"By the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus had fully entered our everyday vocabulary and our lives, religious communities and places of worship around the world were already undergoing profound changes. In Asian and Asian diaspora communities, diverse cultural tropes, beliefs, and artifacts were m
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obilized to make sense of Covid, including a repertoire of gods and demons like Coronasur, the virus depicted with the horns and fangs of a traditional Hindu demon. Various kinds of knowledge were invoked: theologies, indigenous medicines, and biomedical narratives, as well as ethical values and nationalist sentiments. CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age follows the documentation and analysis of the abrupt societal shifts triggered by the pandemic to understand current and future pandemic times, while revealing further avenues for research on religion that have opened up in the Covidian age. Developed in tandem with the research blog CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19, this volume is a “phygital” publication, a work grounded in empirical roots as well as digitally born communication. It comprises thirty-eight essays that examine Asian religious communities—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist, and Christian as well as popular/folk and new religious movements, or NRMs—in terms of the changes brought on by and the ritual responses to the Covid pandemic." (Publisher description)
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"Throughout the twenty-first century, genocide denial has evolved and adapted with new strategies to augment and complement established modes of denial. In addition to outright negation, denial of genocide encompasses a range of techniques, including disputes over numbers, contestation of legal defi
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nitions, blaming the victim, and various modes of intimidation, such as threats of legal action. Arguably the most effective strategy has been denial through the purposeful creation of misinformation. Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century brings together leading scholars from across disciplines to add to the body of genocide scholarship that is challenged by denialist literature. By concentrating on factors such as the role of communications and news media, global and national social networks, the weaponization of information by authoritarian regimes and political parties, court cases in the United States and Europe, freedom of speech, and postmodernist thought, this volume discusses how genocide denial is becoming a fact of daily life in the twenty-first century." (Publisher description)
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"Is it necessary for journalists to seek refuge with foreign agencies to escape national governmental and policy restrictions? Should journalism education rely on international support, or is it feasible to detach it from foreign development collaboration? Should education be viewed as a business or
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commodity? Is any international development support sustainable within the local context? Is free thinking truly free from the structural constraints of slavery and financial influence? Is absolute freedom a utopian ideal or a tangible reality? These inquiries, coupled with corresponding philosophical methodologies, aim to evaluate the structure, constituents, excellence, and norms of current journalism education programs. The goal is to uncover if and to what extent international media development organizations sway journalism education programs during the transition phase (2011–2021) in Myanmar or beyond.
2011 marked a turning point, as the military-supported government of Myanmar granted media professionals the ability to exercise their fundamental rights to express themselves and access information. The government has taken a number of favorable measures towards the democratic path, such as partially lifting censorship from several news publications, authorizing private daily newspapers, approving new television channels, establishing a press council, and permitting journalist unions and associations. The formation of the quasi-elected government in 2015 brought renewed hope. However, the military coup at the beginning of 2021 has once again impeded progress towards a democratic environment, and fundamental rights such as access to information and freedom of speech. Capacity building facilities for journalists and media professionals remain an important aspect of the democratic process in the country." (Publisher description)
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"In this paper, we identified seven most widely spread conspiracy discourses about earthquakes. These conspiracy discourses link earthquakes to military activities like secret nuclear bomb testing, God’s Providence like the punishment of humans for their sins, space activities like aliens visiting
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our planet, the US secret weather control program HAARP, tests of the Large Hadron Collider, fracking projects, and freemasonic plots. Following the major earthquake in Indonesia at the end of November 2022, we extracted data from Twitter by keywords using the Hoaxy tool for tracking the spread of information on Twitter. Applying the Bot Sentinel tool, we also got data on the sentiment of the users. The divine and military discourses dominated the conspiracy discussion, followed by the discussions about extraction and HAARP. Though there were more human-like accounts than bot-like accounts, we found a positive correlation between the frequency of tweets on the conspiracy discourses and the bot scores of the accounts, which suggests that bot-like accounts were tweeting more than human-like accounts. It was also found that normal accounts tweeted more than toxic accounts, and there was a positive relationship between the bot score and the toxicity level of an account. It suggests that bot-like accounts were involved more in disruptive activities than human-like accounts." (Abstract)
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"Moving beyond a common visual concern within Religious Studies with art, aesthetic value, and perceptions of beauty or coherence, this volume shows how, when, and why images dare, shock, terrorize, confront, challenge, mock, shame, taunt, or offend, either intentionally or unintentionally, and as s
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uch lead to both confrontation and affective religious engagement. Exploring and experimenting with the relationship between text and image, the contributions draw attention simultaneously to the messiness of everyday life and to highly targeted, disruptive interventions that mark religious contestation in an era of escalating mobility and digital multiplicity. The volume thus illuminates an insight that has received little attention so far: provocation is among religion’s most significant mediations." (Publisher description)
