Media and Cultural Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

Harnessing scholarship focused on literacy and poverty, in this article we aim to complicate the common understanding of the digital divide. First, we argue that the dominant literature on the digital divide misses broader connections between technological exclusion and broader forms of economic and social exclusion. Accordingly, and following recent qualitative research on the digital divide, we believe future scholarship must examine the complicated relationships between poverty, inequality, and the digital divide and we look to poverty scholarship to understand the complicated and shifting nature of poverty. Finally, we make the case that scholars and practitioners focused on digital literacy programs should pay attention to historical and critical scholarship on education and its role in mediating poverty and fostering social mobility, as it serves digital divide and broadband adoption scholars to understand the ways education processes can either reproduce or set the stage to alter entrenched social realities

- by Amy J Bach and +2
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- Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Literacy, Digital Divide

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

- by Venla Oikkonen
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- American History, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Indigenous Studies

This Special Issue is the first volume in English to focus entirely on this remarkable artist.

- by Andrew Ball
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- Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Contemporary Art

This dissertation provides an examination of the cultural significance of mannequins during the interwar years. As women grew increasingly visible outside of domestic roles subsequent to the First World War and emerging trends for streamlined and practical fashion posed an assault on traditional ideals of femininity, this thesis questions why it was that mannequins became suddenly more realistic than those seen in previous decades.

- by Katie Mason
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Photography, Visual Culture, Surrealism

İletişim olgusu, toplumsal bir varlık olan insan için her dönem önemli bir konuma sahip olmuştur. Tarihin ilk dönemlerinden itibaren doğa ile iç içe yaşayan insan beslenme, barınma ve korunma gibi temel ihtiyaçlarını giderirken iletişim kurmaya çabalamıştır. İletişim her dönem insanların hayatlarını biçimlendirmiş, yaşayışlarına yön vermiştir. Toplumsal dönüşümü hızlandıran ve sosyalleşmeyi biçimlendiren iletişim olgusu, medyanın etkisiyle birlikte daha zengin bir yapıya kavuşmuştur. Geleneksel medyadan yeni medyaya dönüşüm sürecinde iletişim teknolojileri etkisini derinden hissettirmiş ve içinde yaşadığımız dönem “medya çağı” olarak ifade edilmeye başlamıştır. İletişim bugün gerek sokakta, gerek evde izlediğimiz televizyonlarda, gerek sanal ortamda ve gerekse de reel hayatımızda vazgeçemediğimiz olgular arasında yer almaktadır. 23 farklı çalışmadan oluşan bu kitap, altı farklı kategoride bulunan bilimsel çalışmaları kapsamaktadır. Bu kategoriler sırasıyla; “Halkla İlişkiler ve Medya”, “Bilişim ve Medya”, “Sinema ve Medya”, “Sanat ve Medya”, “Kültür ve Medya”, “Siyasal İletişim ve Medya”dır.

- by Ali Murat Kırık
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- Social Psychology, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies

1924 kam Greta Garbo aus Stockholm nach Berlin, um in dem Großfilm der Trianon, DIE ODALISKE VON SMOLNY unter der Regie von Mauritz Stiller mitzuwirken. Kaum weniger spektakulär als der Plot dieses Films war der Skandal, der sich um die Produktion des schwedischen Stars drehte und Garbos deutsche Karriere vorzeitig beendete. Bilder vom Norden erzählt die Geschichte der spannungsvollen Beziehung zweier Filmnationen, die Weltgeltung beanspruchten und mehr als einmal miteinander in Konflikt gerieten.

- by Patrick Vonderau
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Media History, Film History, Media Distribution

In diesem Buch wird erstmals der Stellenwert der audiovisuellen Medien für die Herstellung und Popularisierung von Wissen aufgezeigt. Der historische Rahmen der Studie erstreckt sich dabei von den kinematographischen Bewegungsstudien in Psychiatrie und Physiologie Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Einsatz von Video in den sozialpsychologischen Experimenten der 1970er Jahre. Mit dem Gebrauch von Bewegtbildern zu Zwecken der Kontrolle, Aufzeichnung und Demonstration veränderte sich die gesamte Experimentalkultur der Wissenschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund flexibler medienkultureller Kontexte transformiert sich das Labor zusehends in ein Filmstudio des Wissens, in welchem die Versuchsanordnung am Storyboard entworfen, die epistemischen Gegenstände in Szene gesetzt und die Probanden gecastet werden.

