Media and Politics Fall 2017

2.3. Empowerment

Quiz from seminar 10. November

1. Explain what is meant by a statement like «gender is a

cultural construction”

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…”.

2. Explain the relationship between the global and the local,

as described by the concept "glocality”

“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”.

3. Define diaspora and show how ethnic minority media

channels may represent a dilemma of empowerment

versus ghettoization?

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.

4. What is “the burden of representation”?

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.

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?

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.