Journal articles on the topic 'Dialogical public intellectual'

AbstractThe paper provides an analysis of Martin Buber’s intellectual conversion and shows how it facilitates a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism. Buber, who is today known mainly as a key representative of dialogical philosophy, was in the 1910s part of the double wave of German and Jewish nationalism which strongly affected the German-speaking Jewish public. Buber provided intellectual support for this wave of nationalism and interpreted World War I as a unique chance for the spiritual unification of European Jewry. Consequent to his conflict with Gustav Landauer Buber underwent a complex intellectual and existential transformation. He abandoned key concepts of his pre-dialogical thought and laid the foundations of his dialogical thought. He rejected his endorsement of Geman nationalism and substantially reevaluated his political positions. The analysis of Buber’s intellectual development sheds light on some important aspects of the dynamics of nationalism.

Implementation of the cultural and educational mission by a person who considers himself a philosopher is not possible without public participation as an interaction outside the formal curricula of the university structure, that is, without performing the role of a public intellectual. Of course, the definition of a university teacher as a public intellectual can be treated as a promotion of corporate interest, because there is a risk of thinking about "intellectual" activity as a kind of PR, for example, for the institution, discipline or the research group. This is a legitimate task in educational institutions with an instrumental character that should not be confused with the intellectual tasks of individuals and institutions. Secondly, there are strong tendencies to confuse an intellectual role with an expert role. But the intellectual task, first of all, is focused on the cultural and ideological spheres of society. It should be emphasized that today the role reality of a public philosopher has changed. Previously, he was an intelligent intellectual, a social and political expert, but now he is a dialogical public intellectual. They are no longer authorities and judges of national character, identity and future but cultural intermediaries, whose function in addition to implementation or presentation of certain ideas, objects, and narratives is also to involve and translate other philosophical positions in different contexts during current negotiations about the issues that have cultural and social significance.

The internet and digital platforms provide commentary- and opinion-based journalism with new opportunities to develop into new digital formats, such as podcasts. This article is based on the case studies of four Norwegian podcasts in 2020 and 2021. The findings show that commentary journalism in the form of podcasts has an obvious dual purpose: as publicity and as a commercial. The podcast facilitates a societal mission for the public while creating branded goods for the companies involved. Based on the material and the categories we had constructed, we developed a set of binaries that, understood as typologies, capture important dimensions of the differences between the podcasts. These binaries are monologue vs. dialogue, factual vs. personal, reflexive vs. assertive, and intellectual discussants vs. experts. In the article, we discuss how podcasts draw commentary journalism in a dialogical direction. We also discuss what impact this has upon public reasoning and the democratic role of commentary journalism.

<strong>Abstract</strong> This article argues that a holistic reading of David Graeber&rsquo;s <em>oeuvre</em> reveals a coherent and systematic intellectual and political project. We argue that his theories, public interventions, analyses, or ideas scattered across different (sub)disciplines, formats, and topics as diverse as non-state spaces, anarchist anthropology, democracy, mutual aid, debt, bureaucracy, bullshit jobs, kings and a different understanding of history and the development of science, should be understood as a well-considered and systematic attempt to reimagine and reposition the role of scholarship in a search for a radically different political and economic model. We focus on dialogue as the centre of both Graeber&rsquo;s scholarship and politics. For Graeber, dialogue has always been the primary anthropological method, not only in terms of fieldwork but also in the context of the collective or dialogic emergence of ideas. At the same time, dialogue is the very core of his politics as a collective attempt to reconcile unconsummatable perspectives in a practical situation of action. Finally, we explore Graeber&rsquo;s idea of care and freedom as a new political and economic paradigm. We consider Graeber&rsquo;s simple and yet infinitely complex question: why not use the ideas of care and freedom, instead of production and consumption, as a basis for political economy, which should, after all, only be a way to take care of each other?

Narratives of war and history are central to the development of nationhood. Within the distinctive context of New Zealand decolonisation, The New Zealand Wars documentary series offers a revised version of a formative moment in New Zealand history. This paper draws upon textual analysis and audience research to explore the potential of this series to function as a catalyst within the process of decolonisation. The television broadcast of this five-part series has arguably played a role in evoking a reimagining of the New Zealand ‘nation’, and in opening a space for public debate. This recently invigorated debate can be characterised by the negotiation of a number of discourses of ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘nationhood’. While examples of this public negotiation illustrate the social and intellectual activity involved in the process of making sense of a documentary text, a closer examination of audience response to this series reveals an especially emotional, even ‘mimetic’, dimension of engagement. The few available examples of documentary audience research have tended to focus on intellectual and social processes of negotiating meaning. Through a discussion of passionate responses to The New Zealand Wars series, this paper posits an argument for extending the traditional conceptualisation of documentary audience engagement beyond the intellectual, to include a visceral dimension. Rather than viewing these different types of activity as diametrically opposed, they are considered here to be interconnected elements within a dialogical and experiential encounter between the viewer and the documentary text.

This article traces the motif of English education in Justice Syed Mahmood’s intellectual history and demonstrates the dialogical nature of knowledge formation in British India. While his own educational experience at Cambridge University had a profound and lasting impact on his own conception of the nature and purpose of education, Mahmood transformed and adapted that experiential knowledge to serve his predominant public concerns. He was increasingly committed to arresting the perceived decline in social standing, political influence and above all educational competence of the Muslim community in India. Seeing government service as the birthright of the ashraf Muslim classes, he encouraged the creation of institutions that would facilitate the training of young men from fine families to become effective bureaucrats in the government machinery of British India. In all these endeavours, Mahmood considered the promotion of English education to be the key to real progress for individuals and for the Muslim community.

This article explores the evolution of Jewish–Christian dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church, focusing on the theological and pastoral contributions of three post-Vatican II Popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. Beginning with the transformative Nostra Ætate declaration of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), this study examines how each Pope uniquely advanced Jewish–Christian relations through doctrinal development, symbolic gestures, and interreligious dialogue. John Paul II’s performative theology emphasized reconciliation and outreach, significantly enhancing Jewish–Christian relations through groundbreaking gestures and public declarations. Benedict XVI sought to deepen the theological foundations of Jewish–Christian dialogue, integrating it into broader Roman Catholic theology while navigating challenges of reception due to his intellectual style. Francis emphasized relational warmth, shared ethical commitments, and a theology of reconciliation, fostering a more inclusive and dialogical approach to interreligious engagement. By analysing the continuities and discontinuities in the approaches of these three Popes, this article highlights the dynamic interplay between theology, symbolism, and pastoral care in advancing Jewish–Christian relations, offering a comprehensive overview of a pivotal era in interreligious dialogue.

The people of Rowoboni Village have not optimized the potential of water hyacinths in Lake Rawapening. People only work as laborers picking water hyacinths and selling raw to collectors. It does not improve the community’s economy because the selling price of water hyacinths is still lower than that of water hyacinths processed into handicraft products. This study aims to describe the process of water hyacinth Iboni craft community empowerment to improve community welfare and economy. This qualitative approach used in-depth interview techniques with 14 participants consisting of one manager, seven workers, four devices village, one farmer, and one hyacinth collector who are considered to have precise information related to the focus of the research. Data collection techniques in this study used observation, interviews, and documentation. Data validity applied source triangulation techniques, and the data were analyzed through data collection, reduction, presentation, and conclusions. The results of this study show that the empowerment process of Iboni craft consists of 3 stages, namely 1) awareness and behavior formation, 2) knowledge and skills transformation, and 3) intellectual and skills enrichment or improvement. The economic impact of this empowerment program is increasing people’s income and welfare. The conclusion is that the empowerment process of Iboni Craft consists of 3 stages: 1) awareness and behavior formation through Dialogical communication or word of mouth to the public, 2) knowledge and skills transformation through group training, and independent training with the manager of Iboni Craft, 3) intellectual and skills enrichment or improvement where the workforce begins to produce independently following consumer demand. The economic impact of this empowerment program is an increase in family income, which can provide the family with a second source of income.

The article analyzes the relevance, factors and prospects of the transformation of modern sociological science. It is noted that digital technologies significantly change the fundamental foundations of social interaction, most everyday social practices, structures and conflicts. This poses a number of serious challenges to sociology as a science. It is emphasized that it is time to think deeply not only about the problem of transformation of what sociology studies, but also about the transformation of sociology itself as a specific intellectual practice. Attention is focused on the need for sociological analysis and interpretation of large-scale and long-term social processes, changes in the traditional way of sociology's participation in the formation of state social policy and the implementation of social reforms. Endogenous factors hindering the leadership of sociological science in the modern public intellectual discourse are identified, namely: fragmentation of sociology, its division into a huge number of directions, particular, local thematizations; lack of research attention of sociologists to the fundamental problems of social life; modern sociology does not form an agenda for public intellectual discourse and scientific research, does not define the problematic field of research and interpretation both at the microsocial level and at the level of societal and global phenomena; it is not socially engaged, does not engage in dialogic interaction with various groups of the public, does not help them to realize their values, interests and problems, to fight for their solution; sociologists do not show activity in related research areas (for example, such as social communications, public relations, advertising, marketing, political consulting, conflict studies), do not use for this a rich arsenal of sociological theoretical concepts, quantitative and qualitative methods; despite the mediatization of social life, sociology is not sufficiently media-based, it is extremely weakly present in the media space. A conclusion is formulated about the need to transform sociological thinking and sociological imagination, the need for serious changes in the educational programs of professional training of students, in particular their practical component, the search for new formats of professional communication.

There are many efforts to defend the Humanities against countless attacks by university administrators, the public, and, implicitly, even by students. In light of those problems, this article returns to three of the most important intellectuals in the history of western culture, St. Augustine, Boethius, and Francesco Petrarch, examining their respective fundamental dialogic narratives in which they probed their own self and discovered answers to the most critical questions in life. This paper suggests that we can profoundly promote the Humanities by returning to the bedrock of our discipline established by these three authors whose concepts about the self and its relationship with the transcendental being (the divine, Summum bonum, etc.) continue to offer central perspective also for the twenty-first century.

The present work, the result of the dialogical authorship between an indigenous academic and researcher and two non-indigenous researchers involved in this theme, intends to contribute to greater visibility and recognition of the trajectories of indigenous scholars and professionals formed by public universities in a recent context of affirmative actions that enable the entry and permanence of indigenous and afro-descendant populations in Brazil and Latin America. These subjects have been inserted in the higher education and intensively worked in the most different spaces of student stay, of political struggles, of social and cultural recognition, not only in academic environments but also in the daily life of their communities of belonging. It is a qualitative research, carried out through bibliographical review, documentary research and the report of the experience of an indigenous academic and researcher. The undertaken reflections highlight the daily challenges experienced by indigenous peoples as researchers, intellectuals, protagonists, subjects and authors of the knowledge produced by them, inaugurating an unprecedented moment in the history of indigenous people in Brazil and contributing to new strategies of resistance and strengthening of indigenous people struggles.

The 11th -12th century Abbasid philosopher al-Ghazālī is the center of controversy today in Western societies seeking to understand Islamic radicalism. The article initially examines the al-Ghazālī debate, split between popular images of al-Ghazālī as a fanatical enemy of rational thought, and scholarly depictions of a forerunner of postmodernism. After analyzing a principle example of the latter tendency, centered on the Persian term dihlīz, the article undertakes a sociological investigation of al-Ghazālī’s Alchemy of Happiness within the historic context of the Abbasid crisis of political legitimacy. The troubled historic vista of Abbasid politics, the unique role of al-Ghazālī as representative of ideological power, and the crucial influence of the intercontinental Sufi revolution, are discussed. The analysis focuses on al-Ghazālī’s central concepts of deen (faith) and donya (the secular), that he employed to stabilize and guarantee the continued political success of the multi-civilizational Abbasid state. Spurning the dogma of unified identity, al-Ghazālī recognized the civilizational pluralism underpinning Abbasid political survival. Reconciling multiplicity and unity, al-Ghazālī labored to integrate Islamic and non-Islamic intellectual traditions. Three elements are investigated: (1) Investing epistemology with social significance, al-Ghazālī opposed orthodox conformism; (2) Denouncing ignorance, the passions, and intellectual confusion, al-Ghazālī promoted the dialogic principle – not dogma - as the unique public guarantee of the universal truth; (3) This universal truth had an exclusively secular, not religious, dimension, based on the deen/donya distinction, separating universal secular truth from religious identity. An intellectual exploration of the secular dilemma, of corresponding imaginative magnitude, hardly existed in Western societies at the time. This casts doubt on the current academic enthusiasm for representing traditional Islam in the mirror image of French post-structuralism, and the false depiction of al-Ghazālī as the dogmatic enemy of reason. It opens an entire terrain of possible research that is barely tapped, which contradicts the confused dogmas of Islamic radicalism. A secular conceptual dualism pervaded the Islamic tradition, indeed pre-dating European secularism.

doctrine but as a basic epistemology in Islamic education that encourages reflective awareness and pluralistic values. By integrating the philosophical-anthropological dimensions of humans as 'abd Allah and khalīfah fī al-ardh, inclusive tawhid views humans as unfinished beings who need mujahadah, spiritual and intellectual struggle through a meaningful educational process. Amid global challenges such as Islamophobia, ideological polarization, and identity crisis in a multicultural society, inclusive tawhid offers a transformative education model that builds solidarity based on universal spirituality, not doctrinal uniformity. This research uses an exploratory qualitative approach with a comprehensive literature study of scientific publications related to inclusive tawhid-based Islamic education. Data were collected from accredited journal articles, academic books, and public secondary sources, then thematically analyzed to identify patterns, values, and philosophical foundations in the discourse of inclusive Islamic education. The results show that inclusive tawhid is a strong epistemological basis for reconstructing a more dialogic, tolerant, and humanistic Islamic education paradigm. In addition, this study emphasizes the urgency of reforming the national curriculum to be more sensitive to religious and cultural plurality and to get out of the normative-liberal and conservative-literal dichotomy. This study provides a theoretical contribution to the philosophy of Islamic education and a strategic foundation for curriculum development based on universal ethical and spiritual values.