- by Ramón Reichert
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- Epistemology, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies
- by Wibke Straube, PhD
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- Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Media and Cultural Studies

This book chapter, published as part of the edited volume "Empirical Comics Research (Routledge, 2018), puts forward a quantitative approach to the study of comics by introducing a stylistic analysis of a corpus of around 240 graphic... more

Making News at The New York Times is the first in-depth portrait of the nation’s, if not the world's, premier newspaper in the digital age. It presents a lively chronicle of months spent in the newsroom observing daily conversations, meetings, and journalists at work. We see Page One meetings, articles developed for online and print from start to finish, the creation of ambitious multimedia projects, and the ethical dilemmas posed by social media in the newsroom. Here, the reality of creating news in a 24/7 instant information environment clashes with the storied history of print journalism, and the tensions present a dramatic portrait of news in the online world. This news ethnography brings to bear the overarching value clashes at play in a digital news world. The book argues that emergent news values are reordering the fundamental processes of news production. Immediacy, interactivity, and participation now play a role unlike any time before, creating clashes between old and new. These values emerge from the social practices, pressures, and norms at play inside the newsroom as journalists attempt to negotiate the new demands of their work. Immediacy forces journalists to work in a constant deadline environment, an ASAP world, but one where the vaunted traditions of yesterday's news still appear in the next day's print paper. Interactivity, inspired by the new user-computer directed capacities online and the immersive Web environment, brings new kinds of specialists into the newsroom, but exacts new demands upon the already taxed workflow of traditional journalists. And at time where social media presents the opportunity for new kinds of engagement between the audience and media, business executives hope for branding opportunities while journalists fail to truly interact with their readers. Please note, I have posted the full proof here, but please consider buying the book if you make extensive use of it. Thanks a lot.

- by Nik Usher (they/them)
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- Sociology, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies

This PDF includes Chapters 1 and 2 of the innovative text anthology, designed for use in Media Studies courses, especially large lecture courses like "Media and Society."
-- The book combines movies and texts to introduce students to critical media studies. Accessible and readable, the book is well-liked by students. Topics include the Spectacle, Hyperreality, the Global Village, Social/Mobile Media, Capitalism and Counterculture, Surveillance and Privacy, Ecology and the Anthropocene, Media and Science, Media Futures, the Meme (original version from Dawkins), and many others.
-- Upon adoption, I will provide handouts, syllabus, PPTs.
-- Published by Cognella. https://titles.cognella.com/media-environments-9781516521104

- by Barry Vacker
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- Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies
- by Enikő Dácz
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Nationalism, Romanian Studies, National Identity

Si è cercato, attraverso l’analisi delle interviste contenute all’interno della Notte della Repubblica, non solo di analizzare le risposte alle domande che un Paese intero ha posto ai terroristi attraverso la voce di Zavoli, ma anche di rintracciare una contro-narrazione, di tener conto dell’eterogeneità delle voci degli intervistati. Fornire nuove proposte interpretative e modificare la struttura narrativa accettata dall’opinione pubblica su questo periodo è possibile solo attraverso una rilettura che preveda lo spostamento del focus verso le storie individuali. Questa scelta permette di isolare una piccola parte dell’intreccio degli eventi, sottrarli alla cristallizzazione e ricondurli alla difficoltà del reale.

ABSTRACT How does information become power, who gains and who loses, and what are the implications of this process? As much of the information we produce today is available to very few global companies and governments it is crucial to develop new concepts and modify the existing theories on information and power. Drawing on the political economy of communication, sociology and information science literature, this paper introduces an analytical framework to understand the mechanisms through which information is turned into power and their social and cultural implications. Volume is defined as the informational resources – the amount and diversity of information and the people producing it. Control is described through two competing and complementary mechanisms: popularization (information relevant to most people), and personalization (information relevant to each individual person). The main argument is that the ability to transform information into power requires controlling the interaction between the growing volume of people and information by balancing popularization and personalization mechanisms. This framework is then applied to demonstrate Google’s monopoly of knowledge, its PageRank algorithm, and its inevitable commercial and cultural biases around the world.

- by Elad Segev
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- Cognitive Science, Information Technology, Media and Cultural Studies, Personalization

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developed in Europe during the past decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment as well as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. In the article, it is argued that there has been an approximation between the textual features and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual live television, and a model is presented that is supposed to account for these narrative patterns.

