Australia

This thesis examines the use of video technology as an alternative communication medium within a dialogic framework. It explores multiple dialogic encounters and different meanings of dialogue. It analyses dialogues within and around video technology and dialogues with contemporary events in Mexican history. I argue that these dialogic encounters are contributing to an ongoing process of transformation in Mexican consciousness. The thesis’s theoretical framework draws on Mikhail Bakht in’s theory of dialogism and employs a dialogic method that emphasise s diversity. In the thesis, I conduct an in-depth analysis of multiple series of dialogues between key people, events, and discourses. These dialogues are complex. I explore their complexities and the varied relationships that emerge from them, including my own. As researcher and writer, I am a part of the dialogues I explore in the thesis.

Gran Bretaña

This research assessed students‟ self-perception of communicative competence in EFL in a Mexican university. I argued there was a gap in the knowledge available in the field at the tertiary education level in Mexico that needed filling because of the impact that self-perception has on individuals‟ decisions to act, in this case, to engage in communication acts in the foreign language. The objectives guiding my research were: first, to address the information gap; second, to test the scale created for this study (CCQ); and third, to explore influences on students‟ self -perceptions in this context. Self-perception and its cognitive (efficacy) and affective (confidence) elements were proposed as the aspects of the self-concept to be addressed. Evidence supported identifying Language Identity, Attribution Theory, and Ideal and Ought-to Self Theory as emerging frameworks to understand students‟ self-perceptions. Willingness to communicate was also related to this research.

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

The recent political protests around the globe since the uprising in the Arab World, the Indignados movement in Spain, and the Occupy Movement in United States, were broadcast to the world through both the global mainstream and alternative media using many images and reports produced by people on the ground using internet, mobile phones, and social media. These events have triggered a discussion not only about the political changes taking place in the region but have also opened up an academic debate about what changes and transformations may have occurred in the nature of citizens’ political actions and the use of social media to communicate with people around the world. In turn, these political events have also reignited the discussion on social media as transnational public spheres beyond government control and opened to question the ethos of existing attempts at Internet governance by western nation states. The aim of this thesis is to engage in a theoretical discussion of this political phenomenon through a case study of New Social Movements and social networking sites’ Uses: Mexicans’ mobilization for peace in Mexico, an important element in the development of citizen participation on the Internet focused on in the thesis.

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

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

This dissertation investigates the dynamics of production surrounding United States Spanish-language television by analyzing the strategies followed by newcomer Azteca America in it attempts to become an attractive television option for latinos. Given the scarcity of research on the production approach of U.S. Latino media, this study interrogates the site of production of Spanish-language television—that is, the site in which professional routines and presumably legitimate knowledge about audiences are the basis for the reproduction of particular representations of Latinos in the United States. The incursion of Azteca America into this realm allows me to reflect on the structural and complex relationship between the U.S. Latino and Mexican television industries.

USA

This is a biographical case study of Mexican industrialization, focusing on expatriate U.S. businessman William O. Jenkins (1878-1963). I trace Jenkins’ career in textiles, land speculation, sugar, banking, and film, using it as a forum for themes that flesh out the economic and political history of modern Mexico. Chief among these themes are Mexico’s substantial but socially unequal capitalistic development; interdependent relationships between business elites and the state; the role of the regions in Mexican development; and a tradition of viewing U.S. industrialists as enemies of national progress. I use Jenkins to illustrate the ability of Mexico’s business elite to negotiate the hazards of the 1910-1920 Revolution and the property expropriations that followed.

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.