, we can register revolving door activity. Still, 89 per cent of all the registered job positions fall outside of lobbyism. 11 per cent of the job positions fall within the wider field associated with the emerging field of policy professionals (including lobbyism), while lobbyism on its own accounts for two per cent of the job positions.

The phenomenon,Dimas KanjengTaat Pribadi , is unique issues that have shocked in the Indonesian public because of his unbelievable activities (duplicate the amount of money).This metode of the research is textual;focus onTaat Pribadi news,doubling the money with the religion modus. Mediatisation theory explains about howTaat Pribadi work from the mediatisation, what things appear from the religion ,ediatisation , and how the logic of media work in this case (form knowledge) to the public.The findings of this study are mediatisation religion led to new understanding of the public that led to the substitution of the role of religion and peeps quast-religious.The logic of the media make the knowledge from public that the reporting on this case a shift is no longer focused on the case of deception,but tend to focus on the dramatization of the media or in other words experiencing commoditization of media content,as well as the logic of the media creating a privateTaat Pribadi as a new celebrity. Keywords: Mediatization, religion, logic media, commodification, and dramatization media

This article analyses media discussions around three film projects of the 2000s and 2010s, interpreting the figure of field marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from the point of view of Bourdieuan social aesthetics and civil religion. Mannerheim is a central part of Finnish civil religious concentration of symbols—that is symbols associated to the Finnish nation. This article analyses different actors’ strategies of classification, legitimisation, de-legitimisation, and evaluation in relation to the three film projects. These socio-aesthetic strategies reflect the positions and competitive environment of the Finnish media field. Civil religious concentration of symbols and their connected aesthetic practices work as resources for media power and for classificatory power, and media competition creates a new kind of visibility for these civil religious symbols.