- by Göran Bolin
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- Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Television Studies, Narrative

The focus of this comparative, pan-Iberian study is on the negotiation of identity and hybrid cultural production in early twenty-first-century Spain and Portugal. I identify here two subgenres of indie and electronic music scenes and analyze how the handful of musicians that comprise these burgeoning movements are fighting to keep their respective national cultural traditions alive in the face of iTunes, mp3s, and P2P filesharing that have universalized a certain form of pop music which cuts across languages and cultures. The hybrid musicians I interviewed for this project combine flamenco or fado with a variety of indie sounds: rock, pop, power pop, hip hop, trip hop, post punk, spaghetti western, shoegaze, or experimental electronic. The end result is a musical production which simultaneously attempts to voice their nationality as well as their generation. They are the torchbearers of tradition for an Iberian generation raised on The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, The Clash, The Replacements, Nirvana, and The Strokes. Their music references these and other global indie bands alongside those of twentieth century Iberian urban folk icons--Bambino, Camarón de la Isla, Enrique Morente, Amália Rodrigues, Alfredo Marceneiro, and Carlos do Carmo. I have developed a framework with which to contextualize and conceptualize the various issues addressed by these bands: authenticity, globalization, nostalgia, cultural capital, national-gender identity, and the economic crisis plaguing contemporary Europe.

- by Michael Arnold
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- Cultural Studies, Music, Musicology, Media and Cultural Studies

The book focuses on the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation and wars that followed viewed through the comic art in the local and international press. War propaganda and political discourse are examined and placed in the larger historical context of this conflict. The study reveals that Yugoslav cartoonists anticipated, as early as 1984, the disintegration of the country and were forecasting armed conflict in 1989. Using print media and comic art as a primary source of investigation, the author has presented the mental representation of the war as seen in press cartoons, both chronologically and thematically. A representative sampling of some 400 cartoons (out of a database of almost 7’500) and dozens of interviews undertaken with political cartoonists in the 1990s are quoted in the book as a primary source.

- by Goran Jovanovic
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Balkan Studies, International Security, Kosovo

- by Göran Bolin
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- Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Television Studies, Narrative Theory

Millions of people around the world today use digital tools and platforms to create and share sophisticated cultural artifacts. This book focuses on one such platform: Instagram. It places Instagram image culture within a rich cultural and historical context, including history of photography, cinema, graphic design, and social media, contemporary design trends, music video, and k-pop. At the same it uses Instagram as a window into the identities of first truly global generation connected by common social media platforms, programming languages, and visual aesthetics. The book demonstrates how humanistic close reading and computational analysis of large datasets can work together by drawing on the work in Manovich's Cultural Analytics Lab with 16 million Instagram photos shared in 17 large cities worldwide since 2012.

- by Lev Manovich
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- Art History, Media and Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities, Photography

A relação entre a política e a mídia sempre foi muito intensa. E, ao que tudo indica, a tensão entre ambos será cada vez maior, uma vez que a mídia ocupa um espaço mais significativo e passa a exercer um papel protagonista neste processo, ou seja, a mídia passa a tecer decisões e criar sentidos que perpassam a sociedade, deixando de ser apenas enunciadora dos acontecimentos. Com isso, o poder político (e seus atores) entra em crise, pois precisam se adequar aos modos de saber, de ser e de fazer do universo midiático. Nesse contexto, em 2010, uma candidata à Presidência da República, que tem o apoio especial do presidente Lula, aparece como um elemento de afirmação da mulher no lugar de disputa pelo poder.
O objetivo não é refletir sobre a qualidade do que está sendo representado pela mídia, e sim desvendar os processos simbólicos de representação, aquilo que está sendo criado, reelaborado, reaproveitado. Assim, desvendamos as “operações de sentido” colocadas em prática pelos jornais analisados.
No posfácio é feita uma breve leitura do momento que antecede as eleições de 2014, buscando relações com a eleição anterior e atualizando as representações de Dilma Rousseff para 2014.
Este livro é resultado da tese de doutoramento defendida na Unisinos, intitulada “Dilma Rousseff como candidata à presidência: estratégias midiáticas de Zero Hora (RS) e Folha de S. Paulo (RS)”.