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"Focusing on the arrival of mobile Internet in the early 2010s in developing countries, we identified significant positive effects of mobile Internet on provinces’ average household income in Vietnam. The effect sizes are larger for lower-income quintiles groups and for rural areas, suggesting the
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more inclusive changing impact of the innovation over the last decade. Preliminary evidence of impact mechanisms via skilled employment rates and (formal) wages are also presented. The evidence from Vietnam, a lower middle-income country, can bring further understanding in the extent of development impacts of second-generation mobile for development (M4D 2.0) in particular and ICT for development (ICT4D) in general." (Abstract)
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"Media freedom has deteriorated across the world over the past 15 years with populist leaders attacking journalism in both democratic and repressive states. Since the rise of online misinformation and disinformation, concern is growing that governments are using fake news language and related laws t
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o muzzle the press. Studies find labelling reporters and their stories as fake news can threaten journalistic norms and practices and have implications for trust relationships with sources and audiences. Less understood is the effects of fake news laws on journalism. This article addresses this gap and examines consequences for journalistic practices in Singapore and Indonesia when journalists and sources are targets of fake news laws. Through 20 in-depth expert interviews with journalists, editors, their sources and fake news experts in Indonesia and Singapore, the article identifies “chill effects” on reporting when faced with the threat of new legal sanctions. However, it also identifies adaptations to newsroom practices to manage this threat. We conclude with lessons learned from the Asia Pacific on how journalists in other jurisdictions might manage the potential chilling effects on news reporting when fake news laws are in place." (Abstract)
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"In light of the controversial relationship and blurred lines between information and entertainment media, the current study’s goal aimed at qualitatively exploring media entertainment’s role in emerging adults’ political identity formation and engagement. By analyzing 55 semistructured interv
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iews from Germany, Croatia, Turkey, South Korea, and the Philippines, we examined how emerging adults in 5 countries—differing in tightness-looseness, political culture, and media freedom—explore alternative political identities (identity exploration) and commit to a set of political values (identity commitment). Across countries, notable similarities supported the notion of traditional and new forms of entertainment as universal drivers of political identity formation and engagement (e.g., informational source, broadening one’s horizon). However, idiosyncrasies of countries reflected unique cultural values, beliefs, and norms, and the benefits of media entertainment pathways to political identity development appeared to depend on political freedom and democracy." (Abstract)
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"As can be gleaned from this report, anti-disinformation initiatives are diverse and creative, but whether they’re for prevention, monitoring and identification, or contextualization and correction, the current initiatives can be scaled up and new ones added. Firstly, the initiatives have still to
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reach a large segment of Philippine society, especially those living far from the capital, as well as certain sectors like senior citizens, persons with disabilities, and offline communities that depend greatly on others for information, including word of mouth. Secondly, another area that could be enhanced is research, which still takes long gestation periods when the need for findings and recommendations is immediate. Where possible, studies need to be fast-tracked. Instead of waiting for an event to end, e.g., elections, academic researchers should collaborate with anti-disinformation initiatives from the get-go. Institutions and individuals fighting against disinformation should also be encouraged to produce rigorous research, as well as provide deep dives or snapshots of disinformation landscape as it evolves. Furthermore, although AI tools have been employed by fact-checking initiatives such as Tsek.ph and FactsFirstPH, the study also shows that there is room for development in employing AI Journalism in the fight against disinformation. The ThaiDI Machine is the only purely AI tool on the list and is still in the development stage." (Conclusion)
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"At a time when uneven power dynamics are high on development actors' agenda, this book will be an important contribution to researchers and practitioners working on innovation in development and civil society. While there is much discussion of localization, decolonization and 'shifting power' in ci
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vil society collaborations in development, the debate thus far centers on the aid system. This book directs attention to CSOs as drivers of development in various contexts that we refer to as the Global South. This book take a transformative stance, reimagining roles, relations and processes. It does so from five complementary angles: (1) Southern CSOs reclaiming the lead, 2) displacement of the North-South dyad, (3) Southern-centred questions, (4) new roles for Northern actors, and (5) new starting points for collaboration. The book relativizes international collaboration, asking INGOs, Northern CSOs, and their donors to follow Southern CSOs' leads, recognizing their contextually geared perspectives, agendas, resources, capacities, and ways of working. Based in 19 empirically grounded chapters, the book also offers an agenda for further research, design, and experimentation. Emphasizing the need to 'Start from the South' this book thus re-imagines and re-centers Civil Society collaborations in development, offering Southern-centred ways of understanding and developing relations, roles, and processes, in theory and practice." (Publisher description)
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"This manual offers ideas on how to discuss a violent past in an active manner. The manual mostly focuses on methodology: how to make learning about the past interesting for learners. There is less focus on the specific content of the past. To spark learner’s interest in the (violent) past, it is
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helpful to choose a learner-centered approach. This manual uses the following elements of learner-centered learning: to give learners a voice in what they want to learn about the past based on their own interests, to first let them find out by themselves before information is provided, to foster curiosity, to encourage joint learning and to link local findings with the wider history.
