John Downing
Biographic Data
| ID | 76321 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Downing |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Downing |
| SIGNATURE | DOWNING J |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7173-8043 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 224 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1958 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Methodological insights into digital vernacular (in)security: Developing from netnography to appnography on Snapchat in Marseille, France
While vernacular security studies pays scant attention to the digital field, there are significant untapped opportunities in the digital world. This article aims to contribute to these research opportunities by offering a method and methodological intervention to capture the multimodal, user-generated and self-destructing data on the mobile phone application Snapchat. It does this by adapting netnography into an ‘appnography’ to navigate the data…
Critical Security Studies in the Digital Age: Social Media and Security
Exceptional and banal constructions of British muslims in Grenfell: Social boundaries, twitter, superdiversity and online vernacular memory
The Grenfell fire catapulted North Kensington into the spotlight, an area both synonymous with immigration and social policy innovation for over a century. However, it remains under examined how this extraordinary event re‐defined the discursive landscape around British Muslims and how they have been situated in the national landscape. To do this it analyses the twitter activity in the 96 hours after the fire and also the victim profiles publishe…
Tweeting terrorism: Vernacular conceptions of Muslims and terror in the wake of the Manchester Bombing on Twitter
Both vernacular security studies and critical terrorism studies (CTS) offer constructivist analyses of security couched in understandings of security speak. However, neither adequately take account of the ways in which social media presents important opportunities for greater insight into how terrorism is constructed. This study analyses tweets posted after the 2017 Manchester bombing, exploring how jihadist terror attacks are constructed on soci…
I Think Therefore I Don’t Vote”: Discourses on abstention, distrust and twitter politics in the 2017 French presidential election
Memeing and Speaking Vernacular Security on Social Media: YouTube and Twitter Resistance to an Isis Islamist Terror Threat to Marseille, France
This article intervenes in critical terrorism studies and conceptions of vernacular security to argue that social media has become an important arena for everyday constructions of terrorism and (in)security. Rich, multimodal, social media data provide important means to understand digital forms of everyday constructions of (in)security that discuss, subvert, and parody dominant terrorism and security narratives in the wake of the rise of the Isla…
Blackness in Arab transnational television comedy: Fresh pushback against entrenched stereotypes
We address a hitherto understudied site of ‘racial’ representation, namely comedy discourses in contemporary Arab transnational TV, especially in the enormously popular Saudi show Tash Ma Tash (a 1992–2011 Ramadan special). Arab TV comedy’s ‘racial’ representation melds the globally familiar generic depreciation of phenotypical Blackness with traits and tropes distinctive to Nubian Egyptians, Sudanese, and Gulf Afro-Arabs. Symptomatic readings de…
Theorising the ‘Security Influencer’: Speaking security, terror and Muslims on social media during the Manchester bombings
Security studies literature neglects social media’s potential for lay actors to become influential within security debates. This article develops the concept of ‘security influencers’, bringing literature from marketing into the security debate to understand how social media enables individuals to ‘speak’ and contest security and how lay actors exert influence. Methodologically, this article applies a multi-methods approach to 27,367 tweets to id…
Rapping French Cities in the 1990s: Blurring Marseille and Brightening Paris in Contested Processes of Boundary Making
The scholarship on French rap has thus far paid too little attention to social boundary making. This is important given the long-standing sociological importance of territorial boundaries in creating and reenforcing marginalization, especially for ethnic and racial minorities, in French cities. This article highlights the process of boundary making by presenting an analysis of 364 rap tracks from the 1990s. The results demonstrate stark contrasts…
Blurring European and Islamic values or brightening the good – bad Muslim dichotomy? A critical analysis of French Muslim victims of Jihadi terror online on twitter and in Le Monde newspaper
Victimhood remains under analysed in the Critical Terrorism Studies literature, including the abilities of Muslim victims of terror attacks to blurring social boundaries and possibly de-securitise Muslims in Europe. This is of specific importance in France, which has not only suffered the most terror incidents in Europe in the past five years but also is a country where Muslims have been securitised for decades. This paper uses a mixed methods ap…
MacronLeaks as a “warning shot” for European democracies: Challenges to election blackouts presented by social media and election meddling during the 2017 French presidential election
Tweeting Grenfell: Discourse and networks in critical constructions of British Muslim social boundaries on social media
