Search results for "Politics"
showing 10 items of 2266 documents
Spin doctoring in British and German election campaigns: How the press is being confronted with a new quality of political PR
2000
The 1997 British and 1998 German general elections showed striking parallels and distinctive differences in the way Blair and Schroeder delivered their campaigns and defeated long-sitting conservative governments. Of vital importance was a new quality of political public relations called `spin doctoring'. In this, the British Labour Party served as a kind of role model for the German Social Democratic Party. This article traces the origins and different meanings of `spin doctoring' in both countries, distinguishes between media-related and non-media-related spin activities and analyses it against the background of the specific national contexts. The aims and methods of political spin doctor…
Audiovisual Representation in Spanish and European Election Debates
2020
The presence of ever more conflicting stances between Europhiles and Eurosceptics has revealed some audiovisual discourses unknown until now. The fragmentation of inconclusive narrative discourse and staged situations with a clear intent to clash all make it necessary to analyse in detail the role given by the audiovisual media to the European process of democratisation. This study addresses the audiovisual discourse in Spanish public television (TVE) with the intention of discovering how the different topics addressed in debates are dealt with in audiovisual production, and whether those topics have benefited from certain decisions by the production team that are subjective a priori. Using…
From Tian'anmen Square to the global world stage: framing China in the German press, 1986–2006
2011
Beginning with the historical background, the study investigates how two leading German newspapers covered the People's Republic of China from 1986 to 2006. These two decades were characterized by political turmoil and increased trade relations between the two economically powerful countries. The content analysis, which focuses on the amount of coverage, topics, and journalistic forms, attempts to describe how China has been framed over the years. The findings show an increasing significance of the economy on which again and again shadows were cast by political conflicts. Six frames can be observed; some are positive (political cooperation) and some are negative (scepticism with regard to p…
Sensitizing Foreign Language Learners to Cultural Diversity Through Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence
2011
Language and culture are intricately interwoven thus teaching and learning a language inevitabely involves teaching and learning culture of its users. However, this always raises a question about which culture is involved, how the concept is understood and what it means for foreign language learners as well as for native speakers of the language involved. Culture is not monolithic, it comprises a variety of cultural practices that people engage in across a range of social configurations they participate in. The present chapter addresses current concepts of culture in the context of foreign/second language learning, discusses how they relate to foreign language teaching practices (as illustr…
Editorial: Why do We Choose to Address Health 2020?
2013
Recommended Citation: Flahault A, Martin-Moreno JM. Why do we choose to address health 2020? Public Health Reviews. 2013;35: epub ahead of print.What can we predict for 2020? Solar and lunar eclipses? Without a doubt. Climate change? Most likely. Rising sea levels? Signs point to yes. Beyond that, however, in the world of human events, it is best to be cautious. In the field of health and medicine (or anywhere else, for that matter), no one predicted the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. Economists were no more successful in foreseeing financial or economic crises. The pundits did not forecast any of the recent wars, disruptions or even the recent Arab Spring movements-in…
Social Space for Self-Organising: An Exploratory Study of Timebanks in Finland and in the UK
2018
The article examines the challenges to self-organisation and upscaling of alternative economies from the viewpoint of defending and negotiating social space. Timebanks in Finland and the UK are presented as examples, analysing the difference of defending such social space in the contexts of a traditional welfare state (in the case of Finland) and an austerity-driven government with a “Big Society” ideology (in the case of UK). Both systems of government present different kinds of pressures on timebanks, pushing them to a given ontological categories and to action in accordance with pre-defined political goals. This difference, along with timebank reactions and the question of prospects of o…
Troubled Multiculturalisms and Disrupted Secularities: Religion and Social Integration ‘Crises’ in North Western Europe in Comparative Perspective
2013
These quotations give a sense of the range of themes addressed in this book. Since the turn of the millennium, European societies have been shaken by the re-emergence of religion as a contested factor in public life, arguably part of a worldwide pattern, but taking distinctive form in this most secular part of the world (Norris and Inglehart 2011: 85–9). In this introduction, and again in the conclusion, the European cases which lie at the heart of this book will be situated in the context of broader global developments, in order to better understand the politics of religion in today’s religiously diverse but differently secular societies.
Northern Ireland: Sectarianism, Civil Society and Democratic Deepening
2013
The main aim of this chapter is to provide an overview and evaluation of evidence of efforts at peace-building at the level of civil society (rather than political processes, where most analyses have focused) in Northern Ireland, particularly since the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. How successful have attempts, at the level of civil society, by the people of Northern Ireland, the Irish and British governments, the EU and US governments and other actors been in creating community cohesion in a society with a long history of social and political division? In particular, what has been the role of cross-community and religious groups in these efforts? A second aim is to begin to articula…
‘Community Cohesion’ and English Disruptions of the Multicultural Peace: The Northern Riots, White ‘Backlash’ and the ‘Evocation of a Faith Sector’
2013
This chapter takes as its starting point controversies surrounding the concept and policy ‘agenda’ associated with community cohesion, a concept first voiced in the official reports into the riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in May–July 2001. The most influential of these, the ‘Cantle Report’, deliberately framed itself in opposition to the analysis of reports into previous urban disturbances (e.g. Scarman 1981) with their emphasis on ‘systems, process and institutions’, and hence by implication their link to much academic discourse in the social policy field; choosing instead to focus on the interpersonal, on communication between individuals and groups, and on ‘values’, in line with t…
Religion and Civil Society: Theoretical Reflections
2013
Using World Values Survey data, this chapter begins with the global distinctiveness of European societies in terms of both religious vitality and support for the public role of religion. They exhibit a secularity that has been challenged in recent years by an unexpected return of religion as a contentious public issue. The chapter then asks, which theories in the social sciences can help to think constructively through the challenges of religion and civil society in such media-rich, religiously diverse, consumer-oriented secularised societies? It begins with sociology of religion, arguing that while secularisation and rational choice theories shed light on some developments, their conceptua…