Background/Context Urban public high schools serving low-SES communities historically have underserved nondominant culturally and linguistically diverse students by divesting them of social and cultural resources and delivering impoverished curriculum and instruction. Associated with such subtractive schooling, many Latinx youth have suffered from academic disengagement and limited academic success and futures. Focus of Study This study investigates one school's efforts to promote Latinx students’ academic and intellectual engagement through a schoolwide system of performance-based assessments (PBAs) that featured meaningful, embodied, discourse-rich activities, many of which occurred beyond classrooms during after-school hours. We examine the scope of PBA opportunity across the school and the ways educators enacted PBAs to optimize nondominant students’ engagement. We also report the organizational structures that enabled the PBA system and some implementation challenges/tensions. Setting This study features Mario Molina High, a small urban Title 1 public California school serving 262 students, of whom 90% received free/reduced-price lunches, 76% were Latinx, and 33% were emergent bilinguals. MHS emphasized an explicit social justice mission and had a record of some success with Latinx students, as measured by graduation and college-going rates, course completion for admission to California universities, and standardized achievement tests. Research Design We treat MHS as a “critical case,” holding strategic importance to the problem on which the study focuses. Using qualitative methods, we employed a bi-level design to uncover links between school organization and instruction. Data Collection and Analysis We drew on 240 hours of school observations, with special attention to PBA enactments. We also drew on 45 interviews with key stakeholders; faculty survey responses; school documents; student work; and email list communications. Our analysis involved thematic coding, memos, metamatrices, and situated/discourse analyses. Findings/Results MHS's PBAs drew school actors out of the spatial/temporal boundaries of classrooms and fostered serious, spirited, interactive spaces for learning. Three aspects of PBAs—authentic audiences, embodied action, and dialogic argumentation—transformed these assessments into what we call performance-based engagements (PBEs). This shift enhanced students’ engagement and contributed to a schoolwide culture of engaged learning. We argue that sustained participation in PBEs encouraged students to experiment with and adopt expanded practice-based identities as critical thinkers and change agents. Conclusions/Recommendations Our study suggests how the schoolwide implementation of dynamic, innovative, and culturally sustaining forms of assessment can expand and revivify traditional school learning in ways that promote the academic and intellectual engagement of historically underserved students.

Background. Objectives and methodology of the research. An attempt is made to consider the vocal-performing work of the People’s Artist of Ukraine Tetiana Vierkina in the aspect of the “actual intoning” concept, which was developed in her PhD thesis. “Actual intoning” is interpreted by the researcher not only as the performer’s work, who turned the author’s text into the sound reality, into a living speech utterance, but also as the desire to fill her interpretation with relevant meanings that are significant for the modern era. The scientific work by T. Vierkina, devoted to the problems of intoning, grew out from a generalization of her many years of experience – artistic and pedagogical. However, in the field of view of the musicologists studying the performing art of T. Vierkina, mainly, her pianistic mastery proves to be. However, in Ukraine, as in the cities of Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, T. Vierkina is also known as a chamber singer, the owner of a very beautiful soprano, a performer with a peculiar manner of singing. Being not as powerful and dense as opera voices, the singer’s voice nevertheless sounds good in large concert halls with the accompaniment of symphony orchestras thanks to her technique of bright, sonorous sound. Having a recognizable, unique timbre, Tetiana Vierkina subordinates it to the tasks of expressively meaningful singing, finds her place among the intellectual type of singers. Two main directions in her vocal repertoire are defined – domestic, classical romance, pop songs of the 19th–20th centuries, on the one hand, and chambervocal music by Kharkiv composers, on the other. The purpose of this article is to consider only one direction in the vocal performing creativity by T. Vierkina related to her romances singing repertoire. The research is based on five romances representing the Pushkin-Glinka era –“You’ll never understand my sadness” by A. Gurilev to the poem of V. Beshentsov, “Don’t wake her at the dawn” by A. Varlamov to the poem of A. Fet, “When minute of the life is hard” to the poem of M. Lermontov – and the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry:“No, he didn’t love” by A. Guercia to the poem of E. Del Preite, in the Russian translation of M. Medvedev and “The Lord’s Ball” by A. Vertinsky to the poem of the author. An analysis of the interpretations of these works is included in the historical context, referring to some other interpretations of their musical text, to reveal the originality of the images and meanings created by T. Vierkina. The features of the artist’s creative formation and the circumstances of her life, which influenced her performing style, are taken into account. Thus, the general scientific methods of historical retrospection, comparison, generalization are used in this work, as well as the complex methodology of analytical musical-theoretical researches that correlated with B. Asafiev’s theory of intonation. Research results. The paper describes main features of the singing art of T. Vierkina, the artist with a beautiful timbre of her voice, which has a wide range capable of covering both soprano and mezzo-soprano. A brief overview of the vocal performance of T. Vierkina as a chamber singer is presented. The role of the Petersburg vocal teacher Raisa Christie, under whose guidance T. Vierkina perfected her singing technique and was supported in her search for an intonationally meaningful manner of singing, is shown. Turning to the analytical material, the author emphasizes means of expressiveness, with the help of which the singer creates completely different images on the basis of five romances. High, penetrating elegiac character of the Glinka type in the work of A. Gurilev is combined with the subtle understanding of the dialogical nature of the romance genre – the singer interprets each verse as an increasingly tense “phase” in her communication with an invisible interlocutor. In the song-romance of A. Varlamov, the singer goes by the parallelism of images of nature and a young beauty. The singer organizes the couplet-stanza form in a three-part composition, where the first and last sections (the nature waking up at sunrise plays with morning colors on the cheeks of a sleeping girl) contrast with the central one, in which the image of the night, the time of love anxieties and longings, dominates. At first, the singer’s voice is distinguished by its primary “instrumentality”, ease and purity of sound, while in the “night scene” it acquires greater density, verbal expressiveness. In the Bulakhov’s elegy, subtle penetration into the composer’s concept, which comes in a certain contradiction with Lermontov’s intent, makes it attractive. The poet reveals the effect of prayer as a process that begins “when minute of the life is hard”, and ends with the liberation of the hero from the burden of doubt. Bulakhov, on the contrary, choosing for the romance a gloomy, mournful tonality in B minor keeps it unchanged throughout the entire work, with the exception of episodic deviation to the parallel major, emphasizing the static contemplation of the image of the hero, who thinks suffering itself as grace, as effort of the soul aspiring to God. When considering the last two romances (“No, he didn’t love” and “The Lord’s Ball”), references were made to the interpretations of other performers, who each in their own time and in their own way updated these works (V. Komissarzhevskaya, N. Alisova, A. Vertinsky, V. Vysotsky and others). T. Vierkina’s versions of the two romances are analyzed. The first one attracts with light associations with the free gypsy style of singing (improvisation, use of the larynx-nasal timbre, changing of the metro-rhythm, compression-stretching, free transitions from tempo slowdowns to accelerated movement, transitions from singing to chanting words, etc.). In the song-arietta by A. Vertinsky, the emphasis is on elegance, intonation of sympathy for the heroine, whose life flew in ghostly dreams. The singer narrates, distancing herself from the heroine, then, seems to transform into her, then comments, rising above the “action”. Conclusions. Works created almost two centuries ago, performed by T. Vierkina, become significant and relevant for her contemporaries. In the romance she emphasizes the richness and depth of emotional experiences, which turns it into a kind of “encyclopedia” and, at the same time, “school of feelings”. This school, according to the singer, is called upon to resist the ever-increasing impoverishment of the emotional life of people in the era of technological progress and the increasing popularity of communications in the virtual space of the Internet. T. Vierkina believes that with the classic romance the art of representing ordinary human feelings in the light of a high ideal, reflecting them openly, sincerely, and confidentially, is a part of our life. Evenings of T. Vyerkina’s romances have always been significant events in the musical life of Kharkiv, which drew the attention of the public. The singer’s desire to “actualize” the genre, make it a “barometer” of the moods of her contemporaries, always find support among admirers of her artistic talent – all the singer’s concert performances end with “mass singing” – performance of some popular romance by all the listeners in the hall.

This paper examines how social media is providing a new digital public sphere and shaping the democratic process in Ghana. It draws on Habermas's public sphere theory to explore how social media has occupied a digital public sphere that creates spaces for democratic participation and public discourse. The paper reviews relevant literature on social media use as a tool of political communication, the new digital public sphere, and the democratic process in Ghana and globally. Since Ghana's return to democratic rule in 1992, the media landscape was initially dominated by traditional state and private media outlets. However, the rise of digital and social media over the past two decades has transformed the public sphere, creating online spaces for citizens to engage in political deliberations and share diverse viewpoints. The paper examines how social media played a crucial role in Ghana's 2020 elections, facilitating citizen political participation, public opinion formation, and activism despite COVID-19 restrictions on physical gatherings. Social media enabled political parties to campaign online, citizens to voice concerns, and interest groups to mobilize protests and demand accountability. While acknowledging the digital divide and attempts by political elites to control narratives, the paper argues that social media's interactive and connective structure has enhanced the public sphere by dismantling dominant discourses and amplifying alternative perspectives. The paper concludes by recommending robust fact-checking mechanisms and collaborative efforts from government, civil society, media, and interest groups to strengthen the digital public sphere's role in consolidating Ghana's democracy. 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Issue 56 includes articles whose themes are related to rhetoric, communication, manifestations of dialogue in society, literature, art, education. Nine articles, written by nine authors, are divided into three thematic sections. There is also a Book Review section in this issue. This follows the tradition of presenting results of researches in areas where rhetoric has been operating for decades (society, business, literature, education, media) or is entering new areas (such as the Internet, social networks, software applications, chatbots, artificial intelligence). The first thematic area is Rhetoric, Communication, Dialogue. It includes three articles that outline different research fields, which have points of intersection. The studies are presented through the prism of different sciences and are carried out using contemporary methods. Katya Mihailova explores the manifestations of dialogue and monologue in society, analyzing an interesting and understudied object, which is the contemporary intellectual. Ivanka Mavrodieva explores dialogue in virtual environments, specifically between a human and a chatbot, on topics related to rhetoric, approbating a methodology including the cyberethnographic method and the autocybertenographic observation. Radeya Gesheva analyses dialogue and monologue in the context of twentieth-century Italian literature, choosing an interesting research angle (the body in works of fiction). The second section “Communication, Dialogue, Education” brings together four articles, each containing the results of analysis and research in education. Again, the focus in these texts is on communication and dialogue. Nikolina Tsvetkova analyzes foreign language teaching and inter-subject relations in the university context. Maya Sotirova examines curricula and theoretical formulations on a current topic in the Bulgarian education system: the development of dialogic primary students’ oral communication skills. Models for conceptualizing trust in pedagogical communication between teachers and parents are examined theoretically and methodologically by Gergana Kuteva, and again the topic stands out for its relevance in the field of education. Following the premises of forming and improving communication and presentation skills Valeria Kardashevska presents results of research, techniques and modern approaches to improving orators’ and presenters’ voice and speaking skills. The topicality of the included themes is also evident in the articles of the third section Communication, Libraries, Business, devoted to communication and its manifestations in libraries and in business. Boryana Kozareva analyses user-information communication in libraries in traditional and contemporary terms, reaching also to chatbots and software applications; the author draws a model of behaviour and presents justified conclusions, which can also be regarded as recommendations on an expert basis. Daniel Vassilev focuses on communication in the decision-making process in public and private organizations in Bulgaria and discloses research results using a comparative approach. Stefan Serezliev presents the book written by Ivo Iv. Velinov On Tourism. Five Tourist Walks in the Economy of Culture and Heritage, published by the New Bulgarian University, which comments on the ideas of famous semioticians, their applicability in the professional practice and the rhetorical system of tourism, organizing the poetics of travel (the signifier) and the world of tourism (the signified). Rhetoric and Communications Journal, issue 56, July 2023