The Grenfell fire has yet to be analysed to understand the event’s implications in relation to construction of social boundaries for British Muslims. In this current research, two methodological approaches are applied to gain understandings of social boundary construction on twitter: thematic analysis of the content of tweets and social network analysis (SNA) of how messages are diffused and contested. Twitter is shown to be an important platform…
Fighting cultural marginalisation with symbolic power in a Parisian banlieue: Post-colonial culture and the voluntary association les Oranges
Purpose – There exists a significant literature detailing the role of voluntary associations as important actors in mitigating forms of marginalisation under austerity. However, neglected in this literature is the role that such voluntary associations can play in forming and deploying “symbolic power” to fight post-colonial, cultural forms of marginalisation. This is important, especially given conditions where material forms of fighting marginal…
Influences on state–society relations in France: Analysing voluntary associations and multicultural dynamism, co-option and retrenchment in Paris, Lyon and Marseille
French governance's ad hoc pluralism has offered scope for the emergence of increasing policy dynamism, particularly at the local level. Important in this process is the relationship between the local state and voluntary associations. However, it still remains little understood what external, exogenous factors shape, challenge and facilitate this relationship between the local state and voluntary associations. This paper seeks to contribute to fi…
Understanding the ( R e)Definition of Nationhood in French Cities: A Case of Multiple States and Multiple Republics
Both theoretical and empirical accounts of the nation have neglected the city as an arena for the (re)definition of national belonging. This article analyses contemporary F rance to advance theoretical and empirical insights into this process. Rather than presenting F rance as characterized by a Republican, assimilationist position, this article argues F rance is better characterized by competing ‘multiple republics’ with numerous definitions of …
European influence on diversity policy frames: Paradoxical outcomes of Lyon's membership of the Intercultural Cities programme
This paper examines the formulation of policy frames towards new minorities in France by analysing Lyon's membership of the European Commission's and Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities programme (ICP). Here, with culture accounting for 20% of Lyon's budget, emphasis is placed on the adoption of the Charte de Coopération Culturelle to use cultural institutions to implement difference-orientated policies. Critically, important issues emerge w…
Geopolitics” and “the Popular: An Exploration
The article explores the conceptual boundaries of “geopolitics” and “the popular.” Various examples, both historical and contemporary, are drawn upon to illustrate the necessary linkages between these two taxonomies. These examples illustrate four main arteries of the deeply rooted popular culture of fear in the United States and of its public's consequent capacity to be mobilized for war. The argument concludes with some pointers for further res…
De-Westernizing Communication Research: Altering questions and changing frameworks
Georgette Wang, London & New York, Routledge, 2011, US$125 (hard), 282 pp. These essays make an interesting contribution to the crucial ongoing debate concerning the impact on the social sciences o
Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media
Uncommunicative partners: Social movement media analysis and radical educators
While the research literature on alternative media, participatory media, tactical media, social movement media, continues to expand and explore this significant realm of public communication, it tends at the present time to be very heavily analytical. This is vital work but, I will argue, insufficient to meet the social and economic demands of the day. A quite frequent absence in this research literature is, equally, attention to the interface be…
Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century by Elisa Camisciolo
How to be French: Nationality in the making since 1789 by Patrick Weil
Lakes and reservoirs as regulators of carbon cycling and climate
We explore the role of lakes in carbon cycling and global climate, examine the mechanisms influencing carbon pools and transformations in lakes, and discuss how the metabolism of carbon in the inland waters is likely to change in response to climate. Furthermore, we project changes as global climate change in the abundance and spatial distribution of lakes in the biosphere, and we revise the estimate for the global extent of carbon transformation…
Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet - by Lisa Nakamura
This new study of digital representations and ‘race’ by Lisa Nakamura follows upon and takes further a number of the key issues flagged in her earlier collection Race in Cyberspace co-edited with Kolko and Rodman (2000), and her monograph Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (2002). It also links to a growing number of studies of this key issue, such as the Lee and Wong co-edited volume AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism…
Social Movement Theories and Alternative Media: An Evaluation and Critique
The urgent need for a dialogue about concepts Social movements matter the constructive ones, the dangerous ones, and the confused ones. Their study has taken on considerable life over the past 20–25 years, beginning with the ‘‘resource mobilization/rational actor’’ and the ‘‘New Social Movements’’ schools, and continuing on with the current ‘‘Contentious Politics’’ network, along with studies of solidarity movements (Giugni & Passy, 2001), social…
