Mediated Acts of Citizenship:

Research overview

This research includes comparative study of the culture of cities and citizenship through dialogic framing analysis of public debates in newspapers between 2000-08 with the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative Culture of Cities Project: Montreal, Toronto, Berlin and Dublin; a SSHRC Workshop Grant: Mediated Acts of Citizenship: Between City and Nation; and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Journalism at NYU.

Select description of projects

• Nielsen, Hsu and others developed dialogic framing analysis in a series of comparative case studies of online newspaper reportage including the role of  Dublin in the Irish Abortion debate;  twinning between Montreal and Shanghai; Montreal and Toronto Amalgamation debates, comparisons of CBC and Radio-Canada in the two cities, and on street cultures in Berlin.
• The 2005 SSHRC workshop Mediated Citizenship: Between City and Nation organized by Hsu, Isin and Nielsen brought 23 national and international scholars to come together and explore questions about citizenship that would not normally be considered within the range of any single discipline. In this work we grappled with fundamental questions concerning methods by which we might best discern the moment an act of citizenship occurs.
• Nielsen’s research as Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Journalism NYU compared how the press frames dialogues on poverty in Montreal  and immigration in New York in 2006. In each case it was found that neither journalistic field addresses these groups as their primary implied audiences.  Taken together though, their stories provide a semi-detached image of each city’s citizenship values and, at the same time, of the symbolic reinforcement they give to social division within the city.
• SSHRC Standard grant 2008-10 (Nielsen): Mediated Citizenship: Immigration and Poverty Reporting from the Montreal and NYC Press The objective of the overall research program is to develop comparisons and critiques of representations of citizenship across urban media in different national contexts. The objective for the proposed research period is to provide an analysis of how newspaper journalists in Montreal and New York frame reports on current subjects of immigration and poverty and define conditions for their citizenship with implied audiences.