The concept of identity has been approached from multiple perspectives, as the self always relates to everything and everybody that surrounds it, getting adjusted by every experience it passes through, in a continuous attempt to gain self-apprehension and to recover its sense of belonging. Place, time, emotions, culture are only a few of the factors that impact upon the self, reconfiguring it, as a result of the “troubled condition of the individual, displaced and oscillating between cultures” (Dobrinescu 2017: 156). It is the quest for personal identity, against the background of social relations, that urges the individual to accept or to reject some configurations and representations of his/her self. This personal-social dichotomy has received scholarly attention, engendering numerous theories that aim to integrate the eclectic nature of identity into a coherent picture. Nevertheless, identity should rather be viewed in its own making, as a process, emerging from constant and fluctuating identities (Hall 1997) and leading to permanent or volatile identity fragments (Norris 2011). As Lawler (2014) argues, despite having a stable core embedding both sameness and difference at the same time, identity is produced in the flow of social relationships. Moreover, as Simon (2004) would add, identity is not only socially constructed and negotiated, but also represented and conceptualised at a cognitive level. Thus, identity pertains to the individual’s own perception of him/herself, to the way s/he wants to be perceived by the others, and to the feedback s/he receives throughout the social interactions. Therefore, the individual will get the complete picture of his/her identity once s/he manages to bind “untold and repressed stories” and “the actual stories the subject can take up to and hold as constitutive of his personal identity” (Ricoeur 1984: 74). The contributions in this special issue surpass the boundaries imposed by the Self-Other dichotomy that pervades scholarly research, pinpointing to the multifaceted nature of identity. Its versatility is clearly reflected in the semiotic resources people use to express their identity. Regardless of whether they have it acknowledged by the others or not, they adopt different “stylistic resources” resulting into social semiotic manifestations that best reflect their identity. In Van Leeuwen’s (2022: 2) words: “…not only stable but also hybrid and conflicted or confused identities manifest themselves through different uses of shape, colour, texture, timbre and movement” that are “socially and culturally valued and regulated”. Such signifiers of identity distinguish or, on the contrary, unite different categories of people. “Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other”, as Derrida (1981: 27) explains it. And he goes on saying that “Differences are the effects of transformations…”. Identity production is such a transformation that results into manifest, perceptible difference. Broadly speaking, the contributions in this special issue highlight the sociolinguistic significance of the personal, the relational, and the collective sense of self, as outlined by a variety of genres, such as postmodern autobiographies, film adaptations, essays, novels and short stories, linguistic usage guidebooks, the discourse of education focused on the teaching of stylistic devices, and political cartoons. As surveyed by numerous studies (e.g. Hecht 1993, Brewer and Gardner 1996, Jenkins 2008), the three perspectives on identity pinpoint either to the psychological approaches that mainly focus on the individual and group membership level, or to the interactional approaches that delve into the interpersonal level of identity construction and negotiation, emphasising its sociopragmatic dimensions, such as identity positioning and (mis)management of face (Spencer-Oatey 2007) or the dialogic nature of identity (Feller 2014). This special issue of the Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education proceeds with Tidita Abdurrahmani’s (Bedër University College, Tirana, Albania) contribution entitled “Otherness and contemporaneity of identities in black female autobiography at the turn of the 21st century”. Drawing on a couple of feminist studies by Teresa de Lauretis (1986) or Simone de Beauvoir (1973), as well as on the postmodernist view of alterity as propounded by Gergen (1993) and Vegas-Gonzáles (2001), the study provides an insightful analysis of the multiplicity and specificity of the ethnic self as revealed by two autobiographical writings, namely: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde and Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood by bell hooks. Aware of their matrilineal heritage, the protagonists find the power to acknowledge the conflictual selves or even the Otherness within themselves. Thus, it is argued that a key aspect of the postmodern Self is the continuous pursuit of wholeness and the reconciliation of its fragmented nature. In his contribution, Franck Colotte (Université Clermont Auvergne, France) explores the transfer of meaning and ideology from Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues to Xavier Giannoli’s film Lost Illusions. These shattered illusions belong to the young man from the provinces, Lucien Chardon, who is mesmerised, challenged, and finally defeated by the Parisian mirage in his quest for social recognition. Scholars often debate the extent to which an adaptation should remain faithful to the source material. Some adaptations aim for a high degree of fidelity, closely mirroring the original work, while others embrace transformation, interpreting the source in new and innovative ways. Frank Colotte delves into the techniques employed by Xavier Giannoli to structure the Balzacian narrative and to engage the viewers. By focusing the film on the central portion of the novel, which details Lucien’s time in Paris, and shifting the plot into the background while highlighting the interactions among characters, Giannoli effectively immerses the audience in the ruthless world of the press, outlining economic and social struggles, along with the relentless pursuit of social success. The study conducted by Anca Dobrinescu (Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Romania) critically explores Virginia Woolf’s multimodal techniques that she employs in her essay Three Guineas, including drawing, painting, photography, along with the literary ones, to demonstrate how the interplay of text and image enhances the impact and memorability of the conveyed message, thereby fostering a lasting effect on the reader. The article not only validates Woolf’s masterful experimentation across artistic boundaries, but also underscores her acute awareness of contemporary social issues, such as gender disparities, education, and war, all of which are explored as (dis)connections between the Public and the Private. “Otherness from a Chinese Perspective and Mo Yan’s Hallucinatory Realism” is an expository piece of writing, aimed at conveying the author’s preoccupations with the unnecessarily rigid understanding of “Otherness”, especially in the context of Chinese literary theory. Marius Virgil Florea (Shanghai International Studies University, China) creates a correlation between historical, cultural and geopolitical perspectives and their impact on literature in the perceived chasm of East and West. The paper starts with a detailed account of the rise and development of realism in China, a movement focused on topics such as society, morals, economy, and history. In order to highlight the connection between Chinese and Western literature, the author chooses to examine the Chinese critical reception of Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan, whose work has elicited polarized interpretations. Mo Yan’s style, characterised by a combination of magic realism, modernist elements and influences from both traditional Chinese literature and Western literature, led to two divergent critical opinions, one viewing his work as a continuation of the great Chinese literary tradition with minimal foreign influence, and the other characterising it as an imitation of Western literature. Nevertheless, as Marius Virgil Florea points out, Mo Yan’s work serves as the most effective means to challenge the enduring myth of the incompatibility between West and East, demonstrating that the two cultures can coexist and mutually influence one another without contradiction. Loredana Netedu’s (Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Romania) contribution represents an excellent study of decoding the meaning in contemporary Romanian comic strips by means of a diligent semiotic analysis. Even though the extant literature refers to it in various terms, such as “hybrid genre” (Kaindl 2004), “graphic art” (Inge 1990), or “visual narrative” (Eisner 2008), all studies acknowledge the multimodal nature of the genre, with its dramatic qualities underscored by the dynamic action and the character-driven message delivery. The corpus consists of the comic strips produced by HAC! magazine, representing the reconstruction of one of the traditional Romanian fairy tale written by Ion Creangă, namely Povestea lui Harap Alb (The Story of the White Moor). Thus, HAC! stands for Harap Alb continuă (The White Moor Continues) and involves the transposition of the source text into a successful piece of fanfiction and a metacomic. The research shows how traditional Romanian values can be revived and brought to the attention of both the young and the old generations by using a modern and attractive form of communication, in which the visual and the verbal narratives intertwine. The analysis and interpretation of the data is thoroughly and vividly presented, while the rewriting of canonic texts is clearly explained. Advocating a sociolinguistic perspective complemented by Fillmore’s (1975) frame semantics and Langacker’s (1990) profile/base theory, Adina Oana Nicolae (Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti) investigates a small corpus of nominal pairs employed in British and American English, selected from several usage guidebooks. The study highlights the semantic differences that emerge between apparently synonymous lexical items, which, although profiling a shared concept, convey distinct meanings shaped by the cognitive framing influenced by cultural, social, or legal contexts. The analysis accounts for the way in which seemingly equivalent nominal phrases belonging to British and American English give prominence to various features of the same object or action, leading to their different conceptualisation and implicitly to different interpretations, as a result of the background knowledge they activate in the human cognitive domain. Therefore, such an approach to dialectal variation also underscores the mental images speakers project via the lexical choices they make, thereby revealing a wide range of ideas and experiences that shape our communication and the way we present ourselves to others. In their joint contribution, Irena Shehu (University College Beder, Albania) and Enkeleda Jata (Agricultural University of Tirana, Albania) argue that stylistic devices such as zeugma, puns, and oxymoron, combined with artistic elements like humour and media, contribute to the multimodal construction of identity in the classroom by engaging students emotionally and intellectually. These devices help create a learning environment where students not only develop language skills but they also express their identities. The integration of these elements allows students to relate new information to their own experiences, facilitating deeper connections with the content and fostering a sense of belonging in the classroom. This aligns with the broader theme of identity construction, as the multimodal approach enriches the learners’ self-expression and engagement. In her study, Ágnes Virág (Institute of Fine Arts and Art Theory, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary) examines the visual representation of corruption in political cartoons, with a focus on metaphorical depiction of the European Union and the figure of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. While research on corruption imagery remains limited, political cartoons frequently employ source domains such as poison, disease, and natural disasters to illustrate its destructive nature. A dataset of 57 Hungarian and 15 international cartoons was analysed, with 25 Hungarian and 14 international illustrations from 2012-2023 selected for their emphasis on corruption. The analysis reveals that Hungarian cartoons often depict Brussels, EU politicians, and the European People’s Party metonymically, portraying them as corrupt or threatening entities. In contrast, international cartoons tend to use official EU symbols such as the stars on a blue background, euro signs, and the EU flag. Key metaphors highlight that the EU is frequently represented as a human figure, appearing as a doctor, lion tamer, enemy, investor, or banker, depending on the cartoon’s political stance. While Hungarian illustrations emphasise a power struggle between Orbán and the EU, international cartoons focus more on financial themes, portraying the EU as a treasury or bank whose primary role is distributing or withholding funds. Through the analysis of these visual and narrative techniques, the study highlights how political cartoons reinforce ideological perspectives on corruption and European politics. This special issue concludes with a book review by Jana Bérešová (Trnava University, Slovakia) on Maria-Ionela Neagu’s (2020) edited volume Voyage and Emotions across Genres (Berlin: Peter Lang). While the first part of the volume – Voyage across Literary Studies – delves into the insightful journeys experienced by various characters, as depicted by Jonathan Swift, Sandra Cisneros, Flaubert, or Petronius, the second part of the volume – Space and Emotions. A Discursive Approach – adopts a cognitive, psychological, and/or educational perspective in order to explore a wide range of emotions that pervade the intercultural space. On account of the aforementioned, situated at the crossroads of cultural studies, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics, all studies featured in the current special issue contribute original research on the multifaceted aspects of identity, construed and negotiated in the discursive space of literary texts, films, comic art, and political cartoons. The editor expresses her sincere gratitude to all contributors for their rigorously conducted scholarly work, which paves the way for new avenues of research.

Normative sociology and phronetic social science are research programmes that aim to overcome the dead end of positivism and the obfuscating effects of cryptonormativity, promising renewed social science disciplines that engage normatively with the public. In this article, I aim to deepen our understanding of social science’s (re)turn to normativity by examining how the disciplinary aims of such programmes fare against their conception of practical reason. I consider Tariq Modood’s presentation of the Bristol School of Multiculturalism as a form of normative sociology and begin from its understanding of practical reason after Michael Oakeshott, before specifying Modood’s recommendations, also with reference to other prominent versions of normative sociology. I then show that Bent Flyvbjerg’s phronetic social science, an Aristotle-inspired programme that has received widespread attention, is a particularly useful object of comparison: it bears high proximity to the Bristol School of Multiculturalism by being contextualist, dialogical, and prising public engagement. Most importantly, it too espouses antirationalist arguments via the emphasis it places on the Aristotelian notion of phronesis (practical wisdom). I argue that Oakeshott’s and Aristotle’s insights on the character and growth of practical reason both clarify and problematize the disciplinary aims of normative sociology and phronetic social science. Thus, to develop and defend normative social science, it is necessary to address a host of resulting challenges, most centrally the following: phronesis as an intellectual virtue based on one’s disposition, character, and experience largely eludes disciplinary-level training of the kind that social scientists and political theorists have received, exercise, or provide to students.