- by Mariana Tramontini
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- Communication, Media and Cultural Studies, Journalism, Mass media

Given the prominence of Muslim veils—in particular the hijab and full-face veil—in public discourse concerning the place of Muslims in Western society, we examined their impact on non-Muslims’ responses at both explicit and implicit levels. Results revealed that responses were more negative toward any veil compared with no veil, and more negative toward the full-face veil relative to the hijab: for emotions felt toward veiled women (Study 1), for non-affective attitudinal responses (Study 2), and for implicit negative attitudes revealed through response latency measures (Studies 3a and 3b). Finally, we manipulated the perceived reasons for wearing a veil, finding that exposure to positive reasons for wearing a veil led to better predicted and imagined contact (Study 4). Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

- by Brian D . Earp
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- Religion, Comparative Religion, Cultural History, Sociology

Before the former Yugoslavia was divided by wars, its inhabitants successfully lived side by side in peace. This collection seeks to explain how former neighbors became enemies, with the hope that understanding what drove these peoples apart will help us discover ways for them to coexist in peace again.Contributors analyze political cartoons, psychiatry, the arts, visual media, and law to present a diversity of views on the conflicts in Yugoslavia. While the chapters in this book deal with regional developments, they are not so much focused on politics as they are concerned with how values and attitudes are altered and new identities formed. Thus, this volume goes beyond recent journalistic accounts and should remain relevant for years to come.This book began as a special issue of the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review. Most of the contributors to that issue have revised their chapters for this collection, and new chapters have been added, including one on the recent war in Kosovo. Essays range across all of former Yugoslavia, emphasizing the variability and diversity of ethnic relations throughout its history: Joel M. Halpern & David A. Kideckel (eds.)

- by Goran Jovanovic
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- Caricature (Visual Studies), Media and Cultural Studies, Comics Studies, Kosovo

C’è almeno un aspetto della generale prassi antagonista esercitata dal movimento autonomo italiano degli anni settanta che, ancora oggi, meriterebbe un’attenzione critica svincolata dal ricorrente discorso sui cosiddetti anni di piombo, ed è quello relativo alla pratica-teorica maodadaista, sistematizzata nel 1976 dal collettivo bolognese A/traverso. Tale emergenza
culturale riconfigurò i tradizionali modi della comunicazione politica e produsse effetti, oggi relativamente ignorati, anche nella teoria dell’arte. Nelle seguenti pagine, la tematizzazione di alcune forme di autorappresentazione riconducibili al paradigma maodadaista sarà condotta e accompagnata dall’analisi dei concetti nel titolo anticipati, dei loro incontri realizzati e degli sviluppi presenti e possibili.

- by Danilo Mariscalco
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- Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies

In this article we use the challenge of working with a set of one million manga pages to motivate the need for a computational approach for the exploration of collections of such size, and to explain our particular method that combines digital image analysis and a novel visualization technique. Any reflection on culture begins with an informal comparison between multiple objects in order to understand their similarities and differences. For instance, if we want our analysis to properly reflect the range of graphical techniques used today by manga artists across thousands of manga books, millions of pages in these books, and tens of millions of individual panels, we need to be able to examine details of individual images and to find patterns of difference and similarity across large numbers of images. To do this, we need a mechanism that would allow us to precisely compare sets of images of any size – from a few dozens to millions. We discuss how our method, which combines automatic ...

- by Lev Manovich
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- Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities

This collection of essays examines the relationship between the media and cosmopolitanism in an increasingly fragmented and globalizing world. This relationship is presented from multiple perspectives and the essays cover, amongst other themes, cosmopolitanization in everyday life, the mediation of suffering, trauma studies, and researching cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective.
Some of the essays explore existing research and theory about cosmopolitanism and apply it to specific case studies; others attempt to extend this theoretical framework and engage in a dialogue with the broader disciplines of media and cultural studies. Overall, this variety of approaches generates valuable insights into the central issue of the book: the role played by the media, in its various forms, in either encouraging or discouraging cosmopolitanist identifications among its audiences.

The rise of Boys’ Love (BL) TV series in Thailand over the past decade has sparked critical attention from both academics and journalists alike. Rather than rehashing the trajectory of this development, we analyze Thai popular culture as a contested sexual and political space in which BL performs a paradoxical function within Thailand’s contemporary crisis dominated by a royalist military junta with a penchant for pinkwashing. Through adopting and reappropriating Korean and Japanese BL aesthetics, we argue that BL culture in Thailand recasts such East Asian idolization with its own characteristics, yielding the dual effect of simultaneously bolstering yet challenging Thai discourses on both homosexuality and monarchized military politics.