De-Westernizing Communication Research: Altering questions and changing frameworks
Georgette Wang, London & New York, Routledge, 2011, US$125 (hard), 282 pp. These essays make an interesting contribution to the crucial ongoing debate concerning the impact on the social sciences o
Internationalizing media theory
Media theory has been too narrowly conceptualized within the experiences of British and American scholars. Because the United States and Great Britain are the two countries where most media research has been done, our ideas of what constitutes a media “theory” have been limited by the cultural, political and economic contexts of these nations. But these two countries are far too similar for us to base general media theories on their experiences. …
The realities of virtual play: Video games and their industry in China
Social Movement Theories and Alternative Media: An Evaluation and Critique
The urgent need for a dialogue about concepts Social movements matter the constructive ones, the dangerous ones, and the confused ones. Their study has taken on considerable life over the past 20–25 years, beginning with the ‘‘resource mobilization/rational actor’’ and the ‘‘New Social Movements’’ schools, and continuing on with the current ‘‘Contentious Politics’’ network, along with studies of solidarity movements (Giugni & Passy, 2001), social…
European influence on diversity policy frames: Paradoxical outcomes of Lyon's membership of the Intercultural Cities programme
This paper examines the formulation of policy frames towards new minorities in France by analysing Lyon's membership of the European Commission's and Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities programme (ICP). Here, with culture accounting for 20% of Lyon's budget, emphasis is placed on the adoption of the Charte de Coopération Culturelle to use cultural institutions to implement difference-orientated policies. Critically, important issues emerge w…
Theorising the ‘Security Influencer’: Speaking security, terror and Muslims on social media during the Manchester bombings
Security studies literature neglects social media’s potential for lay actors to become influential within security debates. This article develops the concept of ‘security influencers’, bringing literature from marketing into the security debate to understand how social media enables individuals to ‘speak’ and contest security and how lay actors exert influence. Methodologically, this article applies a multi-methods approach to 27,367 tweets to id…
Audiences and Readers of Alternative Media: The Absent Lure of the Virtually Unknown
Reasons for the virtual absence of research in this area are proposed, and contrasts between users of conventional media and alternative media audiences suggested, along with a political ethics of listening. Connections between social movements and alternative media uses are discussed, the interplay between political consciousness and alternative media use is examined, and social conditions in which the latter are responded to are explored. Final…
Memeing and Speaking Vernacular Security on Social Media: YouTube and Twitter Resistance to an Isis Islamist Terror Threat to Marseille, France
This article intervenes in critical terrorism studies and conceptions of vernacular security to argue that social media has become an important arena for everyday constructions of terrorism and (in)security. Rich, multimodal, social media data provide important means to understand digital forms of everyday constructions of (in)security that discuss, subvert, and parody dominant terrorism and security narratives in the wake of the rise of the Isla…
Influences on state–society relations in France: Analysing voluntary associations and multicultural dynamism, co-option and retrenchment in Paris, Lyon and Marseille
French governance's ad hoc pluralism has offered scope for the emergence of increasing policy dynamism, particularly at the local level. Important in this process is the relationship between the local state and voluntary associations. However, it still remains little understood what external, exogenous factors shape, challenge and facilitate this relationship between the local state and voluntary associations. This paper seeks to contribute to fi…
Geopolitics” and “the Popular: An Exploration
The article explores the conceptual boundaries of “geopolitics” and “the popular.” Various examples, both historical and contemporary, are drawn upon to illustrate the necessary linkages between these two taxonomies. These examples illustrate four main arteries of the deeply rooted popular culture of fear in the United States and of its public's consequent capacity to be mobilized for war. The argument concludes with some pointers for further res…
Hate Speech' and `First Amendment Absolutism' Discourses in the US
This article argues that the First Amendment to the US Constitution, seen inside and outside the USA as a historical high water-mark of discursive freedom, has suffered from an ideological refusal to acknowledge its dangerous implications for the growth of hate speech, whether against people of color or other subordinated groups. This refusal has led in turn to a virtual vacuum in intelligently conceived strategies to combat hate speech. First, i…
Can a Theory-Laden Observation Test the Theory
Trouble in the Backyard: Soviet Media Reporting on the Afghanistan Conflict
