The purpose of this article is twofold: One, to show how the diversity in journalistic subculture... more The purpose of this article is twofold: One, to show how the diversity in journalistic subcultures influences rules of social production of news (newswork). Two, to discuss a conceptual framework to understand and interpret how ethnolinguistic diversity in Indian media and journalism fosters differences in subcultures of news, leading to differences in news values, routines, sources, and professional norms.
Although programmes and policies targeting violence against women and girls (VAWG) have increased... more Although programmes and policies targeting violence against women and girls (VAWG) have increased in the past decade, there is a paucity of evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions. To expand this evidence base, researchers increasingly employ remote data collection (RDC)—including online surveys, mobile applications and telephone interviews—in their evaluations. Although RDC allows for evaluations without in-person interactions—which are restricted during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic— information about these methods is necessary to understand their potential usefulness and limitations. This scoping review examines remote evaluations of VAWG interventions to describe the landscape of RDC methods, reflect on safety and ethical considerations, and offer best practices for RDC in VAWG research. Fourteen studies met eligibility criteria, with seven, five, and two studies employing telephone interviews, online surveys, and mobile applications, respectively. Studies co...
International Journal of Communication, Mar 17, 2014
During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media d... more During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media discourse was rooted in a militarized language used to mediate the unfolding events and a people's struggle against entrenched power structure. We focus on two major conflict events between the security forces and the protesters: the clashes at Maspero (Radio and Television Building) and the march from Tahrir Square to the Ministry of Defense in Abbasiyya. We situate the two events within the trajectory of the uprising.
Today the Right is more visible as the principal actor at the grassroots and in the media. This p... more Today the Right is more visible as the principal actor at the grassroots and in the media. This politics of the Right is shaped by contradictory forces of individual aspirations and resentments rooted in social antagonism of race, caste, and religion. In his new book 2 , Lord Meghnad Desai has taken this ascendance of the Right as evidence of collapsed and collapsing " liberal order. " By liberal order Desai means a " ruling hegemony of ideas and attitudes " favouring social inclusion, market driven globalisation, and cosmopolitanism that consolidated itself in a post-1989 world. I am tempted to say, not so fast Lord Desai! For example, look at how the aspirational politics is faltering under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and a groundswell of opposition seems to be gathering in the country to his economic, cultural, and social policies. To restore politics on an even keel soon, the Left needs a new plan for reinvigoration and resurgence. Any backlash to the ugly manifestations of nationalist politics of the Right on the streets may help. However, this by itself will not restore the liberal order. Yet, we cannot gloss over the fact that we are at a political conjuncture in which a new hegemony 3 of the Right is attempting, if it has not already, to replace the old hegemony of the Left. To restore politics on an even keel soon, the Left needs a new plan for reinvigoration and resurgence. Any backlash to the ugly manifestations of nationalist politics of the Right on the streets may help. However, this by itself will not restore the liberal order. The first step is to acknowledge that we did not arrive at this conjuncture through the course of a single election campaign in India or elsewhere in the world. In India, the Right, since the early 1990s, was chipping-away at the old hegemony carefully constructed by the " Congress System " 4 and the Left-leaning civil society including media, academia, unions, and NGOs. The Right was exploiting the seeming hypocrisy in the praxes of ruling elites that arose from contradictions between politics of exploiting social difference
Early research in western contexts finds evidence of online participation leading to political en... more Early research in western contexts finds evidence of online participation leading to political engagement. We test this hypothesis in a nonwestern campaign context. We discuss India's complex " hybrid media system, " political parties, leaders, and issues in the 2014 national election that saw more use of digital information channels by all parties, and more so by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the young Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) than the incumbent Indian National Congress (INC). We hypothesize that online engagement and, specifically, sharing of campaign information is a significant predictor of political engagement in the campaigns of each of these three parties. Our dependent variable is a scale of engagement in campaign activities. Independent variables include campaign interest, issue salience, exposure to outdoor party publicity, attention to political information in various traditional media, party contact and sharing information with others (both measured face-to-face and electronically), and controlling for age, gender, and education. Our models, based on survey data from Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, show that party contact, sharing campaign information, and campaign interest are significant predictors of engagement while the other items vary in terms of significance.