- by Adam Chen-Dedman (formerly Adam K. Dedman） and +1
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- Cultural Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Thai Studies, Cultural Politics
- by Lyton Ncube Siya
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- Media and Cultural Studies

Cultural examinations focusing on the spheres
of the Fine Arts and popular media forms –
within sociology, gender studies and cultural
studies – have primarily focused on how gender
roles affect the ability to fully participate in all
aspects of culture, or how media representations
have promoted essentialist and heteronormative
narratives and visual imagery. Much of the scholarship
thus far has looked at culture and gender
from a traditional binary perspective (high/low,
male/female, production/reception). However,
the recent emergence of the interdisciplinary
field of queer studies (within the last decade)
and the study of post-internet participatory media
culture(s) offer new conceptual and empirical
terrain to explore gender and sexuality. Radical
feminist and queer media forms challenge us to
reconsider the creation, distribution and reception
of culture, and present opportunities to resist, and
in some cases pervert, dominant narratives, policies
and ways of seeing.

- by Marin Kosut
- •
- Sociology, Cultural Studies, Feminist Sociology, Gender Studies
- by Sungkyu Lee
- •
- Media and Cultural Studies, Cognitive Capitalism

My Master’s Thesis in Library and Information Science from The Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS), Copenhagen, examines the topic: the profile of the “New Public Library”, primarily in Denmark. However, in the text I have made a few comparisons to foreign projects which single themselves out in this context.
The Danish main title “Det Nye Folkebibliotek”, translates into English as “The New Public Library”. My research hypothesis being: the Danish public library has undergone a series of changes, and the changes and developments are ongoing; from being a mere collections of knowledge and materials such as books, to being active, outgoing, far reaching and versatile institutions focusing on the common good of society in a number of ways. Thus my main research question is this: how and by which means do the public libraries act differently now as opposed to earlier? Another relevant question is: which tactics do the public libraries employ in order to keep, and reinforce, their place as necessary cultural institutions in postmodern, postindustrial society today? A time period sometimes called “the Internet Age”?
My empirical research and observations provide evidence that the public library no longer “just” is an institution for the loaning out of books etc. It has become a public domain focusing on lifting up society, educating the population / the users of the library, while at the same time bringing the users together in social contexts as well as cultural ones. In short, the libraries have taken on new functions and tasks, including some of the social functions earlier managed exclusively at local city halls.
In order to study these new tendencies, I have applied two main methods of research: firstly, the case study, for which I have handpicked three public libraries in the metropolitan area of Copenhagen. Libraries which are similar in some ways, yet still have their different traits, although they are located within a limited geographical area. These three focus libraries have served as case studies and examples for my empirical research, active observation, and for my other primary research method: the semi-structured research interview.
My three focus libraries are:
• Biblioteket, Rentemestervej, Copenhagen Northwest
• Ørestad Bibliotek, in the Eastern and newest part of the city
• Blågårdens Bibliotek, in a central part of the city troubled by various social issues
At each library I have conducted interviews with senior staff members, and gathered further information by active observation and photography, trying to catch everyday life with my eyes and camera.
Part of my theory behind this research, has been the writings of Henrik Jochumsen, Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen and Dorte Skot-Hansen, amongst others.
From the latest book by the three aforementioned Danish scientists, authors and professors at RSLIS, I have found great inspiration and motivation, and what is more, scientific terms which capture some of the most vital tendencies of The New Library. These are: Public Domain, Placemaker and Icon.
In this thesis I have done my best to apply these terms, and others, in order to answer my research questions, and thereby make my contribution to unveil why we need the public libraries now, more than ever, and which components, so speak, constitute the profile of the Danish public library of today. Including its new functions, profiles, vision and mission.

- by Jon Hansen
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- Education, Media and Cultural Studies, Library Science, Public Libraries

Review of T'ai Smith's Bauhaus Weaving Theory in The Journal of Modern Craft.

- by Michelle Stephens
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- Critical Theory, Art History, Media and Cultural Studies, Design

La relación entre los medios sociales y la participación política de los jóvenes en diferentes contextos, ha sido materia de estudio en la academia durante la última década. Con el objetivo de examinar si en efecto existía un cambio en las preferencias en el consumo de información sobre política entre los jóvenes, se realizó un estudio en cuatro estados de México durante un proceso electoral nacional en 2015. Este mismo estudio se replicó durante las elecciones presidenciales del año 2018. En términos generales, los resultados obtenidos durante la elección no variaron de manera significativa de un proceso electoral a otro. La presente investigación pretende contribuir al debate académico sobre un fenómeno que en algún momento se consideró emergente, pero que en la actualidad parece encontrarse en un proceso de consolidación.

- by Nick Malek
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- Cultural Studies, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies