Gran Bretaña

This thesis examines the role of the mass media in international relations and discusses processes of national image building. Its focus is on the way the press covers events, topics and issues relating to a foreign country, using Germany’s newspaper coverage of Mexico as an example. Although a great deal has been published on personal and advertising brand image building, the literature on national image building is sparse. A range of literature on image building and national identity and the role of the media was reviewed to provide a suitable theoretical framework for the empirical research to follow. Communication developments, e.g. live television and the internet, have transformed diplomatic practices. Nation states, reacting to the input they receive from the media, adjust and redefine their communications policies accordingly.

Gran Bretaña

This doctoral contribution borrows from the discursive practices of transnationalism and diaspora in order to articulate the concept of “transnational audiences” in the United States. The project identifies transnational audiences as formed by individuals and families whose lives straddle two national territories. It draws on the traditions of cultural studies and reception analysis as a strategy to explore the relation between media use and novel experiences of migration in a context of contemporary gl obalization. This conceptual background is the result of empirical research conducted in Los Angeles which investigated the television news reception of 67 informants of Mexican origin during three months in 2006. Relying on a range of qualitative research methods based in the domestic settings of the participants, the project found high levels of interests across a variety of news occurring in Los Angeles, the US, Mexico and further afield. During interviews, television news-viewing sessions and in daily written accounts, respondents constantly conveyed the idea of being directly impacted by a wide vari ety of events and developments in the news, regardless of geographic proximity.

Gran Bretaña

The defeat of the longstanding PRI party in the presidential elections of year 2000 has been acknowledged as a milestone in the democratisation of Mexico. Nevertheless, for over 40 years, many authors have suggested that Mexico has been undergoing a democratic transition. These repeated assertions highlight just how difficult it is to define a democratic transition or when or how such a process begins or ends. Media theorists have been intrigued as to what changes a media system goes through when experiencing a democratic transition, as new political arrangements have an impact on the dynamics of journalism and newsmaking. This study aimed to examine to what extent the close relationship that the media and the government traditionally held during the PRI regime had changed as a product of political transformations. This research adopted the concept of political clientelism of a media system as a theoretical framework, in order to identify aspects in which the Mexican media system had altered from how it occurred in the past. The study relied on the use of two types of qualitative research methodologies, interviews with Mexican journalists, as well as content analysis of newspaper articles.

Gran Bretaña

This thesis investigated the appropriation of information and communication technologies in everyday life among university students and mature people. To that end, pertinent literature was reviewed resulting in the identification of three issues in need of amore careful appraisal by the HCI field. These issues were used as the research questions propelling this work; they include the identification of elements favouring the process of appropriation; the effect of a changing context on this process; and the co-existence of seemingly overlapping ICTs in people’s lives. A qualitative methodology was utilised in the studies reported in this thesis. Ethnographic work was conducted over a period of three months with fifteen masters students at the University of Glasgow in the UK. Further ethnographic work over a shorter time frame was conducted abroad among university students at Hokkaido University in Japan, Ajou University in South Korea and Nankai University in China. Additional ethnographic work was conducted among mature people in a religious community in Mexico. Qualitative data gathered was analysed using Grounded Theory and Structuration Theory.

Gran Bretaña

The impact of technology in society nowadays has led to significant curricular reforms around the world that aim to achieve a higher quality in education. Mexico has not been the exception and in 2008, the Reforma Integral de la Educación Media Superior, RIEMS (the Comprehensive Reform of Upper Secondary Education) was launched with the aim to overcome three challenges in upper secondary education in Mexico: access to education, quality and equity. The proper development of this educational level would represent a fundamental assumption that the country could respond to the challenges of the global economy in a context of equity and diversity. In this context, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools has become a required tool considered as the necessary action for the qualitative improvement of the teaching and learning process. This provides many possibilities, but also new demands.

USA

This work is an interdisciplinary intervention into ethnographic research which addresses two levels. The first of these is methodological, concerning the manner in which social science is conducted. The second is practical, attempting to illustrate how the methodological issues uncovered by the application of phenomenologically-based abject communication theory can be circumnavigated by a program of reflexive involvement in a community through social action research. Based on methodological issues, the case study location was Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, México, an small island located off the Yucatan coast of Mexico, eight miles northeast of Cancun. The study focuses specifically on. the on-going creation of the identity of the island as a home and as a site of tourism, as communicated through promotional texts and through personal interaction between tourists and islanders.

USA

Between 1950 and 1970 television emerged as one of the most important forms of mass communication in Mexico. An analysis of television news scripts and film clips located at the Televisa (the nation’s largest television network) Archives in Mexico City exposed tensions and traditions in television news. The tensions reveal conflicts between: the government and media producers; modernity and the desire to create traditions and maintain those already invented; elite controllers of the media and popular viewers; a male dominated business and fema le news producers and viewers; an elite (mostly white) group of media moguls and a poor mestizo and indigenous viewers; and the United States and Mexico in the midst of the Cold War.

USA

In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, many indigenous communities further their struggles for greater political and cultural autonomy by working with transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Communication technology (what I call comtech) is increasingly vital to these intersecting socio-spatial relations of activism and advocacy. In this dissertation, I examine how comtech offer indigenous individuals and organizations with the means for visualizing their political-cultural agendas. Approaching the access and use of comtech, especially video technologies, as a partial and situated technoscience, I inquire into how and why these activities reconfigure the production and evaluation of authoritative knowledge about indigenous peoples, places, and practices. More specifically, I undertook an organizational ethnography of a small intermediary NGO comprised of individuals who self-identify as indigenous and others who do not, Ojo de Agua Comunicación Indígena, which endeavors to place communication technologies (especially video equipment) at the disposal of indigenous communities.

USA

Grounded in the theory of intra-media agenda -setting, this research will analyze the dynamic process among the Mexican national television networks during the 2006 presidential election campaign period. Specifically, what were the intra-media agenda-setting effects between the Mexican television media Televisa and TV Azteca during the 2006 presidential election campaign? The television content analysis data set is from a systematic random sample of national Mexican prime time television news programs broadcast during the official Instituto Federal Electoral's (Federal Electoral Institute) presidential campaign period, which runs from January 19 to June 28, 2006. The Mexican television newscasts that were analyzed are Televisa's El Noticiero con Joaquín López Dóriga, and TV Azteca's Hechos de la Noche . Overall, the results indicated that television news strongly influences a presidential candidate’s television political spots.

USA

In my dissertation I show how the hegemonic power of the post revolutionary state in Mexico utilized the figure of legendary Pancho Villa in literature and cinematography to create a national myth that represents a consensus in a mestizo patriarchal Christian society. I examine how the use and abuse of the image of Villa in post - revolutionary literary works and films caused this figure to acquire mythical characteristics and dimensions, and to become a key element in the construction of national identity and masculinity in Mexico. I argue that the figure of Villa is a confirmation of a traditional rather than a revolutionary proposal in gender terms. Equally important, I demonstrate how the literature and film of the Mexican revolution constitute instrumental devices for the formation of masculinity and the strengthening of a homosocial culture in the Mexico’s vi post - revolutionary stage, a process that would later determine the structure of the Mexican state.