A qualitative analysis of Soviet media coverage of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986 shows that several familiar themes, from unpopular guerrillas to national security, are used to justify the Soviet presence in Afghanistan—and a comparison of U.S. coverage of El Salvador, from secondary sources, throws up some intriguing parallels
The alternative public realm: The organization of the 1980s anti-nuclear press in West Germany and Britain
Tweeting terrorism: Vernacular conceptions of Muslims and terror in the wake of the Manchester Bombing on Twitter
Both vernacular security studies and critical terrorism studies (CTS) offer constructivist analyses of security couched in understandings of security speak. However, neither adequately take account of the ways in which social media presents important opportunities for greater insight into how terrorism is constructed. This study analyses tweets posted after the 2017 Manchester bombing, exploring how jihadist terror attacks are constructed on soci…
Blurring European and Islamic values or brightening the good – bad Muslim dichotomy? A critical analysis of French Muslim victims of Jihadi terror online on twitter and in Le Monde newspaper
Victimhood remains under analysed in the Critical Terrorism Studies literature, including the abilities of Muslim victims of terror attacks to blurring social boundaries and possibly de-securitise Muslims in Europe. This is of specific importance in France, which has not only suffered the most terror incidents in Europe in the past five years but also is a country where Muslims have been securitised for decades. This paper uses a mixed methods ap…
US Media Discourse on South Africa: The Development of a Situation Model
This article provides a developmental analysis of discursive treatment of South Africa in two key US news media, Time and Newsweek. In so doing, it investigates the role of media in relation to political memory and public participation in foreign policy-making in the United States. A brief template of `ideal' media discourse on South Africa is set out in the introduction to enable a contrast with actual media output, and then a detailed analysis …
The Child's Conception of 'A Word
EXAMINES preschool, kindergarten, and first grade children's conceptual understanding of what constitutes a spoken English word. Children were presented with examples of 8 classes of auditory stimuli to which they responded yes if they thought each was a single word and no if they did not. Certain age trends were noted with respect to the number of correct responses to each class of stimuli and to the number of children demonstrating concept atta…
Tweeting Grenfell: Discourse and networks in critical constructions of British Muslim social boundaries on social media
The Grenfell fire has yet to be analysed to understand the event’s implications in relation to construction of social boundaries for British Muslims. In this current research, two methodological approaches are applied to gain understandings of social boundary construction on twitter: thematic analysis of the content of tweets and social network analysis (SNA) of how messages are diffused and contested. Twitter is shown to be an important platform…
Understanding the ( R e)Definition of Nationhood in French Cities: A Case of Multiple States and Multiple Republics
Both theoretical and empirical accounts of the nation have neglected the city as an arena for the (re)definition of national belonging. This article analyses contemporary F rance to advance theoretical and empirical insights into this process. Rather than presenting F rance as characterized by a Republican, assimilationist position, this article argues F rance is better characterized by competing ‘multiple republics’ with numerous definitions of …
The Intersputnik system and soviet television
Cohesiveness, Perception, and Values
Exceptional and banal constructions of British muslims in Grenfell: Social boundaries, twitter, superdiversity and online vernacular memory
The Grenfell fire catapulted North Kensington into the spotlight, an area both synonymous with immigration and social policy innovation for over a century. However, it remains under examined how this extraordinary event re‐defined the discursive landscape around British Muslims and how they have been situated in the national landscape. To do this it analyses the twitter activity in the 96 hours after the fire and also the victim profiles publishe…
I Think Therefore I Don’t Vote”: Discourses on abstention, distrust and twitter politics in the 2017 French presidential election
Blackness in Arab transnational television comedy: Fresh pushback against entrenched stereotypes
We address a hitherto understudied site of ‘racial’ representation, namely comedy discourses in contemporary Arab transnational TV, especially in the enormously popular Saudi show Tash Ma Tash (a 1992–2011 Ramadan special). Arab TV comedy’s ‘racial’ representation melds the globally familiar generic depreciation of phenotypical Blackness with traits and tropes distinctive to Nubian Egyptians, Sudanese, and Gulf Afro-Arabs. Symptomatic readings de…
Cohesiveness, Perception, and Values
The Relationship Between Reading Attainment and the Inconsistency of English Spelling at the Infants' School Stage
The current investigation into the effects of providing infant beginners with books printed in a phonemically regular and limited alphabet with consistent spelling has revived interest in the proposition that the unsystematic spelling of English is a major cause of reading failure. Critics of traditional orthography suggest that it makes the development of the skill of reading too complex a task for the young beginner. The excessive number of var…
Bookreviews