Encouraging discussion: As the title shows, a main aim of this manual is to provide learners – and facilitators – with activities to not only learn about the past, but also to discuss it. The activities let learners practice key elements of discussion, such as active listening (with the attempt to understand the other well), responding to each other’s statements or arguments, not judging others’ opinions, aiming to understand motives and intentions, etc. In this process, it is the facilitator’s task to guide the discussion, to keep it on topic and not let it get personal, ensure that different perspectives are included and that all learners can express themselves." (Introduction, page 1)
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"The survey found that 13% of respondents’ organizations are very familiar with Gen AI, while an additional 46% possess a basic awareness. Among those who stated they had basic to good familiarity with Gen AI, 38% reported using it either daily or very frequently. The most common use of Gen AI was
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for research and idea generation, followed by content creation & copy editing, and translation. In terms of the platform, ChatGPT was by far the most widely used, followed by Bing AI, Midjourney, and Dall-E. The majority of respondents (94%) stated that they found Gen AI to be either very useful or somewhat useful. Furthermore 67% of respondents view the future of Gen AI as either very promising (22%) or promising (45%)." (Key findings, page 1)
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"Through interviews with women journalists in the Philippines, this study documents and examines their experiences with online harassment. Three main themes stand out. First, we find that online harassment against journalists follows a systematic process that starts from the top, is followed through
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by a network of social media personalities and an army of trolls, and then completed by ordinary social media users. Second, cases of harassment impact journalists across multiple levels: individually, interpersonally and professionally. Finally, the participants referred to different ways of coping with what they experienced and identified three sources of support: their peers, their organizations and the public. Harassment against journalists has always been gendered, with women journalists finding themselves at the receiving end more often than do their male counterparts, and this has spilled over into digital platforms." (Abstract)
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"This study investigates how Islamic fundamentalists groups in Indonesia use Twitter to communicate with their stakeholders to achieve organizational goals. Based on previous work, three main functions of the use of social media by organizations were examined: spreading information, building and mai
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ntaining communities, and mobilizing for action. Based on an analysis of 2000 coded tweets from 20 Islamic fundamentalist accounts in Indonesia, the results showed that using Twitter for spreading information is by far the most frequently used function for Islamic fundamentalist groups in Indonesia, followed by community building and mobilizing for action. Our analysis of the effect of the different uses of Twitter shows that in terms of reach (i.e. retweets), there is an advantage in using Twitter to spread information compared to calling for action in terms of retweeting and – to a lesser extent – to building a community." (Abstract)
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"A total of 4,094 news stories were collected and analysed across 12 selected media outlets for a period of one month, from 2 January 2023 to 31 January 2023, by trained monitors. This study revealed a grim picture of women’s under-representation and misrepresentation in Cambodian news. This is a
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call to action for media owners and managers, senior editors, journalists, journalist associations to be intentional about women’s presence and portrayal in the news, to report the news from women’s perspectives and to regard women in news as an everyday topic rather than a marginalised topic. It is also a call to action to the Royal Government of Cambodia to support the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to monitor women’s presence and portrayal in news and in media outlets and to call out breaches to the Joint Prakas On Media Code of Conduct for Reporting on Violence Against Women, and to redress the gender imbalance of government spokespeople across all Ministries. This study did not extend to examining the impact on society of women being under-represented and misrepresented in news. Nevertheless, we do know that news media help shape public discourse and who or what is selected to appear in the news and how individuals are portrayed can influence people’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviours (Flood & Pease, 2009).
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