Media and politics 2017

1. Media and Politics Fall 2017
2.3. Empowerment
Quiz from seminar 10. November

2. 1. Explain what is meant by a statement like «gender is a
cultural construction”

3. Gender refers to the characteristics and behaviors society
expects from you (norms) as either male or female - as
opposed to sex, which is biologically determined (although
now also challenged).
Being a cultural construction, it varies between cultures and
over time.
Gender can also be understood as a series of performances
based on prevailing understandings of what it is to be male
and female. “.. something we do rather than something we
are…”.

4. 2. Explain the relationship between the global and the local,
as described by the concept "glocality”

5. “Glocality” refers to that although we have certain global
frames of reference, we still belong some place, which is the
local.
Globalization is reflected in our level of “cosmopolitanism”
(sharing information and identifying with people from other
places).
But the local is still important for identity and meaning. The
local and the global co-exists in the glocality – “being inside
and outside at the same time”.

6. 3. Define diaspora and show how ethnic minority media
channels may represent a dilemma of empowerment
versus ghettoization?

7. A diaspora is an ethnic group consisting of migrants and their
descendants. It is united by a common place of origin – and a
common identity as a group different from the others in the host
country.
Minority media channels empower because they enable minority
groups to maintain their identity and common frame of reference,
besides providing access to media texts which they find more
relevant for their own lives.
Ghettoization refers to the effect of isolation from the mainstream
and segregation/fragmentation into minority subcultures, instead
of inclusion into a national community. Media ghettos complement
neighbourhood ghettos.

8. 4. What is “the burden of representation”?

9. When minorities gets access to mainstream media dominated
by the majority, individuals belonging to these minorities tend
to be framed or perceived as a representative for the minority
group in question, not as an individual person. Individuals
from the majority group, on the other hand, have the privilege
of being framed and perceived as exactly that.

10. 5. Describe how popular cultural artefacts, such as movies
and TV-series, produced after 9/11 might challenge identity
in powerful states and reassert identity in other states?

11. Instead of a singular heroic narrative, many American popular
culture artefacts representing such events as 9/11 and the
subsequent “war on terror” contained doubts, fear and
anxiety about the USA, its global role and relations with the
outside world.
In other states, such as Turkey, movies and TV-series tended
towards reasserting the national and/or religious identity as
heroic and framing the US and the West as villains.