‘Digital Amnesia’ as a result of the dependence of Internet users is considered in this article on the example of students’ mass media audience. The empirical basis for this article was formed by the results of sociological research obtained by the authors in the framework of the project ”Digitalization of communicative-cultural memory and the problems of its intergenerational transmission” conducted in 2018–2020. Young people in the digital age not only face drastic changes in media practices but also the development of factors affecting the formation of communicative-cultural memory of various societies representatives. This makes it possible to identify some methods of preserving the role of the most important social institution by journalism, as well as the formation of meaningful components of mass media activity under conditions of permanent social and technological transformation. Several conclusions have been drawn from the system analysis. Firstly, the need to introduce the notion of ‘functional media literacy’ into the theory of communication. Secondly, it is possible to overcome digital amnesia by increasing the number of multimedia products of mass media of various subjects. As an example, the Russian Digital project ”1968”, created specifically for smartphones and addressed primarily to the generation Y. evoked a wide public response, and this project offers a method to present and promote specific events, facts and phenomena in the form of multimedia stories. The use of the project materials in university pedagogical practice is one of the most effective ways of interaction with a young audience. Thirdly, the study confirms the hypothesis that a method of information selection focused on sensationalism, discontinuity and conflict is not typical for students as consumers of media products. For most of this demogrpahic, the mass media act as a cognitive and ideological phenomenon that primarily assumes a dialogical relationship between the communicator and communicants. This allows us to conclude that digital amnesia as a form of psychological dependence arises in representatives of this audience group most often when the media discourse lacks intellectual and emotional involvement.&#x0D; Keywords: mass media, students, audience, digital amnesia

AbstractThis article is about the thoughts of KH. Ahmad Dahlan on Islamic Education in Muhammadiyah. In this article, we discuss that Muhammadiyah is part of Indonesia's history that contributes as a carrier of modernity in Islam. In this article, the concept of Muhammadiyah education is explained, including bringing updates in the field of forming Islamic educational institutions which were originally a pesantren system into a school system and have included general lessons for religious schools or madrasas. For the Muhammadiyah education model, this article explains the integralistic model, adopts the substance and methodology of modern Dutch education into religious education madrasas, provides Islamic teaching content in modern Dutch public schools, and implements a cooperative system in the field of education. In the learning method, the emergence of the lecture method and the munadharah (dialogical) method in teaching created by Muslim scholars and with this method can be adjusted to the level of convenience of the subject matter, to suit the intellectual abilities of students. This research is a qualitative research with an emphasis on the comparative method process or comparing the thoughts of KH Ahmad Dahlan by conducting library research. The goals of Islamic education are a) general goals, cannot be achieved except after going through the process of teaching, appreciation, experience, and belief in the truth. b) the final goal, namely human beings who die and will face their God is the final goal of the Islamic education process. c) temporary goals are goals that will be achieved after students are given a certain number of experiences that have been planned in a formal education curriculum. d) operational goals are practical goals to be achieved by a certain number of educational activities that require certain abilities and skills which are more emphasized on the nature of appreciation and personality. K.H. Ahmad Dahlan carried out modernization in the field of Islamic education, from the cottage system which was only taught Islamic religious education lessons, from the cottage system which was only taught individually to class and supplemented with general knowledge lessons.

This paper troubles the dominant ways of pursuing of “global education” pointing to the possibilities of such education through an Indigenist anti-colonial lens. The intellectual objective is to ensure that global education helps destabilize existing power relations, colonial hierarchies, and re-centers key questions of equity, power and social justice in education. An important question is: How do we frame an inclusive anti-racist future and what is the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future? It is argued that one of the many hallmarks of the contemporary neo-liberal corporate agenda in education is the intensification of private and corporate commercial interests in schooling and education. Education is being tailored to suit the needs of the current labour market with funding being preferentially diverted to economically viable disciplines, the streaming of students to ensure a blue-collar workforce and with complete disavowal of education as a social and public good. The paper introduces an ‘Indigenist anti-colonial’ lens highlighting Indigenous democratic principles for effective educational delivery. Indigenous communities see education both as a process and as something that happens at a place or site where learners openly utilize the body, mind and spirit/soul interface in critical dialogues about themselves and their communities. There is a shared understanding in these communities that people come to know through the simultaneous, dialogical and trialectic engagement of body, mind and spirit/soul, reinforcing the power of Land and Earth teachings; a need to understand the learner and the learning space; the nexus of society, nature, and culture; bringing an embodied connection to education; the importance of ethics, consciousness and responsibility; and engaging the coloniality of power. It is concluded that for the Global South, a rethinking of schooling and education has to take us back to our roots to examine our histories and cultural traditions of knowledge production, dissemination and use. We need to look at education from this source in terms of its connections with family life, community and social relevance. This means drawing from the lessons of how knowledge is impacted through early socialization practices, child-rearing practices, teaching and learning responsibilities of community membership, and the application of knowledge to solve everyday practical problems within one’s backyard and beyond.

A fé procura sua inteligência em dois movimentos: um ad extra,compreendendo o que se passa ao seu redor e um ad intra, num movimentode autoconsciência. Fides quaerens intellectum evoca, em dias marcados pelapluralidade e secularização, o fundamento da própria teologia. A teologia fundamentalé uma zona de fronteira entre a teologia e o mundo, a fim de traduziras questões da fé para a linguagem atual, deixando de lado uma atitude apologéticade autodefesa em prol de uma postura dialógica de empatia e alteridade,na perspectiva do Vaticano II. A questão central da teologia fundamental é darrazões esclarecedoras da fé na esfera pública, enquanto dimensão reflexiva eoperante dos fundamentos da fé diante da sociedade. A teologia é pública nãoapenas em sua autocompreensão, mas, sobretudo, enquanto ressalta a perspectivaescatológica das coisas públicas. É pública a partir de uma visão críticados problemas sociais, a fim de contribuir com a cidadania e de pensar em umasociedade que proporcione um projeto de vida mais integral e humanizado, naperspectiva do Reinado de Deus.Palavras-chave: Inteligência da fé. Pluralismo. Secularização. Fundamento dateologia. Teologia fundamental. Teologia pública.Abstract: Faith seeks its intelligence in two movements: an extra ad, understandingwhat is going on around it and an ad intra, in a movement of self-consciousness. Fides quaerens intellectum evokes, in days marked by pluralityand secularization, the foundation of theology itself. Fundamental theologyis a frontier zone between theology and the world, in order to translate thequestions of faith into current language, leaving aside an apologetic attitude ofself-defense in favor of a dialogical posture of empathy and otherness, alongthe perspective of Vatican II. The central question of fundamental theology isto give illuminating reasons for faith in the public sphere as a reflective andoperative dimension of the foundations of faith before society. Theology ispublic not only in its self-understanding, but above all, as it emphasizes theeschatological perspective of public affairs. It’s public from a critical view ofsocial problems, in order to contribute to citizenship and to think of a societythat provides a project of life more integral and humanized, in the perspectiveof the Reign of God.Keywords: Intelligence of faith. Pluralism. Secularization. Foundations of theology.Fundamental theology. Public theology.

Public engagement of scientists is defined as “all kinds of publicly accessible communication carried out by people presenting themselves as scientists. This includes scholarly communication directed at peers as well as science communication directed at lay publics” (Jünger &amp; Fähnrich, 2019, p. 7). Field of application/theoretical foundation: The variable “public engagement of scientists” can be differentiated according to the following three main dimensions (Jünger &amp; Fähnrich, 2019): Directions of engagement: Describes the extent to which communication scientists on Twitter connect with people from different sectors of society (e.g. science, politics, media, economy). This allows conclusions to the potential influence of scientists reaching specific audiences beyond the scientific community (Jünger &amp; Fähnrich, 2019). Topics of engagement: Previous research reveals that social scientists not only act as experts in their research field, but often present themselves as public intellectuals by also referring to political and social issues (Albæk, Christiansen, &amp; Togeby, 2003; Fähnrich &amp; Lüthje, 2017). For this reason, communication scientists are expected to communicate not only on scientific but also on political or economic issues. Modes of engagement: In addition to disseminating information, social networking sites also allow for more interactive ways of maintaining relationships. Thus, following Ellison and Boyd (2013), it can be assumed that communication on social networking sites can be both content-centered and user-centered. This dimension can be linked to the speech act theory (Klemm, 2000; Searle, 1990), according to which every use of language has a performative function. References/combination with other methods of data collection: In some cases, a mixed method approach, employing two data collection methods, is applied: a content analysis is complemented by a survey to gain information about the science communicators such as demographic information (Hara, Abbazio, &amp; Perkins, 2019). Furthermore, their social networks are investigated by means of network analysis (Walter, Lörcher, &amp; Brüggemann, 2019). Example studies: Hara et al. (2019); Jahng &amp; Lee (2018); Kouper (2010); Mahrt &amp; Puschmann (2014); Walter et al. (2019) Information on Jünger &amp; Fähnrich, 2019 Authors: Jakob Jünger &amp; Birte Fähnrich, 2019 Research questions: How can the public engagement of scientists in the context of online communication be conceptualized? Which types of engagement occur in the Twitter activity of communication scholars? Object of analysis: Tweets and followers belonging to the Twitter profiles of communication scientists who are following the International Communication Association (ICA) on Twitter (only German- and English-speaking users) Timeframe of analysis: Data collection in September 2017 Info about variables Variable name/definition: Subject area of the content of the tweets Level of analysis: Tweet Values: - Science-related topics (research, teaching) - Non-scientific topics (politics, economy, media, sports, environment, society, leisure time, and others) Scale of measurement: Nominal Reliability: Gwet’s AC1: 0,71 – 1,00; Holsti: 0,82 – 1,00 Variable name/definition: Language patterns of communication scientists (Speech acts) Level of analysis: Tweet Values: - Actor-centered patterns (discussing, activating, socializing), - Content-centered patterns (reporting, commenting), - Other language patterns Scale of measurement: Nominal Reliability: Gwet’s AC1: 0,54 – 0,95; Holsti: 0,75 – 1,00 Variable name/definition: References of the communication scientists on Twitter Level of analysis: Tweet Values: - Self-reference, - Reference to specific actor, - Reference to other unspecific actor, - No reference to actors Scale of measurement: Nominal Reliability: Gwet’s AC1: 0,83 – 0,87; Holsti: 0,88 – 0,93 Variable name/definition: Type of actor (followers of the investigated scientists) Level of analysis: Self description in profile Values: Person, Organization Scale of measurement: Nominal Reliability: Gwet’s AC1: 0,89; Holsti: 0,91; Kappa: 0,84; Krippendorffs’ Alpha: 0,84 Variable name/definition: Social sphere of action of the followers Level of analysis: Self description in profile Values: - Science (communication science, other sciences, science in general) - Politics (party, state/administration, activists &amp; lobbyists) - Media (media &amp; journalism, news &amp; comments) - Economy (communication industry, other economic sectors) - Arts &amp; Entertainment - Health - Other (Other areas of activity, personal interests) Scale of measurement: Nominal Reliability: Gwet’s AC1: 0,81 – 0,87; Holsti: 0,82 – 0,88; Kappa: 0,83 – 0,85; Krippendorffs’ Alpha: 0,83 – 0,85 Codebook: in the appendix (in German) Information on Walter, Lörcher &amp; Brüggemann, 2019 Authors: Stefanie Walter, Ines Lörcher &amp; Michael Brüggemann Research question: How do scientists interact with politicians and civil society on Twitter? Object of analysis: Climate-related English-language Tweets posted by scientists from the United States (to classify the Twitter users, an automated content analysis, a dictionary approach, was applied; Krippendorffs’ Alpha: 0,74) Timeframe of analysis: Data collection took place from October 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018 Variable name/definition: Mode and content of communication Level of analysis: Tweet Values: Negative emotion, Certainty Scale of measurement: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program for computerized text analysis Reliability: – Codebook: in the appendix (R-Script) Information on Hara et al., 2019 Authors: Noriko Hara, Jessica Abbazio &amp; Kathryn Perkins Research questions: What kind of demographic characteristics do the scientists participating in “Science” subreddit AMAs have? [survey] What was the experience like to host an AMA in the “Science” subreddit? [survey] What type of discussions did “Science” subreddit AMA participants engage in? Do questions receive answers? What are posters’ intentions? What kind of content features appear? Who is posting comments? What kind of responses do posts receive? Object of analysis: Six Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on Reddit’s “Science” subreddit (r/science) Timeframe of analysis: – Info about variable Variable name/definition: Poster’s intentions (PI); Answer status (AS); Comment status (CS); Poster’s identity (PID); Content features (CF) Level of analysis: Post Values: - PI: Seeking information, Seeking discussion, Non-questions/comments, Further discussion/interaction among users, Answering a question - AS: Answered, Not answered - CS: Commented on, Not commented on - PID: Host, Participant – flair, Participant – no flair - CF: Providing factual information, Providing opinions, Providing resources, Providing personal experience, Providing guidance on forum governance, Making an inquiry – initial question, Making an inquiry – embedded question, Requesting resources, Off-topic comment Scale of measurement: Nominal Reliability: Intercoder reliability ranged between 0.66 and 1.0 calculated by Cohen’s Kappa Codebook: in the appendix (in English) References Albæk, E., Christiansen, P. M., &amp; Togeby, L. (2003). Experts in the mass media: Researchers as sources in Danish daily newspapers, 1961–2001. Journalism &amp; Mass Communication Quarterly, 80(4), 937–948. Ellison, N. B., &amp; Boyd, D. M. (2013). Sociality through social network sites. In W. H. Dutton, N. B. Ellison, &amp; D. M. Boyd (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (pp. 151–172). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fähnrich, B., &amp; Lüthje, C. (2017). Roles of Social Scientists in Crisis Media Reporting: The Case of the German Populist Radical Right Movement PEGIDA. Science Communication, 39(4), 415–442. Hara, N., Abbazio, J., &amp; Perkins, K. (2019). An emerging form of public engagement with science: Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on Reddit r/science. PloS One, 14(5), e0216789. Jahng, M. R., &amp; Lee, N. (2018). When scientists tweet for social changes: Dialogic communication and collective mobilization strategies by flint water study scientists on Twitter. Science Communication, 40(1), 89–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547017751948 Jünger, J., &amp; Fähnrich, B. (2019). Does really no one care?: Analyzing the public engagement of communication scientists on Twitter. New Media &amp; Society, 7(2), 146144481986341. Klemm, M. (2000). Zuschauerkommunikation: Formen und Funktionen der alltäglichen kommunikativen Fernsehaneignung [Audience Communication: Forms and Functions of Everyday Communicative Appropriation of Television]. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Kouper, I. (2010). Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities. Journal of Science Communication, 09(01). Mahrt, M., &amp; Puschmann, C. (2014). Science blogging: An exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions. Journal of Science Communication, 13(03). Searle, J. R. (1990). Sprechakte: Ein sprachphilosophischer Essay [Speech Acts: An Essay on the Philosophy of Language]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Walter, S., Lörcher, I., &amp; Brüggemann, M. (2019). Scientific networks on Twitter: Analyzing scientists’ interactions in the climate change debate. Public Understanding of Science, 28(6), 696–712.

In “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber outline what they term “wicked problems.” According to Rittel and Webber, wicked problems are unavoidably “ill-defined,” that is, unlike “problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable…[wicked problems] are never solved. At best they are only re-solved—over and over again” (160). Rittel and Webber were thinking specifically of the challenges involved in making decisions within immensely complex social circumstances—building highways through cities and designing low income housing projects, for example—but public policy-making and urban design are not the only fields rife with wicked problems. Indeed, the nub of Rittel and Webber’s articulation of wicked problems concerns a phenomenon common to many disciplines: interdisciplinary collaboration. As anyone who has collaborated with people outside her area of expertise will acknowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration itself is among the wickedest problems of all. By way of introduction, we direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. In the seven years since LGI was inaugurated, we have undertaken many productive and well-received collaborations, including: 1) leading workshops at national and international conferences; 2) presenting numerous academic talks; 3) editing academic journals; 4) writing books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly materials; 5) exhibiting creative and archival work in museums, galleries, and libraries; and 6) building one of the largest academic research archives of computer games, systems, paraphernalia, and print-, video-, and audio-scholarship in the world. We thus have a fair bit of experience with the wicked problem of collaboration. The purpose of this article is to share some of that experience with readers and to describe candidly some of the challenges we have faced—and sometimes overcome—working collaboratively across disciplinary, institutional, and even international boundaries. Collaborative Circle? Michael Farrell, whose illuminating analysis of “collaborative circles” has lent much to scholars’ understandings of group dynamics within creative contexts, succinctly describes how many such groups form: “A collaborative circle is a set of peers in the same discipline who, through open exchange of support, ideas, and criticism develop into an interdependent group with a common vision that guides their creative work” (266). Farrell’s model, while applicable to several of the smaller projects LGI has nurtured over the years, does not capture the idiosyncratic organizational method that has evolved more broadly within our collective. Rather, LGI has always tended to function according to a model more akin to that found in used car dealerships, one where “no reasonable offer will be refused.” LGI is open to anyone willing to think hard and get their hands dirty, which of course has molded the organization and its projects in remarkable ways. Unlike Farrell’s collaborative circles, for example, LGI’s collaborative model actually decentralizes the group’s study and production of culture. Any member from anywhere—not just “peers in the same discipline”—can initiate or join a project provided she or he is willing to trade in the coin of the realm: sweat equity. Much like the programmers of the open source software movement, LGI’s members work only on what excites them, and with other similarly motivated people. The “buy-in,” simply, is interest and a readiness to assume some level of responsibility for the successes and failures of a given project. In addition to decentralizing the group, LGI’s collaborative model has emerged such that it naturally encourages diversity, swelling our ranks with all kinds of interesting folks, from fine artists to clergy members to librarians. In large part this is because our members view “peers” in the most expansive way possible; sure, optical scientists can help us understand how virtual cameras simulate the real properties of lenses and research linguists can help us design more effective language-in-context tools for our games. However, in an organization that always tries to understand the layers of meaning-making that constitute computer games, such technical expertise is only one stratum. For a game about the cultural politics of ancient Greece that LGI has been working on for the past year, our members invited a musical instrument maker, a potter, and a school teacher to join the development team. These new additions—all experts and peers as far as LGI is concerned—were not merely consultants but became part of the development team, often working in areas of the project completely outside their own specialties. While some outsiders have criticized this project—currently known as “Aristotle’s Assassins”—for being too slow in development, the learning taking place as it moves forward is thrilling to those on the inside, where everyone is learning from everyone else. One common consequence of this dynamic is, as Farrell points out, that the work of the individual members is transformed: “Those who are merely good at their discipline become masters, and, working together, very ordinary people make extraordinary advances in their field” (2). Additionally, the diversity that gives LGI its true interdisciplinarity also makes for praxical as well as innovative projects. The varying social and intellectual concerns of the LGI’s membership means that every collaboration is also an exploration of ethics, responsibility, epistemology, and ideology. This is part of what makes LGI so special: there are multiple levels of learning that underpin every project every day. In LGI we are fond of saying that games teach multiple things in multiple ways. So too, in fact, does collaborating on one of LGI’s projects because members are constantly forced to reevaluate their ways of seeing in order to work with one another. This has been particularly rewarding in our international projects, such as our recently initiated project investigating the relationships among the mass media, new media, and cultural resource management practices. This project, which is building collaborative relationships among a team of archaeologists, game designers, media historians, folklorists, and grave repatriation experts from Cambodia, the Philippines, Australia, and the U.S., is flourishing, not because its members are of the same discipline nor because they share the same ideology. Rather, the team is maturing as a collaborative and productive entity because the focus of its work raises an extraordinary number of questions that have yet to be addressed by national and international researchers. In LGI, much of the sweat equity we contribute involves trying to answer questions like these in ways that are meaningful for our international research teams. In our experience, it is in the process of investigating such questions that effective collaborative relationships are cemented and within which investigators end up learning about more than just the subject matter at hand. They also learn about the micro-cultures, histories, and economies that provide the usually invisible rhetorical infrastructures that ground the subject matter and to which each team member is differently attuned. It is precisely because of this sometimes slow, sometimes tense learning/teaching dynamic—a dynamic too often invoked in both academic and industry settings to discourage collaboration—that François Chesnais calls attention to the fact that collaborative projects frequently yield more benefits than the sum of their parts suggests possible. This fact, says Chesnais, should lead institutions to value collaborative projects more highly as “resource-creating, value-creating and surplus-creating potentialities” (22). Such work is always risky, of course, and Jitendra Mohan, a scholar specializing in cross-cultural collaborations within the field of psychology, writes that international collaboration “raises methodological problems in terms of the selection of culturally-coloured items and their historical as well as semantic meaning…” (314). Mohan means this as a warning and it is heeded as such by LGI members; at the same time, however, it is precisely the identification and sorting out of such methodological problems that seems to excite our best collaborations and most innovative work. Given such promise, it is easy to see why LGI is quite happy to adopt the used car dealer’s slogan “no reasonable offer refused.” In fact, in LGI we see our open-door policy for projects as mirroring our primary object of study: games. This is another factor that we believe contributes to the success of our members’ collaborations. Commercial computer game development is a notoriously interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavor. By collaborating in a fashion similar to professional game developers, LGI members are constantly fashioning more complex understandings of the kinds of production practices and social interactions involved in game development; these practices and interactions are crucial to game studies precisely because they shape what games consist of, how they mean, and the ways in which they are consumed. For this reason, we think it foolish to refuse any reasonable offer to help us explore and understand these meaning-making processes. Wicked Problem Backlash Among the striking points that Rittel and Webber make about wicked problems is that solutions to them are usually created with great care and planning, and yet inevitably suffer severe criticism (at least) or utter annihilation (at worst). Far from being indicative of a bad solution, this backlash against a wicked problem’s solution is an integral element of what we call the “wicked problem dialectic.” The backlash against attempts to establish and nurture transdisciplinary collaboration is easy to document at multiple levels. For example, although our used car dealership model has created a rich research environment, it has also made the quotidian work of doing projects difficult. For one thing, organizing something as simple as a project meeting can take Herculean efforts. The wage earners are on a different schedule than the academics, who are on a different schedule from the artists, who are on a different schedule from the librarians. Getting everyone together in the same room at the same time (even virtually) is like herding cats. As co-directors of LGI, we have done our best to provide the membership with both synchronous and asynchronous resources to facilitate communication (e.g., conference-call enabled phones, online forums, chat clients, file-sharing software, and so on), but nothing beats face-to-face meetings, especially when projects grow complex or deadlines impend mercilessly. Nonetheless, our members routinely fight the meeting scheduling battle, despite the various communication options we have made available through our group’s website and in our physical offices. Most recently we have found that an organizational wiki makes the process of collecting and sharing notes, drawings, videos, segments of code, and drafts of writing decidedly easier than it had been, especially when the projects involve people who do not live a short distance (or a cheap phone call) away from each other. Similarly, not every member has the same amount of time to devote to LGI and its projects despite their considerable and demonstrated interest in them. Some folks are simply busier than others, and cannot contribute to projects as much as they might like. This can be a real problem when a project requires a particular skill set, and the owner of those skills is busy doing other things like working at a paying job or spending time with family. LGI’s projects are always done in addition to members’ regular workload, and it is understandable when that workload has to take precedence. Like regular exercise and eating right, the organization’s projects are the first things to go when life’s demands intrude. Different projects handle this challenge in a variety of ways, but the solutions always tend to reflect the general structure of the project itself. In projects that follow what Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede refer to as “hierarchical collaborations”—projects that are clearly structured, goal-oriented, and define clear roles for its participants—milestones and deadlines are set at the beginning of the project and are often tied to professional rewards that stand-in for a paycheck: recommendation letters, all-expenses-paid conference trips, guest speaking invitations, and so forth (133). Less organized projects—what Lunsford and Ede call “dialogic collaborations”—deal with time scheduling challenges differently. Inherently, dialogic collaborations such as these tend to be less hampered by time because they are loosely structured, accept and often encourage members to shift roles, and often value the process of working toward the project’s goals as highly as actually attaining them (134). The most common adaptive strategy used in these cases is simply for the most experienced members of the team to keep the project in motion. As long as something is happening, dialogic collaborations can be kept fruitful for a very long time, even when collaborators are only able to contribute once or twice a month. In our experience, as long as each project’s collaborators understand its operative expectations—which can, by the way, be a combination of hierarchical and dialogical modes—their work proceeds smoothly. Finally, there is the matter of expenses. As an institutionally unaffiliated collective, the LGI has no established revenue stream, which means project funding is either grant-based or comes out of the membership’s pockets. As anyone who has ever applied for a grant knows, it is one thing to write a grant, and another thing entirely to get it. Things are especially tough when grant monies are scarce, as they have been (at least on this side of the pond) since the U.S. economy started its downward spiral several years ago. Tapping the membership’s pockets is not really a viable funding option either. Even modest projects can be expensive, and most folks do not have a lot of spare cash to throw around. What this means, ultimately, is that even though our group’s members have carte blanche to do as they will, they must do so in a resource-starved environment. While it is sometimes disappointing that we are not able to fund certain projects despite their artistic and scholarly merit, LGI members learned long ago that such hardships rarely foreclose all opportunities. As Anne O’Meara and Nancy MacKenzie pointed out several years ago, many “seemingly extraneous features” of collaborative projects—not only financial limitations, but also such innocuous phenomena as where collaborators meet, the dance of their work and play patterns, their conflicting responsibilities, geographic separations, and the ways they talk to each other—emerge as influential factors in all collaborations (210). Thus, we understand in LGI that while our intermittent funding has influenced the dimension and direction of our group, it has also led to some outcomes that in hindsight we are glad we were led to. For example, while LGI originally began studying games in order to discover where production-side innovations might be possible, a series of funding shortfalls and serendipitous academic conversations led us to favor scholarly writing, which has now taken precedence over other kinds of projects. At the most practical level, this works out well because writing costs nothing but time, plus there is a rather desperate shortage of good game scholarship. Moreover, we have discovered that as LGI members have refined their scholarship and begun turning out books, chapters, and articles on a consistent basis, both they and the organization accrue publicity and credibility. Add to this the fact that for many of the group’s academics, traditional print-based work is more valued in the tenure and promotion economy than is, say, an educational game, an online teachers’ resource, or a workshop for a local parent-teacher association, and you have a pretty clear research path blazed by what Kathleen Clark and Rhunette Diggs have called “dialectical collaboration,” that is, collaboration marked by “struggle and opposition, where tension can be creative, productive, clarifying, as well as difficult” (10). Conclusion In sketching out our experience directing a highly collaborative digital media research collective, we hope we have given readers a sense of why collaboration is almost always a “wicked problem.” Collaborators negotiate different schedules, work demands, and ways of seeing, as well as resource pinches that hinder the process by which innovative digital media collaborations come to fruition. And yet, it is precisely because collaboration can be so wicked that it is so valuable. In constantly requiring collaborators to assess and reassess their rationales, artistic visions, and project objectives, collaboration makes for reflexive, complex, and innovative projects, which (at least to us) are the most satisfying and useful of all. References Chesnais, François. “Technological Agreements, Networks and Selected Issues in Economic Theory.” In Technological Collaboration: The Dynamics of Cooperation in Industrial Innovation. Rod Coombs, Albert Richards, Vivien Walsh, and Pier Paolo Saviotti, eds. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1996. 18-33. Clark, Kathleen D., and Rhunette C. Diggs. “Connected or Separated?: Toward a Dialectical View of Interethnic Relationships.” In Building Diverse Communities: Applications of Communication Research. McDonald, Trevy A., Mark P. Orbe, and Trevellya Ford-Ahmed, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 3-25. Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics &amp; Creative Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Mohan, Jitendra. “Cross-Cultural Experience of Collaboration in Personality Research.” Personality across Cultures: Recent Developments and Debates. Jitendra Mohan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 313-335. O’Meara, Anne, and Nancy R. MacKenzie. “Reflections on Scholarly Collaboration.” In Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Elizabeth G. Peck and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 209-26. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Weber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ruggill, Judd, and Ken McAllister. "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php&gt;. APA Style Ruggill, J., and K. McAllister. (May 2006) "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php&gt;.

