public sphere

A controversial and comprehensive debate that has resulted in numerous discursive clashes in Iran pertains to the presence of women at stadiums during male soccer matches. Different discourse systems have expressed their own contradictory and opposite stances in terms of whether Iranian women have the right to attend such events inside or outside the stadium, ranging from different notions of ritual pollution and moral threats to gender equality and women rights in public spheres and spaces. When the debate is considered more in depth, a question arises about the female representation of national identity in Iran: What is the status and role of the female body in symbolic demonstration of the national body of Iranian society as a kind of social body? It seems that there is a discursive debate about the symbolic representation of female body in public sphere in Iran. To provide further insight into this question, ethnographic methods, participant observations and different models of interviews (focus and nominal interviews) were employed in the fields and cultural areas under study. The purpose of this article is to examine the systems of discourses about the allowance or prohibition of the presence of women at soccer stadiums and the cultural foundations and backgrounds that have given shape to these discourses over recent decades.

Nowadays with the ever-increasing growth in social media platforms and the creation of different forms of online activism, the word known as “Campaign” has become a familiar and useful term in people’s everyday lives. Campaigns with all kinds of social aims especially using Hashtags are run on social media platforms by individuals, charities, NGOs, governments, municipalities and brand companies and with peoples' participation and value co-creation, appropriate results are achieved and the desired changes are made in people’s attitudes and the behavior of individuals, businesses, or governments. Therefore, there seems to be a new form of a virtual public sphere where there is action, dialog and social mobilization, which leads to the formation of public opinion and social change in the digital era. In this paper, using a critical review method, we are going to investigate a public sphere's literature and study its core features (1. access, 2. dialog, 3. action, and 4. public opinion) in digital campaigns and online platforms. Then, in the last part, we are going to map those in a real case study in order to further clarify the arguments and show how social campaigns on online platforms contribute to the formation of a public sphere in the digital era.

After offering an overview of some of the main themes of Popper’s political thought, the paper argues that his account faces two problems relating to institutions. The first is that while Popper stresses the ‘rational unity of mankind’, and the potential for any of us to furnish criticisms of public policy, it is not clear what institutional means currently exist for this to enable this to take place. Second, Popper has stressed the conjectural character of even our best theories. However, at any point, some theories will have fared better in the face of criticism than others, and they may give us important information about constraints on our actions. At the same time, as ordinary citizens we may not be in a good position to understand the theories in question, let alone appraise the state of the specialised discussion of them. There is, it is suggested, a case for thinking of ways to institutionally entrench such fallible theories, especially in the current setting in which social media play an important role

Media is considered as one of the ideological apparatuses. This research is based on the question in parallel of enhancing technology and the formation of new media, as well as change passive audience into the active user, can these media still be called ideological? If so, the question is that how does the new media, despite the adaptation of interaction from the internet, find the ideological function? This paper discusses the role of the concept of the ideology for understanding social media critically. This study based on Althusser's definition of ideology and Habermas's theory about the public sphere creates consultative democracy led it to evaluate new media, their behavior and practices. The paper was developed based on a qualitative approach and descriptive-analytical method. As a result, new media owners are looking to create a two-tier Internet in which commercial content is more important than public content. Commercial content is managed by the ruling power and is governed by an ideology, which is the ideology of the ruling class. On the contrary, public content is controlled by media owners and contains a variety of ideologies that carry different ideas and meanings. The contemporary media system, through its ownership has divided media audiences into smaller groups (specific audiences), and has severely restricted fair access and participation in the public sphere, so that the ideological aspect of new media remains unchanged, but it emerges in the new shapes.