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.

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

Mexico’s Split Public Sphere In 1930, Robert Redfield wrote, “Mexico is in no small part modern... In the more sophisticated villages of the north, in the middle classes in the cities everywhere, are to be found a people much like the masses in our own country. They not only can read, but they do read. The folk hear rumor; these people read the news” (1930: 3). With this last sentence, he gives the basic division with which this dissertation will be concerned, though in a context very different from the one Redfield was familiar with: contemporary Tijuana, a fast-paced border city of some two million people and an integral part, however segregated by the international boundary, of the vast metropolitan constellation that is southern California. Through a detailed analysis of texts and interactions, the chapters collected here trace ethnographically the relation between two publics: one that takes shape through the genres of communication associated with the classic bourgeois public sphere (rational debate, for instance, as well as news-reading) and another that depends on genres of rumor. The border brings out not just the importance of the nation for these publics, but that of state recognition: the first public imagines itself as documented, that is, with papers to cross the border legally, while the public of hearsay imagines itself as undocumented.

USA

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, created a rupture with a series of neoliberal policies implemented in Mexico and on a global scale over the last few decades of the 20th century. In a moment when alternatives to neoliberal global capitalism appeared to have disappeared from the world stage, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) initiated a movement and process that would have significance not only in Chiapas and for Mexico, but for many struggles and movements around the world that would come to identify with a kind of “alter globalization” project. This dissertation examines the historical moment of neoliberal globalization, what the EZLN calls the “Fourth World War,” the Zapatista initiative to construct an alternative political project, and the importance of this process of rupture and construction for our understanding of social organization, political participation, struggle and subjectivity.

USA

This dissertation tries to deal critically with the common utilization of media literacy as skilled - based initiative or participatory culture building. It raises a number of questions about the process of participation and production that have often been ignored by a media literacy research. Based on work I did directly with two communities of youth Latina/os in weekly media workshops that had real community impact, I examine the participatory dynamics surrounding three video productions that responded to stereotypes and the topics of community service and immigration in corporate news media representations of the Latina/o community and the U.S.-Mexico border.

USA

The 2006 Mexican presidential election and the 2008 U.S. presidential election are valuable opportunities for cross-cultural comparative research. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, a woman and an African American man, were two candidates in the United States. Patricia Mercado, a woman and strong defender of minorities’ rights, was one of the candidates in Mexico. This dissertation used a comparative ethnographic analysis of these candidates’ political advertisements to identify the framing devices that female and minority candidates utilized in their self-presentations to audiences. The findings show that candidates in both countries use similar frames and tend to emphasize personality traits over issues and policies.

USA

This dissertation analyzed how the media on both sides of the U.S. - Mexico border portrayed the issue of gun traffic king’s into Mexico and its impact on Mexico’s border violence. National newspapers from both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border were analyzed from January 2009 through January 2012, The New York Times for the U.S. and El Universal for Mexico, which resulted in a sample of 602 newspaper articles. Qualitative research methods were utilized to collect and analyze the data, specifically content analysis. Drawing on a theoretical framework of social problems and framing this study addressed how gun trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border impacted the drug related violence that is ongoing in Mexico, how gun trafficking was portrayed as a social problem by the media, and how the media depicted the victims of drug related violence.

USA

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print —the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production — across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post colonial economy.

USA

This project reconsiders the relationship between the government and media as revealed by the development of national print media organizations in Mexico before and after the revolutionary period, 1900 - 1940. Historians have long believed that Mexican journalists had accepted payments from the PRI, the party that laid the foundation for its seventy year dictatorship during this period, in exchange for positive news coverage and to cover up the government’s failings. This project challenges this assumption and demonstrates a different history of intense contestation between the state and media organizations. Instead of acquiescing to government officials, Mexican journalists founded new periodicals and used them to defy their authority throughout this time period, often at the risk of their careers and lives. Journalists remained strong activists and worked closely with politicians to pass the reforms they fought for during the revolution. It was only through the leadership of President Lázaro Cárdenas that the government was able to integrate these defiant reporters into the “Revolutionary Family.”