During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media d... more During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media discourse was rooted in a militarized language used to mediate the unfolding events and a people’s struggle against entrenched power structure. We focus on two major conflict events between the security forces and the protesters: the clashes at Maspero (Radio and Television Building) and the march from Tahrir Square to the Ministry of Defense in Abbasiyya. We situate the two events within the trajectory of the uprising.
The Abu Ghraib breaking stories by CBS and The New Yorker scooped the news media with reporters o... more The Abu Ghraib breaking stories by CBS and The New Yorker scooped the news media with reporters on the ground in Iraq. The study drawing on Hallin’s (1986) model of American journalism shows why and how the elite newspapers missed the lede on Abu Ghraib and then goes on to show how after being scooped The New York Times and The Washington Post, working within the norms of the dominant paradigm, transformed the “outrage” and “deviance” that was hallmark of the CBS and The New Yorker breaking stories into “a legitimate controversy” in follow-up stories. In addition, this paper shows that the dominant journalistic paradigm (Reese, 1997) works best in the sphere of legitimate controversy in which cultural-ideological boundaries of the elite press are maintained.
Ward & Wasserman (2010) argued that in the digital age we must rethink and reconfigure journalism... more Ward & Wasserman (2010) argued that in the digital age we must rethink and reconfigure journalism ethics from the perspective of an Open Media Ethics framework, rather than the Closed Media Ethics framework of professional journalism. To show how ethical analysis may or may not work in an Open Media Ethics framework I undertake a thematic analysis of the online public debate on media ethics that was fostered by the reassignment of a beat reporter because his disparaging tweet about one of the subjects of his reporting. Drawing on theoretical debates over ethics of objectivity I argue that the age of digital social media we live, journalists and the rest of us, calls upon us to not only take a situational approach to media ethics, but also forces as to conceptualize objectivity-as-a-practice rather than objectivity-as-a-value.
The purpose of this paper is to understand and explain the emergence of a public sphere and the a... more The purpose of this paper is to understand and explain the emergence of a public sphere and the articulation of a new Egyptian identity. We argue that the Egyptian revolution, catalyzed by the social media, was possible because the young men and women succeeded in reclaiming the public space from the apparatuses of the post-colonial state. There was a contest between the protesters and the regime over the meaning of Egyptian identity and what it means to be an Egyptian. The protesters were able to redefine the Egyptian public sphere and redraw its contour. Through a semiotic and discourse analysis of the repertoires of protest, the symbols, the slogans and the images at Tahrir Square and on social media sites, we hope to show how the youth-led massive social mobilization redefined and reconstructed the civil society and the Egyptian national political community (identity).
Bombay Hustle is likely the first archeo-anthropology of cinema in India. It is refreshing to hav... more Bombay Hustle is likely the first archeo-anthropology of cinema in India. It is refreshing to have a book on the colonial period in Indian cinema that is not primarily a study of films as texts. Instead, like an archeologist, Mukherjee digs into film sites of production, objects, bodies, practices, and modes of production and finance to show immaterial structures of entangled and interdependent relationships in the cine-ecology of late colonial Bombay.
In 1994, the reactionary student agitation against OBC reservations metamorphosed into a jan ando... more In 1994, the reactionary student agitation against OBC reservations metamorphosed into a jan andolan (populist social mobilisation) for creation of Uttarakhand state. This study conceptualises jan andolan as a non-party populist political process that temporarily claims public space and often relies on the press to get its voices heard in the corridors of power. The mobilisation for Uttarakhand was led by social activists and civic leaders, who formed the Uttarakhand Samyukta Sangharsh Samitis, and was supported by the Hindi press, particularly Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran. Moving beyond explanations based on electoral caste politics, The Making of a Small State traces the roots of the political imagination of Uttarakhand in the series of socio-ecological protests, such as dhandaks (peasant protests) and Chipko. The study suggests that the new regional movements are manifestations of political and economic deprivation. They highlight developmental regionalism and the demand to restore community s control over jal, jungle and zameen. However, the paradox of the jan andolan was that the samitis, inspite of their wide social base, failed to emerge as a political alternative. The study suggests that internal contradictions in the samitis, the dependency on the press and the news culture opened the opportunity for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress to co-opt the movement for statehood and undermine the core socio-ecological issues by colonising the public space that was created by the andolan. This book is for both academic and general readers who are interested in news media research, populist mobilisation, and political imagination of new regional identities.
The purpose of this article is twofold: One, to show how the diversity in journalistic subculture... more The purpose of this article is twofold: One, to show how the diversity in journalistic subcultures influences rules of social production of news (newswork). Two, to discuss a conceptual framework to understand and interpret how ethnolinguistic diversity in Indian media and journalism fosters differences in subcultures of news, leading to differences in news values, routines, sources, and professional norms.
Although programmes and policies targeting violence against women and girls (VAWG) have increased... more Although programmes and policies targeting violence against women and girls (VAWG) have increased in the past decade, there is a paucity of evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions. To expand this evidence base, researchers increasingly employ remote data collection (RDC)—including online surveys, mobile applications and telephone interviews—in their evaluations. Although RDC allows for evaluations without in-person interactions—which are restricted during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic— information about these methods is necessary to understand their potential usefulness and limitations. This scoping review examines remote evaluations of VAWG interventions to describe the landscape of RDC methods, reflect on safety and ethical considerations, and offer best practices for RDC in VAWG research. Fourteen studies met eligibility criteria, with seven, five, and two studies employing telephone interviews, online surveys, and mobile applications, respectively. Studies co...
International Journal of Communication, Mar 17, 2014
During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media d... more During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media discourse was rooted in a militarized language used to mediate the unfolding events and a people's struggle against entrenched power structure. We focus on two major conflict events between the security forces and the protesters: the clashes at Maspero (Radio and Television Building) and the march from Tahrir Square to the Ministry of Defense in Abbasiyya. We situate the two events within the trajectory of the uprising.
Today the Right is more visible as the principal actor at the grassroots and in the media. This p... more Today the Right is more visible as the principal actor at the grassroots and in the media. This politics of the Right is shaped by contradictory forces of individual aspirations and resentments rooted in social antagonism of race, caste, and religion. In his new book 2 , Lord Meghnad Desai has taken this ascendance of the Right as evidence of collapsed and collapsing " liberal order. " By liberal order Desai means a " ruling hegemony of ideas and attitudes " favouring social inclusion, market driven globalisation, and cosmopolitanism that consolidated itself in a post-1989 world. I am tempted to say, not so fast Lord Desai! For example, look at how the aspirational politics is faltering under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and a groundswell of opposition seems to be gathering in the country to his economic, cultural, and social policies. To restore politics on an even keel soon, the Left needs a new plan for reinvigoration and resurgence. Any backlash to the ugly manifestations of nationalist politics of the Right on the streets may help. However, this by itself will not restore the liberal order. Yet, we cannot gloss over the fact that we are at a political conjuncture in which a new hegemony 3 of the Right is attempting, if it has not already, to replace the old hegemony of the Left. To restore politics on an even keel soon, the Left needs a new plan for reinvigoration and resurgence. Any backlash to the ugly manifestations of nationalist politics of the Right on the streets may help. However, this by itself will not restore the liberal order. The first step is to acknowledge that we did not arrive at this conjuncture through the course of a single election campaign in India or elsewhere in the world. In India, the Right, since the early 1990s, was chipping-away at the old hegemony carefully constructed by the " Congress System " 4 and the Left-leaning civil society including media, academia, unions, and NGOs. The Right was exploiting the seeming hypocrisy in the praxes of ruling elites that arose from contradictions between politics of exploiting social difference
Early research in western contexts finds evidence of online participation leading to political en... more Early research in western contexts finds evidence of online participation leading to political engagement. We test this hypothesis in a nonwestern campaign context. We discuss India's complex " hybrid media system, " political parties, leaders, and issues in the 2014 national election that saw more use of digital information channels by all parties, and more so by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the young Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) than the incumbent Indian National Congress (INC). We hypothesize that online engagement and, specifically, sharing of campaign information is a significant predictor of political engagement in the campaigns of each of these three parties. Our dependent variable is a scale of engagement in campaign activities. Independent variables include campaign interest, issue salience, exposure to outdoor party publicity, attention to political information in various traditional media, party contact and sharing information with others (both measured face-to-face and electronically), and controlling for age, gender, and education. Our models, based on survey data from Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, show that party contact, sharing campaign information, and campaign interest are significant predictors of engagement while the other items vary in terms of significance.
During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media d... more During the street protests in Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the media discourse was rooted in a militarized language used to mediate the unfolding events and a people’s struggle against entrenched power structure. We focus on two major conflict events between the security forces and the protesters: the clashes at Maspero (Radio and Television Building) and the march from Tahrir Square to the Ministry of Defense in Abbasiyya. We situate the two events within the trajectory of the uprising.
The Abu Ghraib breaking stories by CBS and The New Yorker scooped the news media with reporters o... more The Abu Ghraib breaking stories by CBS and The New Yorker scooped the news media with reporters on the ground in Iraq. The study drawing on Hallin’s (1986) model of American journalism shows why and how the elite newspapers missed the lede on Abu Ghraib and then goes on to show how after being scooped The New York Times and The Washington Post, working within the norms of the dominant paradigm, transformed the “outrage” and “deviance” that was hallmark of the CBS and The New Yorker breaking stories into “a legitimate controversy” in follow-up stories. In addition, this paper shows that the dominant journalistic paradigm (Reese, 1997) works best in the sphere of legitimate controversy in which cultural-ideological boundaries of the elite press are maintained.
Ward & Wasserman (2010) argued that in the digital age we must rethink and reconfigure journalism... more Ward & Wasserman (2010) argued that in the digital age we must rethink and reconfigure journalism ethics from the perspective of an Open Media Ethics framework, rather than the Closed Media Ethics framework of professional journalism. To show how ethical analysis may or may not work in an Open Media Ethics framework I undertake a thematic analysis of the online public debate on media ethics that was fostered by the reassignment of a beat reporter because his disparaging tweet about one of the subjects of his reporting. Drawing on theoretical debates over ethics of objectivity I argue that the age of digital social media we live, journalists and the rest of us, calls upon us to not only take a situational approach to media ethics, but also forces as to conceptualize objectivity-as-a-practice rather than objectivity-as-a-value.
The purpose of this paper is to understand and explain the emergence of a public sphere and the a... more The purpose of this paper is to understand and explain the emergence of a public sphere and the articulation of a new Egyptian identity. We argue that the Egyptian revolution, catalyzed by the social media, was possible because the young men and women succeeded in reclaiming the public space from the apparatuses of the post-colonial state. There was a contest between the protesters and the regime over the meaning of Egyptian identity and what it means to be an Egyptian. The protesters were able to redefine the Egyptian public sphere and redraw its contour. Through a semiotic and discourse analysis of the repertoires of protest, the symbols, the slogans and the images at Tahrir Square and on social media sites, we hope to show how the youth-led massive social mobilization redefined and reconstructed the civil society and the Egyptian national political community (identity).
Bombay Hustle is likely the first archeo-anthropology of cinema in India. It is refreshing to hav... more Bombay Hustle is likely the first archeo-anthropology of cinema in India. It is refreshing to have a book on the colonial period in Indian cinema that is not primarily a study of films as texts. Instead, like an archeologist, Mukherjee digs into film sites of production, objects, bodies, practices, and modes of production and finance to show immaterial structures of entangled and interdependent relationships in the cine-ecology of late colonial Bombay.
In 1994, the reactionary student agitation against OBC reservations metamorphosed into a jan ando... more In 1994, the reactionary student agitation against OBC reservations metamorphosed into a jan andolan (populist social mobilisation) for creation of Uttarakhand state. This study conceptualises jan andolan as a non-party populist political process that temporarily claims public space and often relies on the press to get its voices heard in the corridors of power. The mobilisation for Uttarakhand was led by social activists and civic leaders, who formed the Uttarakhand Samyukta Sangharsh Samitis, and was supported by the Hindi press, particularly Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran. Moving beyond explanations based on electoral caste politics, The Making of a Small State traces the roots of the political imagination of Uttarakhand in the series of socio-ecological protests, such as dhandaks (peasant protests) and Chipko. The study suggests that the new regional movements are manifestations of political and economic deprivation. They highlight developmental regionalism and the demand to restore community s control over jal, jungle and zameen. However, the paradox of the jan andolan was that the samitis, inspite of their wide social base, failed to emerge as a political alternative. The study suggests that internal contradictions in the samitis, the dependency on the press and the news culture opened the opportunity for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress to co-opt the movement for statehood and undermine the core socio-ecological issues by colonising the public space that was created by the andolan. This book is for both academic and general readers who are interested in news media research, populist mobilisation, and political imagination of new regional identities.
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