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Media Representations (media + representation)
Selected AbstractsThe Dangers of Hanging Baskets: ,Regulatory Myths' and Media Representations of Health and Safety RegulationJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2009Paul Almond The successful enforcement of health and safety regulation is reliant upon the ability of regulatory agencies to demonstrate the legitimacy of the system of regulatory controls. While ,big cases' are central to this process, there are also significant legitimatory implications associated with ,minor' cases, including media-reported tales of pettiness and heavy-handedness in the interpretation and enforcement of the law. The popular media regularly report stories of ,regulatory unreasonableness', and they can pass quickly into mainstream public knowledge. A story's appeal becomes more important than its factual veracity; they are a form of ,regulatory myth'. This paper discusses the implications of regulatory myths for health and safety regulators, and analyses their challenges for regulators, paying particular attention to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which has made concerted efforts to address regulatory myths attaching to its activities. It will be shown that such stories constitute sustained normative challenges to the legitimacy of the regulator, and political challenges to the burgeoning regulatory state, because they reflect some of the key concerns of late-modern society. [source] (RE)PRODUCING A "PERIPHERAL" REGION , NORTHERN SWEDEN IN THE NEWSGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 4 2008Madeleine Eriksson ABSTRACT. Building on theories of internal orientalism, the objective of this study is to show how intra-national differences are reproduced through influential media representations. By abstracting news representations of Norrland, a large, sparsely populated region in the northernmost part of Sweden, new modes of "internal othering" within Western modernity are put on view. Real and imagined social and economical differences between the "rural North" and the "urban South" are explained in terms of "cultural differences" and "lifestyle" choices. The concept of Norrland is used as an abstract essentialized geographical category and becomes a metonym for a backward and traditional rural space in contrast to equally essentialized urban areas with favoured modern ideals. Specific traits of parts of the region become one with the entire region and the problems of the region become the problems of the people living in the region. I argue that the news representations play a part in the reproduction of a "space of exception", in that one region is constructed as a traditional and undeveloped space in contrast to an otherwise modern nation. A central argument of this study is that research on identity construction and representations of place is needed to come to grips with issues of uneven regional development within western nations. [source] HOW CHILDREN PLACE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS IN LOCAL SPACEGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2008Danielle Van Der Burgt ABSTRACT This study examines the ways in which children aged 11 to 15 in six adjacent neighbourhoods in a medium-sized Swedish town place themselves and others in local space. Special attention is given to how they discuss a neighbourhood stigmatized in the public discourse and how children who live in this neighbourhood react to the negative representations of the place in which they live. The study is based on group interviews and maps. The study shows that children construct representations of their own neighbourhoods as "quiet" neighbourhoods and place objects of "trouble" and "danger" somewhere else. It is argued that this is done both in relation to their personal knowledge of the neighbourhood and in relation to local and/or media representations of their own and other neighbourhoods. It is shown that the children are influenced by media representations of a stigmatized neighbourhood, but also that they are not passive reproducers of these discourses and that some of them are able to offer counter-discourses. The children living in this neighbourhood experience difficulties in defending it as the quiet place which they perceive it to be to outsiders because of the negative discourses. [source] Discursive constructions of terrorism in Spain: Anglophone and Spanish media representations of EtaINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2009Roberto A. Valdeón separatista; terrorista; medios de comunicación; noticias; enfoque crítico This paper studies the use of the terms ,separatist' and ,terrorist' in the aftermath of Madrid's 3/11 attacks and their discursive implications from a critical perspective, and attempts to throw some light on whether there are sufficient grounds to substantiate the voices against ,separatist' when reporting on attacks carried out by the militant group Eta that involved killings. The study is divided into three sections, which examine, first, the choice(s) made by Spanish news websites and the intratextual cohesion devices used by the authors, and, secondly, the terms and devices used in British and American news websites. Finally, we shall discuss the ideological implications that might lie beneath the preference for ,separatist' in Anglophone media, and comment on the problems derived from it. En este artículo se analiza el uso de las palabras ,terrorist' y ,separatist' tras los atentados terroristas que tuvieron lugar en Madrid en marzo de 2004, así como sus implicaciones discursivas desde un enfoque crítico. Se comprobará si existen razones para justificar las críticas al uso del término ,separatista' para definir los atentados perpetrados por la banda Eta. El trabajo se divide en tres secciones. En la primera se estudian medios de noticias españoles en internet para establecer qué elementos léxicos se utilizan así como las estrategias de cohesión intratextual presentes. En el segundo se analizan medios de noticias de habla inglesa, tanto británicos como americanos. Por último se comentarán las implicaciones ideológicas del uso de ,separatist' en los medios de habla inglesa así como los problemas que ocasiona. [source] Reforming Leasehold: Discursive Events and Outcomes, 1984,2000JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2001Sarah Blandy This article uses discourse analysis to explore and explain the limits of ongoing efforts to resolve the problems experienced by long leaseholders living in private flats in England and Wales. Attention is focused on the position of leasehold within the three discourses of property law, housing, and housing law, as revealed through the language used in legislation, consultation papers, Law Commission reports, political statements, media representations, and the accounts of leaseholders themselves. The implementation gap between legislative intentions and effects, so often neglected in discussion of housing policy, is explored. The article considers policy and legislation in the light of a metanarrative encompassing all aspects of the multi-occupancy of blocks of flats. [source] Science, Modernity, and the Making of China's One-Child PolicyPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 2 2003Susan Greenhalgh China's one-child-per-couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world-in-crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core,that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one-child policy was "the only solution" to it,as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge-making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself. [source] Making Sense of Violence in the "Badlands" of KenyaANTHROPOLOGY & HUMANISM, Issue 1 2009Bilinda Straight SUMMARY In this article, I situate violent conflict affecting pastoralists in northern Kenya in the context of media representations of violent incidents and the relationship that many Kenyans perceive between such incidents and election politics. I argue that media representations are implicated in cycles of violent conflict through erasure and misrecognition. Most crucially, media representations tend to focus on cultural stereotypes that tacitly legitimate ongoing violence by explaining it away as timeless and cultural. These unidimensional representations can distract from the culpability of political elites and from the role of economic and political disenfranchisement in sustaining violence. They can also mask the ways in which some elites benefit from the propagation of cultural stereotypes even while deliberately engaging in manipulation of ethnic fault lines. Finally, I argue that these already ubiquitous representations hinging on cultural stereotypes contribute to a global politics of marginalization, within which so-called indigenous violence is simultaneously politically expedient, routine, and forgettable. [source] Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 2.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2010April 2010 Front cover caption, volume 26 issue 2 A positive, albeit anthropomorphized, view of badgers appears in this illustration for the original edition of the children's classic Wind in the willows. Badgers are shortly to be culled in north Pembrokeshire as part of a Welsh Assembly Government campaign against bovine TB. Pat Caplan's article in this issue discusses the arguments around the cull and the reasons behind the varying positions held by local people on this issue. Back cover caption Witchcraft and Child Sacrifice Above: a poster (supported by NGOs including Save the Children Uganda) against ,child sacrifice' in Uganda, a current topic of concern both to Ugandans and to anthropologists who have criticized media representations of this issue. Below: a Save the Children poster publicizing the main principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed by 191 countries. These rights include, among others, the rights to: be protected from being hurt or badly treated in any way; not be kidnapped or sold; be protected from being taken advantage of or exploited in any way; not be punished in a cruel or hurtful way. The article by Pat Caplan in this issue discusses a number of recent BBC broadcasts focused on allegations of witchcraft and child sacrifice, and asks what anthropologists have to offer in terms of understanding such topics. Caplan notes that they can not only contribute their knowledge of the occult in many societies, but also contextualize this realm in terms of historical processes and more material concerns. In addition, anthropologists can suggest links between apparently disparate issues and thereby go beyond surface manifestations. While anthropologists have no monopoly on truth claims, they can sometimes offer alternative explanations and show that things are not always the way they first seem. In order to play an effective role as public intellectuals in this regard, anthropologists need to be willing to grapple pro-actively with such matters of public concern, not least by engaging constructively with the media. [source] ,Child sacrifice' in Uganda?ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2010The BBC, anthropologists (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate), witch doctors' This article discusses both several recent BBC broadcasts on allegations of ,child sacrifice' in Uganda and criticisms of the programmes by a number of British anthropologists. It pursues the idea that both the broadcasts and the criticisms raise two sets of crucial questions: the first is in regard to the interpretation of alleged ritual killings in contemporary Africa and the effects of their representation on lay audiences, both non-African and African; the second concerns media representations of Africa and public anthropology. Anthropologists (and indeed scholars from other disciplines such as history) have a lot of expertise to offer in terms of understanding the occult in many societies, including contextualising this realm in terms of historical processes and material concerns and suggesting links between apparently disparate issues. In this way, they can they can sometimes go beyond surface manifestations, offer alternative explanations and show that things are not always the way they first seem. However, in order to play an effective public role in this regard, anthropologists need to be willing to grapple pro-actively with such matters of public concern, not least by engaging constructively with the media. [source] | ||||||||||