Early problem-solving, learning to read and the development of intelligence
The Initial Teaching Alphabet
The Development of Linguistic Concepts in Children’s Thinking
have the same concepts of language as adults. But do young children understand such categories as sound, word, letter, sentence, when teachers use them in talking about language? If not, what are the stages in the development of such linguistic concepts in children's thinking? What practical help can teachers give to develop their pupils' understanding of such concepts? These are the problems to be discussed in this article
Teaching Race Relations
An Investigation of the Reading Readiness Domain
Preview this article: An Investigation of the Reading Readiness Domain, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/7/1/researchintheteachingofenglish20113-1.gif
Cognitive factors in dyslexia
The Child's Conception of 'A Word
EXAMINES preschool, kindergarten, and first grade children's conceptual understanding of what constitutes a spoken English word. Children were presented with examples of 8 classes of auditory stimuli to which they responded yes if they thought each was a single word and no if they did not. Certain age trends were noted with respect to the number of correct responses to each class of stimuli and to the number of children demonstrating concept atta…
Cultural priorities and the acquisition of literacy
Discussion Review of Reading Comprehension Education in Fifteen Countries
McCullough. For the benefit of the readers, I will begin with a brief summary of what this significant pioneer study is about. Essentially the book is a brief report of an international study that was carefully planned, cooperatively executed, processed with sophistication, and interpreted with admirable circumspection. Beginning in 1959 the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement made pilot studies to determine th…
"Discussion Review of "Reading Comprehension Education in Fifteen Countries
Constance M. McCullough, John Downing, Harold L. Herber, Discussion Review of "Reading Comprehension Education in Fifteen Countries", American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 409-414
A Methodological Critique of the 1973 IEA Survey of Reading Comprehension Education in 15 Countries
THORNDIKE'S REPORT IS CRITICIZED on a number of grounds: 1) The research has no guiding theoretical basis and lacks a general logical framework; consequently, the analyses are post hoc and often unclearly motivated. No attempt is made to relate the study to previous research in reading or in comparative education. 2) Incomplete and often unclear reporting makes it difficult to understand and evaluate the methods used and the results obtained, and…
Sex Role Stereotypes in Learning to Read
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Words, words, words
John Downing Division of Psychological Foundations in Education University of Victoria, Canada W Tilliam Shakespeare has Polonius ask: What do you read, my lord? To which Hamlet replies: Words, words, words. This article is about words words like word and other terms that we use in communicating ideas about reading and writing to each other and to our students. The theme of this article was stated in a nutshell in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh: I
Strategies of bilingual teaching
Computer-Mediated Communication Systems: Status and Evaluation
When Is a Silent Letter Silent
S ummary . The ambiguity of the term “silent letter” may cause logical errors in reading research. A critical analysis of Conrad's theoretical use of data from Corcoran's experiments on silent e cancellation and in proof reading indicates that neither of these authors recognised that a so‐called “silent” letter may or may not be associated with pronunciation. This calls into question evidence that has been advanced to support Conrad's theory that…
The Intersputnik system and soviet television
The alternative public realm: The organization of the 1980s anti-nuclear press in West Germany and Britain
Trouble in the Backyard: Soviet Media Reporting on the Afghanistan Conflict
A qualitative analysis of Soviet media coverage of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986 shows that several familiar themes, from unpopular guerrillas to national security, are used to justify the Soviet presence in Afghanistan—and a comparison of U.S. coverage of El Salvador, from secondary sources, throws up some intriguing parallels
Computers for Political Change: PeaceNet and Public Data Access
Journal Article Computers for Political Change: PeaceNet and Public Data Access Get access John D. H. Downing John D. H. Downing 1John D. H. Downing is Professor of Communications, Hunter College, City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 39, Issue 3, September 1989, Pages 154–162, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1989.tb01049.x Published: 07 February 2…
International Communications and the Second World: Developments in Communication Strategies
There are many forms of communication between the socialist nations, and between them and capitalist countries, such as diplomatic (both conventional and public), party-to-party, scientific and foreign language media services. This article focuses upon the use of media technologies in international communication. It examines (a) TV programme exchange practices and policies; (b) the role of the Intersputnik international satellite organization; (c…
Can a Theory-Laden Observation Test the Theory
Political science (45 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Law (31 works) · Media studies (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Art (12 works)