Social media companies like to claim the world. Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is “building a global community”. Twitter promises to show you “what’s happening in the world right now”. Even Parler claims to be the “global town square”. Indeed, among the fungible aspects of digital culture is the promise of geographic fungibility—the interchangeability of location and national provenance. The taglines of social media platforms tap into the social imagination of the Internet erasing distance—Marshall McLuhan’s global village on a touch screen (see fig. 1). Fig. 1: Platform taglines: YouTube, Twitter, Parler, and Facebook have made globality part of their pitch to users. Yet users’ perceptions of geographic fungibility remain unclear. Scholars have proposed forms of cosmopolitan and global citizenship in which national borders play less of a role in how people engage with political ideas (Delanty; Sassen). Others suggest the potential erasure of location may be disorienting (Calhoun). “Nobody lives globally”, as Hugh Dyer writes (64). In this article, I interrogate popular and academic assumptions about global political spaces, looking at geographic fungibility as a condition experienced by users. The article draws on interviews conducted with Twitter users in the Scandinavian region. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark offer an interesting contrast to online spaces because of their small and highly cohesive political cultures; yet these countries also have high Internet penetration rates and English proficiency levels, making them potentially highly globally connected (Syvertsen et al.). Based on a thematic analysis of these interviews, I find fungibility emerges as a key feature of how users interact with politics at a global level in three ways: invisibility: fungibility as disconnection; efficacy: fungibility as empowerment; and antagonism: non-fungibility as strategy. Finally, in contrast to currently available models, I propose that online practices are not characterised so much by cosmopolitan norms, but by what I describe as fungible citizenship. Geographic Fungibility and Cosmopolitan Hopes Let’s back up and take a real-life example that highlights what it means for geography to be fungible. In March 2017, at a high-stakes meeting of the US House Intelligence Committee, a congressman suddenly noticed that President Donald Trump was not only following the hearing on television, but was live-tweeting incorrect information about it on Twitter. “This tweet has gone out to millions of Americans”, said Congressman Jim Himes, noting Donald Trump’s follower count. “16.1 million to be exact” (C-SPAN). Only, those followers weren’t just Americans; Trump was tweeting to 16.1 million followers worldwide (see Sevin and Uzunoğlu). Moreover, the committee was gathered that day to address an issue related to geographic fungibility: it was the first public hearing on Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 American presidential race—which occurred, among other places, on Twitter. In a way, democratic systems are based on fungibility. One person one vote. Equality before the law. But land mass was not imagined to be commutable, and given the physical restrictions of communication, participation in the public sphere was largely assumed to be restricted by geography (Habermas). But online platforms offer a fundamentally different structure. Nancy Fraser observes that “public spheres today are not coextensive with political membership. Often the interlocutors are neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens” (16). Netflix, YouTube, K-Pop, #BLM: the resources that people draw on to define their worlds come less from nation-specific media (Robertson 179). C-SPAN’s online feed—if one really wanted to—is as easy to click on in Seattle as in Stockholm. Indeed, research on Twitter finds geographically dispersed networks (Leetaru et al.). Many Twitter users tweet in multiple languages, with English being the lingua franca of Twitter (Mocanu et al.). This has helped make geographic location interchangeable, even undetectable without use of advanced methods (Stock). Such conditions might set the stage for what sociologists have envisioned as cosmopolitan or global public spheres (Linklater; Szerszynski and Urry). That is, cross-border networks based more on shared interest than shared nationality (Sassen 277). Theorists observing the growth of online communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s proposed that such activity could lead to a shift in people’s perspectives on the world: namely, by closing the communicative distance with the Other, people would also close the moral distance. Delanty suggested that “discursive spaces of world openness” could counter nationalist tendencies and help mobilise cosmopolitan citizens against the negative effects of globalisation (44). However, much of this discourse dates to the pre-social media Internet. These platforms have proved to be more hierarchical, less interactive, and even less global than early theorists hoped (Burgess and Baym; Dahlgren, “Social Media”; Hindman). Although ordinary citizens certainly break through, entrenched power dynamics and algorithmic structures complicate the process, leading to what Bucher describes as a reverse Panopticon: “the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough” (1171). A 2021 report by the Pew Research Center found most Twitter users receive few if any likes and retweets of their content. In short, it may be that social media are less like Marshall McLuhan’s global village and more like a global version of Marc Augé’s “non-places”: an anonymous and disempowering whereabouts (77–78). Cosmopolitanism itself is also plagued by problems of legitimacy (Calhoun). Fraser argues that global public opinion is meaningless without a constituent global government. “What could efficacy mean in this situation?” she asks (15). Moreover, universalist sentiment and erasure of borders are not exactly the story of the last 15 years. Media scholar Terry Flew notes that given Brexit and the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, projections of cosmopolitanism were seriously overestimated (19). Yet social media are undeniably political places. So how do we make sense of users’ engagement in the discourse that increasingly takes place here? It is this point I turn to next. Citizenship in the Age of Social Media In recent years, scholars have reconsidered how they understand the way people interact with politics, as access to political discourse has become a regular, even mundane part of our lives. Increasingly they are challenging old models of “informed citizens” and traditional forms of political participation. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik writes: the oft-heard claims that citizenship is in decline, particularly for young people, are usually based on citizenship indicators derived from these legacy models—the informed/dutiful citizen. Yet scholars are increasingly positing … citizenship [is not] declining, but rather changing its form. (1891) In other words, rather than wondering if tweeting is like a citizen speaking in the town square or merely scribbling in the margins of a newspaper, this line of thinking suggests tweeting is a new form of citizen participation entirely (Bucher; Lane et al.). Who speaks in the town square these days anyway? To be clear, “citizenship” here is not meant in the ballot box and passport sense; this isn’t about changing legal definitions. Rather, the citizenship at issue refers to how people perceive and enact their public selves. In particular, new models of citizenship emphasise how people understand their relation to strangers through discursive means (Asen)—through talking, in other words, in its various forms (Dahlgren, “Talkative Public”). This may include anything from Facebook posts to online petitions (Vaughan et al.) to digital organising (Vromen) to even activities that can seem trivial, solitary, or apolitical by traditional measures, such as “liking” a post or retweeting a news story. Although some research finds users do see strategic value in such activities (Picone et al.), Lane et al. argue that small-scale acts are important on their own because they force us to self-reflect on our relationship to politics, under a model they call “expressive citizenship”. Kligler-Vilenchik argues that such approaches to citizenship reflect not only new technology but also a society in which public discourse is less formalised through official institutions (newspapers, city council meetings, clubs): “each individual is required to ‘invent themselves’, to shape and form who they are and what they believe in—including how to enact their citizenship” she writes (1892). However, missing from these new understandings of politics is a spatial dimension. How does the geographic reach of social media sites play into perceptions of citizenship in these spaces? This is important because, regardless of the state of cosmopolitan sentiment, political problems are global: climate change, pandemic, regulation of tech companies, the next US president: many of society’s biggest issues, as Beck notes, “do not respect nation-state or any other borders” (4). Yet it’s not clear whether users’ correlative ability to reach across borders is empowering, or overwhelming. Thus, inspired particularly by Delanty’s “micro” cosmopolitanism and Dahlgren’s conditions for the formation of citizenship (“Talkative Public”), I am guided by the following questions: how do people negotiate geographic fungibility online? And specifically, how do they understand their relationship to a global space and their ability to be heard in it? Methodology Christensen and Jansson have suggested that one of the underutilised ways to understand media cultures is to talk to users directly about the “mediatized everyday” (1474). To that end, I interviewed 26 Twitter users in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The Scandinavian region is a useful region of study because most people use the Web nearly every day and the populations have high English proficiency (Syvertsen et al.). Participants were found in large-scale data scrapes of Twitter, using linguistic and geographic markers in their profiles, a process similar to the mapping of the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns et al.). The interviewees were selected because of their mixed use of Scandinavian languages and English and their participation in international networks. Participants were contacted through direct messages on Twitter or via email. In figure 2, the participants’ timeline data have been graphed into a network map according to who users @mentioned and retweeted, with lines representing tweets and colours representing languages. The participants include activists, corporate consultants, government employees, students, journalists, politicians, a security guard, a doctor, a teacher, and unemployed people. They range from age 24 to 60. Eight are women, reflecting the gender imbalance of Twitter. Six have an immigrant background. Eight are right-leaning politically. Participants also have wide variation in follower counts in order to capture a variety of experiences on the platform (min=281, max=136,000, median=3,600, standard deviation=33,708). All users had public profiles, but under Norwegian rules for research data, they will be identified here by an ID and their country, gender, and follower count (e.g., P01, Sweden, M, 23,000). Focussing on a single platform allowed the interviews to be more specific and makes it easier to compare the participants’ responses, although other social media often came up in the course of the interviews. Twitter was selected because it is often used in a public manner and has become an important channel for political communication (Larsson and Moe). The interviews lasted around an hour each and were conducted on Zoom between May 2020 and March 2021. Fig. 2: Network map of interview participants’ Twitter timelines. Invisibility: The Abyss of the Global Village Each participant was asked during the interview how they think about globality on Twitter. For many, it was part of the original reason for joining the platform. “Twitter had this reputation of being the hangout of a lot of the world’s intellectuals”, said P022 (Norway, M, 136,000). One Swedish woman described a kind of cosmopolitan curation process, where she would follow people on every continent, so that her feed would give her a sense of the world. “And yes, you can get that from international papers”, she told me, “but if I actually consumed as much as I do on Twitter in papers, I would be reading papers and articles all day” (P023, Sweden, F, 384). Yet while globality was part of the appeal, it was also an abstraction. “I mean, the Internet is global, so everything you do is going to end up somewhere else”, said one Swedish user (P013, M, 12,000). Users would echo the taglines that social media allow you to “interact with someone half a world away” (P05, Norway, M, 3,300) but were often hard-pressed to recall specific examples. A strong theme of invisibility—or feeling lost in an abyss—ran throughout the interviews. For many users this manifested in a lack of any visible response to their tweets. Even when replying to another user, the participants didn’t expect much dialogic engagement with them (“No, no, that’s unrealistic”.) For P04 (Norway, F, 2,000), tweeting back a heart emoji to someone with a large following was for her own benefit, much like the intrapersonal expressions described by Lane et al. that are not necessarily intended for other actors. P04 didn’t expect the original poster to even see her emoji. Interestingly, invisibility was more of a frustration among users with several thousand followers than those with only a few hundred. Having more followers seemed to only make Twitter appear more fickle. “Sometimes you get a lot of attention and sometimes it’s completely disregarded” said P05 (Norway, M, 3,300). P024 (Sweden, M, 2,000) had essentially given up: “I think it’s fun that you found me [to interview]”, he said, “Because I have this idea that almost no one sees my tweets anymore”. In a different way, P08 (Norway, F) who had a follower count of 121,000, also felt the abstraction of globality. “It’s almost like I’m just tweeting into a void or into space”, she said, “because it's too many people to grasp or really understand that these are real people”. For P08, Twitter was almost an anonymous non-place because of its vastness, compared with Facebook and Instagram where the known faces of her friends and family made for more finite and specific places—and thus made her more self-conscious about the visibility of her posts. Efficacy: Fungibility as Empowerment Despite the frequent feeling of global invisibility, almost all the users—even those with few followers—believed they had some sort of effect in global political discussions on Twitter. This was surprising, and seemingly contradictory to the first theme. This second theme of empowerment is characterised by feelings of efficacy or perception of impact. One of the most striking examples came from a Danish man with 345 followers. I wondered before the interview if he might have automated his account because he replied to Donald Trump so often (see fig. 3). The participant explained that, no, he was just trying to affect the statistics on Trump’s tweet, to get it ratioed. He explained: it's like when I'm voting, I'm not necessarily thinking [I’m personally] going to affect the situation, you know. … It’s the statistics that shows a position—that people don't like it, and they’re speaking actively against it. (P06, Denmark, M, 345) Other participants described their role similarly—not as making an impact directly, but being “one ant in the anthill” or helping information spread “like rings in the water”. One woman in Sweden said of the US election: I can't go to the streets because I'm in Stockholm. So I take to their streets on Twitter. I'm kind of helping them—using the algorithms, with retweets, and re-enforcing some hashtags. (P018, Sweden, F, 7,400) Note that the participants rationalise their Twitter activities through comparisons to classic forms of political participation—voting and protesting. Yet the acts of citizenship they describe are very much in line with new norms of citizenship (Vaughan et al.) and what Picone et al. call “small acts of engagement”. They are just acts aimed at the American sphere instead of their national sphere. Participants with large followings understood their accounts had a kind of brand, such as commenting on Middle Eastern politics, mocking leftist politicians, or critiquing the media. But these users were also sceptical they were having any direct impact. Rather, they too saw themselves as being “a tiny part of a combined effect from a lot of people” (P014, Norway, M, 39,000). Fig. 3: Participant P06 replies to Trump. Antagonism: Encounters with Non-Fungibility The final theme reflects instances when geography became suddenly apparent—and thrown back in the faces of the users. This was often in relation to the 2020 American election, which many of the participants were following closely. “I probably know more about US politics than Swedish”, said P023 (Sweden, F, 380). Particularly among left-wing users who listed a Scandinavian location in their profile, tweeting about the topic had occasionally led to encounters with Americans claiming foreign interference. “I had some people telling me ‘You don't have anything to do with our politics. You have no say in this’” said P018 (Sweden, F, 7,400). In these instances, the participants likewise deployed geography strategically. Participants said they would claim legitimacy because the election would affect their country too. “I think it’s important for the rest of the world to give them [the US] that feedback. That ‘we’re depending on you’” said P017 (Sweden, M, 280). As a result of these interactions, P06 started to pre-emptively identify himself as Danish in his tweets, which in a way sacrificed his own geographic fungibility, but also reinforced a wider sense of geographic fungibility on Twitter. In one of his replies to Donald Trump, Jr., he wrote, “Denmark here. The world is hoping for real leader!” Conclusion: Fungible Citizenship The view that digital media are global looms large in academic and popular imagination. The aim of the analysis presented here is to help illuminate how these perceptions play into practices of citizenship in digital spaces. One of the contradictions inherent in this research is that geographic or linguistic information was necessary to find the users interviewed. It may be that users who are geographically anonymous—or even lie about their location—would have a different relationship to online globality. With that said, several key themes emerged from the interviews: the abstraction and invisibility of digital spaces, the empowerment of geographic fungibility, and the occasional antagonistic deployment of non-fungibility by other users and the participants. Taken together, these themes point to geographic fungibility as a condition that can both stifle as well as create new arenas for political expression. Even spontaneous and small acts that aren’t expected to ever reach an audience (Lane et al.) nevertheless are done with an awareness of social processes that extend beyond the national sphere. Moreover, algorithms and metrics, while being the source of invisibility (Bucher), were at times a means of empowerment for those at a physical distance. In contrast to the cosmopolitan literature, it is not so much that users didn’t identify with their nation as their “community of membership” (Sassen)—they saw it as giving them an important perspective. Rather, they considered politics in the EU, US, UK, Russia, and elsewhere to be part of their national arena. In this way, the findings support Delanty’s description of “changes within … national identities rather than in the emergence in new identities” (42). Yet the interviews do not point to “the desire to go beyond ethnocentricity and particularity” (42). Some of the most adamant and active global communicators were on the right and radical right. For them, opposition to immigration and strengthening of national identity were major reasons to be on Twitter. Cross-border communication for them was not a form of resistance to nationalism but wholly compatible with it. Instead of the emergence of global or cosmopolitan citizenship then, I propose that what has emerged is a form of fungible citizenship. This is perhaps a more ambivalent, and certainly a less idealistic, view of digital culture. It implies that users are not elevating their affinities or shedding their national ties. Rather, the transnational effects of political decisions are viewed as legitimate grounds for political participation online. This approach to global platforms builds on and nuances current discursive approaches to citizenship, which emphasise expression (Lane et al.) and contribution (Vaughan et al.) rather than formal participation within institutions. Perhaps the Scandinavian users cannot cast a vote in US elections, but they can still engage in the same forms of expression as any American with a Twitter account. That encounters with non-fungibility were so notable to the participants also points to the mundanity of globality on social media. Vaughan et al. write that “citizens are increasingly accustomed to participating in horizontal networks of relationships which facilitate more expressive, smaller forms of action” (17). The findings here suggest that they are also accustomed to participating in geographically agnostic networks, in which their expressions of citizenship are at once small, interchangeable, and potentially global. References Asen, Robert. "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship." Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189–211. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Bruns, Axel, et al. "The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network." Social Media + Society 3.4 (2017): 1–15. Bucher, Taina. "Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook." New Media &amp; Society 14.7 (2012): 1164–80. 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"The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory." British Journal of Sociology 57.1 (2006): 25–47. Dyer, Hugh C. Coping and Conformity in World Politics. Routledge, 2009. Flew, Terry. "Globalization, Neo-Globalization and Post-Globalization: The Challenge of Populism and the Return of the National." Global Media and Communication 16.1 (2020): 19–39. Fraser, Nancy. "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World." Theory, Culture &amp; Society 24.4 (2007): 7–30. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991 [1962]. Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta. "Alternative Citizenship Models: Contextualizing New Media and the New ‘Good Citizen’." New Media &amp; Society 19.11 (2017): 1887–903. Lane, Daniel S., Kevin Do, and Nancy Molina-Rogers. "What Is Political Expression on Social Media Anyway? A Systematic Review." Journal of Information Technology &amp; Politics (2021): 1–15. Larsson, Anders Olof, and Hallvard Moe. "Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia." Twitter and Society. Eds. Katrin Weller et al. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 319–30. Linklater, Andrew. "Cosmopolitan Citizenship." Handbook of Citizenship Studies. Eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage, 2002. 317–32. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Ark, 1987 [1964]. Mocanu, Delia, et al. "The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms." PLOS ONE 8.4 (2013): e61981. Picone, Ike, et al. "Small Acts of Engagement: Reconnecting Productive Audience Practices with Everyday Agency." New Media &amp; Society 21.9 (2019): 2010–28. Robertson, Alexa. Mediated Cosmopolitanism: The World of Television News. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Sassen, Saskia. 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Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. Webb, Alban. “Cold War Diplomacy.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/projects/cold-war-politics-and-bbc-world-service›. Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices. Regulating and Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Introduction The LEGO Group is a multinational toy manufacturer headquartered in Billund, Denmark, with interests in videogames, television, and film, in addition to toys. Their primary product consists of plastic building blocks with thousands of variations in dozens of colours, purchasable either in sets with instructions to create particular designs, or as assorted boxes for more creative freeform building; sets have a multitude of “themes”, including in-house labels such as ‘Bionicles’ and ‘Ninjago’, ‘city’ sets, and products based on popular intellectual property from film, television, videogames, and even organisations such as NASA. Different sets and themes are targeted at different audience segments, including adults and children by age group. The company announced in 2021 that it would aim to ensure its “products and marketing are accessible to all and free of gender bias” (LEGO Group, “Girls”). The LEGO Group and its various products attract active and engaged fans. LEGO bricks allow users to create designs limited only by their imagination and their ability to acquire sufficient parts. Though initially and perhaps primarily a children’s toy, LEGO has over the past few decades attracted a substantial adult audience, often referred to as Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) who function as brand ambassadors, consumers, and co-creators (Jennings 222). The toy’s creative affordances have allowed AFOLs to establish numerous fan conventions and events at which they display their designs. In addition to unofficial fan activity such as conventions, LEGO has shown an interest in direct economic engagement with fans of their products. This is evidenced by their 2021 purchase of a large after-market LEGO reselling marketplace, Bricklink (LEGO Group, “LEGO Group Acquires”), and the establishment of the LEGO Ideas platform, which is the subject of this article. Such efforts might be viewed in light of Busse’s warning that there is “danger to fan culture [from] the co-optation and colonization of fan creations, interactions, and space” (Busse 112). This article investigates the LEGO Group’s relationship to adult fan labour through the notion of ‘platform rhetoric’, by which we mean the way in which the LEGO Ideas platform, and specifically the LEGO Ideas Guidelines (LEGO Group, “Product Idea”), hereafter “Guidelines”, create an infrastructure for structuring the relationship between fan designers and the company. The platform harnesses the labour of both adult fan designers and other site users to generate new and successful products for the LEGO Group. In doing so, it offers a tantalising case study of how this toy is positioned at the intersection of creativity, transnational data flows, and global economic activity. While the LEGO Ideas platform and Guidelines are not the only space in which LEGO and their fans negotiate such matters, as shown by other examples already mentioned, the platform’s public nature and its intersection with other aspects of participatory online media offer a valuable case study for understanding platform rhetorics and the way they can structure interactions between fans and brands. About LEGO Ideas LEGO Ideas was established in 2008 as a collaboration between the LEGO Group and a Japanese company as a crowdsourcing platform called LEGO CUUSOO. It was relaunched as LEGO Ideas in 2014 (LEGO Group, “LEGO History”). Crowdsourcing is an “online, distributed problem-solving and production model” (Brabham 75) that became popular from about 2006 as a new approach to generating product ideas. It is a process in which “the crowd was co-opted” (Ghezzi et al. 344) and where “products designed by the crowd become the property of companies, who turn large profits off from this crowd labor” (Brabham 76). Ideas appears part of a broader reset for LEGO that occurred as the Internet came to occupy increasing prominence in social and commercial life. Hatch and Shultz (596) observe that in contrast to previous strategies for the company, by the early 2000s “consumer and company alike were now using the Internet as both the platform and a channel for brand engagement”. In line with this trend, the Ideas platform invites fan designers to submit ideas for new LEGO products which then pass through a series of filters before reaching a stage at which the company considers them for production, including multiple stages of public voting. After reaching the final stage of fan voting, potential products are assessed by the LEGO Group on a range of factors. Each of these stages is laid out in the Guidelines, along with authorship arrangements: successful designers receive “1% of the total net sales of the product … 10 complimentary copies of your LEGO Ideas set [and] Credit and bio in set materials as the LEGO Ideas set creator”. Ideas capitalises on the cultures of creation and co-creation that Nancy Jennings has identified as central to AFOL communities, although her work focusses on the Lego Ambassador Program and LEGO Group AFOL Engagement Department (238). The LEGO Ideas Website can be described as a platform, a “digital, socio-technical system that create[s] relationships between different entities” (Lee). When self-applied by the entity, the term platform has a political purpose to simplify or obfuscate “tensions … between user-generated and commercially-produced content, between cultivating community and serving up advertising, between intervening in the delivery of content and remaining neutral” (Gillespie 348). In applying the term ‘platform’ to LEGO Ideas, we are making similar political claims that it occupies a tension-filled role between users (including those who submit designs) and the commercial interests of the LEGO Group. Plantin et al. suggest something of a convergence between platform and infrastructure studies, especially when addressing “new digital objects” (293). The platform also serves a role in collecting large amounts of data for LEGO, which can be understood as equivalent to the advertising initiatives of other platforms. It is certainly not a neutral carrier of content, as our analysis of the Guidelines will show. The affordances of the LEGO Ideas platform engage both fans who actively produce fan products in the form of designs and photographs submitted to the site, but also “nonproductive fans [who] can participate in fandom's gift economy through their engagement with the fruits of fannish labor” (Turk). Such engagement takes the form of participating in the voting systems, commenting upon the designs, and generating engagement through social media. This is a capturing of consumer labour in much the same way envisioned by Toffler (cited in Bruns) in the notion of a ‘prosumer’: “Producer and consumer, divorced by the industrial revolution, are reunited in the cycle of wealth creation, with the customer contributing not just the money but market and design information vital for the production process”. The ecosystem of participation also extends beyond the platform itself as the Guidelines explicitly specify that a user may “promote as you wish online”. Fan designer Brent Waller, creator of two successful LEGO Ideas sets, commented in an interview that you need to actively promote it via outside avenues – forums, websites, Facebook, Twitter etc. This is particularly important if your project is based on existing [sic] license or intellectual property. If that is the case then you need to reach out to those external fan bases who may not be huge LEGO fans but may be a fan of the project you’ve submitted and would love to see it come to life in LEGO form. (Ong, “Interview with Brent Waller”) As such, submitters tend to use social media and other Internet platforms to generate votes, further extending the complexity of interactions between user creativity, the toy company and their economic interests, and the flow of user-generated information across Internet platforms. LEGO Ideas Guidelines as Rhetorical Infrastructure While we have characterised LEGO Ideas as a platform, it is not an open social media platform but instead has tightly controlled submission procedures. Each submission to LEGO Ideas must incorporate several required elements outlined in the Guidelines and be approved by platform staff prior to publication. This is the first in a series of processes by which LEGO Ideas operates to shape the products which are published through it. These are rhetorical infrastructures, “not just containers for composition but systems of support that structure the compositions they generate in an active way” (Pilsch 8). Accepting the distinction between platforms and infrastructure in terms of digital objects discussed by Plantin et al., we are distinguishing between LEGO Ideas as a platform and the LEGO Ideas guidelines as an infrastructural element which shapes how the platform operates. Whereas infrastructure studies has “focused on analyzing essential, widely shared sociotechnical systems” (Plantin et al., 294), the Guidelines serve that purpose only within the Ideas platform for the purposes of this case study. There are similarities in this conception of rhetorical infrastructure and terms such as ‘affordance’, which similarly seek to describe the way in which artifacts embed “mechanisms and conditions [which] create a scaffold through which artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse” (Davis and Chouinard 246, original emphasis). The notion of “rhetorical infrastructure” is distinctive in capturing the functional and relational work done by networks of documents, artifacts, activities, and procedures that underpin action within a given environment (Read 12); within technical communication, there is a particular emphasis on the rhetorical infrastructure of “invisible documents” such as documentation and standards – forms of writing that serve a vital regulatory function but which are often invisible until they fail (Frith 406). Understanding the LEGO Ideas Guidelines as rhetorical infrastructure allows us to excavate how this document works behind the scenes to shape user action and standardise outputs within a platform that ostensibly privileges free play and creativity, but actually transforms these into valuable intellectual property for the LEGO Group. The Guidelines function as a translational infrastructure to incorporate fan labour directly into the LEGO ecosystem. The Guidelines serve their regulatory function in part by outlining in plain terms, both textually and visually, what content will and will not be accepted as a submission to the site. The Guidelines specify that Ideas must be: “single, stand-alone LEGO products”; “a maximum of 3000 pieces”; “must focus on a single concept”; and not based “on a licensed property we currently sell”. Platform users must be older than 13 years of age, and any submitter younger than 18 must have written approval from their caregiver. In this way, LEGO further orients the Ideas platform toward the putative AFOL, and submitted Ideas, in our review, likewise tend to be targeted toward older builders. Additionally, the Guidelines prohibit any commercial activity related to submitted Ideas, although they do permit sharing of “photos and building instructions free of charge”. These are the basic substantive rules by which staff approve submissions to be posted to (or remain on) the platform, though further aesthetic and legal conditions are outlined elsewhere in the Guidelines. Following initial approval, concepts published on LEGO Ideas must achieve a series of voting milestones in which other users of the platform show their ‘support’ – 100 supporters in the first 60 days, 1,000 supporters in the next year, and so on – a process which generates substantial amounts of user data for LEGO. Ultimately, projects have just over two years to attain the figure of 10,000 supporters that triggers the “expert review” phase of the Ideas selection process. Such voting is a form of collective knowledge generation; within the context of a workplace, Majchrzak et al. describe this practice as “metavoicing … adding metaknowledge to the content that is already online” (41). It is also a substantial source of market data. Assuming at least some supporters of each successful project have selected their time zone and filled in other details, the submission of these votes under the LEGO Ideas guidelines demonstrates potential market interest for the projects and other data points of economic interest to the toymaker. Additionally, LEGO Ideas places at least eight ‘cookies’ on Web browsers used to access the site. This process also generates a substantial potential data pool (Bennett; Englehardt et al.). In addition to generating data for LEGO, achieving milestones motivates submitters to continue promoting their idea and thus drives traffic to the platform. Blog posts published on the LEGO Ideas site demonstrate that the 10,000 vote milestone in particular generates substantial excitement for the fan designers. For example, in one such post Peter (user SoGenius106), who submitted an Idea based on television program The Office, notes that this project hit 10k about 8 days before it was set to expire, this is what really made me nervous, knowing that this project was so close to 10K but had little time to get there. (Kamila9) Similarly, Sam (user KaijuBuildz) expressed excitement at reaching the 10,000-supporter milestone: it took a while, around 16 months to be precise. But the feeling when it finally DID hit that magic 5-digit number felt incredible, though it did take some time to truly sink in. (fergushart) Like Waller, quoted earlier, both fan designers noted that using social media platforms outside of Ideas was important to their success. But Sam / KajuiBuildz also credited the platform’s affordances and userbase, suggesting: “word of mouth through the supporters of the project itself was a big help for sure” (fergushart). Such extension across platforms demonstrates “the logic of self-branding – of carefully curated self-promotion – [which] is a fact of social media life, for everyday users and cultural workers alike” (Duffy and Pooley 8). While the LEGO Ideas platform shapes production of submitted projects, the Guidelines also structure the relationship between fan designers and the LEGO Group after any successful voting period. Any Idea that reaches the 10,000-supporter milestone is reviewed by a ‘review board’ of “designers, product managers, and other key team members”; if an Idea is selected for production, “professional LEGO designers take over” (LEGO Group, “Product”). In practice, a number of fan designers document collaborating with professional designers in some capacity. For example, Motorised Lighthouse designer Sandro Quattrini said he was able to express ideas “in our very first meeting” (Ong, “Interview with the LEGO Ideas Design Team”), while the designer of the Typewriter set stated: “I was really made to feel a part of the team” (Huw). In this case, the published document sets a term of engagement that may or may not be reflected in the actual practice of creating a LEGO set following a successful Ideas submission. It therefore establishes the framework through which the decision to interact or not with the designer is left in the hands of LEGO staff assigned to the project. Guidelines for Social Action This points to the dual role of the Guidelines: the document is at once procedural, laying out the steps required of platform users, and social, shaping the ways that users of the platform engage with the Ideas published there and with the LEGO Group. It’s common for technical documents such as guidelines and instructions to be characterised as formulaic, mechanical tools for dictating practice, what Walwema and Butts refer to as “grey genres” (Butts and Walwema 15); in practice, however, such genres both shape users’ actions and position them as members of a community with shared interests and values. This positioning happens in both informal and formal guidelines – for example, Ledbetter’s study of user-generated instructional content in YouTube beauty communities has demonstrated how video tutorials begin from users’ shared interests (here, in makeup techniques) and then build fan-user communities that share specialist vocabularies, social interactions, and value-led behaviours (Ledbetter). Within institutions, codes of conduct are a well-defined and stable genre, yet operate in a complex, unstable nexus of procedural, ethical, and legal contexts; they are simultaneously internal policy documents (setting out standards of behaviour for organisation members), public ethical statements (published as part of an organisation’s commitment to ethical frameworks, emphasising principles and values over actions), and deployed or deployable in legal contexts to shield corporations. As Sam Dragga notes, codes of conduct typically adopt a legislative approach and are composed as “guidelines and regulations”, even where they use language and syntax – like “we” statements – designed to look more like commitments than regulations. These documents position users as subject to the institution’s values, “implying that the individual is without power because all power comes from the regulating corporation” (Dragga 7), rather than as collaborators in them. The LEGO Ideas Guidelines likewise operate to require alignment of user actions with brand values to ensure that fan labour can be successfully monetised at all stages of the Ideas process, from initial visits to the platform right through to commercial production of fan designs. This expectation is codified in the Guidelines’ “Acceptable Content” section: “in order for us to be able to consider your product idea, it must fit with our brand values and guidelines … following these guidelines is the surest recipe to see that your work is approved for LEGO Ideas”. Those values, however, are only implicit in the list of concrete themes and attributes that “do not fit”, including nudity, modern warfare, human-scale weapons, and racism. The Guidelines are explicitly directive, with a hard demarcation between LEGO and its fans: the document refers to “we” the LEGO Group and “you” the user, and bans fan designers from using any version of the brand logo, even an approximation so abstract as “a red square”, lest their submission be misconstrued as LEGO-endorsed. This exclusion occurs even as in-house terminology like “LEGO Fan designer” and “professional LEGO designer” or “LEGO Set designer” establishes an overlap between the labour of fans and employees – one reinforced by the showcasing of those fan designers who do participate in some co-design with LEGO’s professional team when their Idea goes into production. Conclusion The LEGO Ideas platform is presented as a channel for fans and designers to use their existing passion and creativity productively, for their own financial benefit and for the (considerably larger) economic benefit of the company. Adult designers using the platform do so only in alignment within the operation of a set of Guidelines that constrain and guide their decisions in a way perceived to be an appropriate reflection of the LEGO brand. Like other online platforms with social features, the Ideas platform is a commercial infrastructure in which community is shaped, rather than a community infrastructure. The success of the platform has also impacted on the wider toy industry, with other toy companies introducing Ideas-like platforms, such as Mattel’s ‘Creations’. In turn, the platform and its users intersect with other participatory Internet platforms such as social network sites where they promote their Ideas to garner the magical 10,000 supporters needed to progress to the next step. Further engagement with broader notions of digital infrastructure and platforms, especially on the terms described by Plantin et al., would offer fruitful insights into both the wider LEGO operation and LEGO Ideas specifically. Throughout the process, LEGO collects massive amounts of user data from both participating fan designers and other users of the site through both technical means and social signals. Such data is of additional value when combined with other LEGO user accounts such as purchase history, and potentially also with information about users (buyers and sellers) on the Bricklink site. This offers a potentially vast amount of signals about purchase, browsing, and interest among both existing and prospective LEGO customers, and could again be part of a larger study of the company’s corporate strategies. The Guidelines shape the entirety of this interactive space, creating the infrastructure in which different forms of knowledge and cultural capital operate, and rhetorical action occurs. Successful Ideas have captured a social Zeitgeist to gather the required number of supporters, while also ensuring they closely align with the LEGO brand guidelines. LEGO staff participating in the process bring their own institutional perspective to the designs, taking over where required but also consulting the submitting fan designers in a number of cases. On this point, the Guidelines offer ambiguity, allowing the LEGO Group discretion over the final shape of interaction between designers of different status. 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ORIGINS We warmly welcome you to this special issue of Approaches. Spirituality is a shared area of interest for many disciplines that explore the role of music in human life, including music therapy, ethnomusicology, music education, music philosophy and theology. Interdisciplinary dialogue in this area, however, has been limited. Responding to this situation, and with an explicit focus on spirituality and music in relation to wellbeing and education, this special issue brings to the fore ideas, questions and debates that often remain hidden within the confines of each discipline. The vision underpinning this special issue originates in the 2017 conference ‘Exploring the Spiritual in Music: Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Music, Wellbeing and Education’ which took place at the Nordoff Robbins London Centre. Co-organised by the UK music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins and the international network Spirituality and Music Education (SAME), and according to the ethos of the Nordoff Robbins Plus Research Conference Series (Pavlicevic, 2014; Spiro, 2017; Spiro &amp; Schober, 2014), this event offered a platform for interdisciplinary and cross-institutional thinking within, around and beyond music therapy.[1] Indeed, the conference attracted over a hundred scholars, researchers, practitioners and students from different disciplinary, geographical and spiritual spaces. It became a meeting point of diverse and, at times, contrasting spiritualities and musics fostering constructive debates and generating a ‘place’ alive with multiple meanings (Hendricks, 2018; Hendricks &amp; Smith, 2019). The presentations were grouped into six main themes: i) Uncertainties and controversies, ii) Culture, politics and identity, iii) Learning and teaching, iv) Music, imagery and reflection, v) Musicians, thinkers and approaches, and vi) Living and dying. These themes offered a framework for critical and constructive dialogue regarding the multiple manifestations and understandings of the spiritual in music across different practices, settings and cultures. HYBRIDITY Building on the ethos and the themes of the 2017 conference, this special issue brings together and takes forward diverse theoretical perspectives, practices and methodological approaches. Our vision, as chairs of the conference and editors of this publication, has been to move beyond conceptual and methodological conventions, and to offer an open space for exploring the spiritual in music.[2] In this context, ‘the spiritual’ is intentionally used as a term reflecting our commitment to a hybrid spiritual discourse. ