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Fears and fantasies in human interactions with sex robots: USA media discourse analysis 2016-2023
Gavrilova, Iuliia ; Lorenz - Meyer, Dagmar (advisor) ; Kolářová, Kateřina (referee)
This thesis employs a feminist critical discourse analysis to investigate the fears, desires, and pleasures invoked by sex robots in users, as well as the representation of sex robots in media discourse. Feminist critical discourse analysis is used to provide insight into the ways in which technology is shaping human sexuality and changing our perceptions of sex and love. My sample includes 59 articles published in contemporary American media between 2017 and 2023 that focus on human interaction with sex robots. This thesis examines how the current dramatic prognosis of harm of sex robot use is empirically grounded. It also identifies multiple main themes that are present in the media discourse, namely sex robots' human-likeness, future of human relationships, as well as the tendency to associate the use of sex robots with rape and pedophilia. The artificial nature of the robot in the most intimate aspects of life such as love and sex is perceived as threatening, potentially making us less human. However, there are also positive aspects of human-sex robot interaction as framed by media discourse. Sex robots allow people to have a more satisfactory sexual life even when they have difficulties to build interpersonal relationship, for example, for elderly or socially awkward people. Moreover, a rising...
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Rhetoric of US Foreign Environmental Policy: Case Study of the Paris Agreement
Štěpařová, Tereza ; Hornát, Jan (advisor) ; Fiřtová, Magdalena (referee)
The Paris Agreement represents a landmark international environmental agreement that received extensive political, journalistic, and academic attention, and the United States played a key role in the negotiation process. This thesis presents a comprehensive overview of determinants that can impact the U.S. approach to international environmental politics, and it focuses on a detailed discourse analysis of U.S. federal political elites' rhetoric on the Paris Agreement, comparing two time periods - the second term of the Obama presidency and the Trump administration. The analysis demonstrates a strong alignment of political ideology with partisanship, dividing the Democratic and Republican argumentation into rhetorical opposition, and proves the significant influence of the highly polarized two-party system on the U.S. environmental rhetoric. However, applying Putnam's two-level game framework, the case study also demonstrates that even Democratic politicians approached pragmatic rhetoric on topics such as the U.S. economy, economic growth, or U.S. leadership, and employed creative narratives that addressed the pragmatic concerns of the American public to gain support for their progressive foreign policy agenda represented by the Paris Agreement in the end result. The paper presents the rhetorical...
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The position of the CDU in Baden-Württemberg on the issue of asylum policy
Prokhoshin, Aleksei ; Kunštát, Miroslav (advisor) ; Filipová, Lucie (referee)
This bachelor's thesis deals with the topical issue of the asylum policy, which is one of the most pivotal topics in contemporary German politics. It focuses on the state politics of Baden- Württemberg and deals with one political party, namely the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, which is one of the key actors on the state level. This thesis analyses the period 2011-2021, so it intentionally avoids the Ukrainian refugee crisis as a consequence of Russian aggression. The bachelor's thesis presents basic information about the position of the CDU on asylum policy and provides the historical context of immigration to Germany and specifically to Baden-Württemberg. Afterwards, it analyses the development of the attitude towards the asylum policy of CDU Baden-Württemberg's key personalities chronologically, also analysing the argumentation of their stances, for which primary and secondary sources are used. The primary sources are session protocols from the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg; the secondary sources are regional news articles and several chosen monographs, which serve to provide the thesis with political and social context, which is crucial for a more precise interpretation of CDU Baden-Württemberg politicians. Based on the conducted analysis, one may conclude that the biggest shift in...
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Discourse analysis of language of tabloids
Gazdošová, Sára ; Walek, Agata (referee) ; Langerová, Petra (advisor)
Tato práce obsahuje popis jazykové analýzy textů z hlediska lexikálního, gramatického a stylistického. Dále jsou probírány termíny jako koheze, koherence a kontext. Tato práce je rozdělena do dvou částí. První část se zabývá teorií a obecnými informacemi o diskurzní analýze a obsahuje obecné příklady. Tyto informace jsou důležité pro pozdější pochopení analýzy jazyka bulváru. Je zde také zmíněna historie a základní typy masmédií. Druhá část se zabývá analýzou praktických příkladů z online verzí bulvárních deníků Daily Mail a The Sun. Je zde krátce popsán vzhled a rozložení stránek těchto deníků. Vybrané prvky analýzy jazyka jsou aplikovány na příklady z těchto bulvárních novin.
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Discourse Analysis of Islamic Terrorist Propaganda on the Internet
Fuxa, Filip ; Střítecký, Vít (advisor)
Thesis Discourse Analysis of Islamic Terrorist Propaganda on the Internet uses the method of thematic discourse analysis to study jihadi discussion forums in the cyberspace. Since the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century the Internet has became one of the most powerful communication tools through which are jihadi terrorists able to reach thousands of Muslims worldwide. After the traditional Western media had intensively begun to filter terrorist messages shortly after 11/9/2001, jihadists found a perfect way how to draw attention of these media once more - not directly, but through the Internet communication which is widely used by traditional media as a source of their content. The first part of this thesis presents theoretical framework for the second, purely practical part. Firstly, this paper deals with propaganda as a form of communication, shows the Internet as a medium that has absorbed all other media, and analyses the terrorism spread through the Internet. The main part of this study focuses on the jihadi discourse, through which jihadists view the Islamic world as suffering under the oppression of the West to persuade passive Muslim audience to join the jihad. This paper deals not only with different types of propaganda, but also with intentions of propagandists and the means...
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Gender aspects in state-led water security discourses: A case study of the Syr Darya river basin countries
Mukhamejan, Nadira ; Parks, Louisa Rosemary (advisor) ; Anceschi, Luca (referee)
This postgraduate research project proposes to explore water security discourses in Central Asia, which is one of the global "climate hotspots" (Giorgi, 2006, p. 33). Recent increases in temperatures exceeding global historical averages are causing more frequent droughts and earlier snowmelt, which has a major influence on future water availability in an already water-stressed region (Bernauer and Siegfried, 2012; Sorg et al., 2013). These impacts affect individuals and segments of society differently and aggravate already existing gendered vulnerabilities and diverse capacities to face its consequences (Sultana, 2018, p. 19). There is a growing consensus that water relations in societies are affected by social relationships related to gender (Fröhlich et al., 2018). Several case studies have indeed highlighted that water (in)securities are rooted in gendered water-related labour division and associated social norms, and could be worsened by climate change (Rao et al., 2019, Adams et al., 2018, Bacon et al., 2022). However, the geography of this literature body is uneven: existing studies are focused on Southeast Asia, Africa, and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. While there is a growing research interest to gendered realities and insecurities in water sector, the academic literature in...
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Semiotic Specifics of Media Contents
Podzimek, Jan ; Bednařík, Petr (advisor) ; Dvořáčková, Věra (referee) ; Ducháček, Milan (referee)
This dissertation explores specifics of media semiotics as a method of media content analysis. The main research sample consists of mediasemiotic studies, in the second place of studies within other applied semiotics and methodological publications on the subject. The research method is a discourse analysis, done on all levels from micro- to macrostructures, specifically on levels of language, intertextuality, narrativity, discussions, discourse models and discourses. The analysis also took into account interdiscoursive relations between media semiotics and media studies, theoretic semiotics, and other related disciplines, as well as the question whether bringing concepts from these fields into media semiotics involves some transformations of these concepts, and how are these transformations related to the nature of the given discourses. The main contribution of this dissertation is introduction of the principle of modularity. It is a specific way of employing analytical functions into an analytical engine, which was present in all researched media semiotic studies, but also in the studies which belong to other applied semiotics (movie semiotics, anthropological semiotics, semiotics of law), and to discourse analysis as well. The modularity is an autonomous principle which must be, in case of the...
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Hunger games: Discourses of the G7 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa
Milerová Prášková, Dagmar ; Novotný, Josef (advisor) ; Daněk, Petr (referee) ; Profant, Tomáš (referee)
The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was launched in 2012 as the main G7 initiative to combat hunger in Africa. Its proclaimed objective was to facilitate cooperation between selected African countries and private sector companies by promoting pro-market reforms and investments in African agriculture. However, it quietly disappeared from public space around 2015, seven years before the end of its programming period. The New Alliance can thus be considered and analysed as a case of failed policy, which has not achieved its declared goals. In this thesis, I examine the discourses of this initiative in official documents of selected G7 countries, focusing on how this initiative was constructed and framed in the wider context of their approaches to global food security and hunger. The selection of the analysed countries (USA, France, and the UK) reflects their distinct positions on the New Alliance. This analysis is supplemented by discourse analysis of western and African civil society actors who took an active role either in a New Alliance project or the anti-New Alliance campaign. I assumed that examination and confrontation of different positions of these countries with respect to the New Alliance may uncover different conceptualisations of food security and hunger in Africa associated...
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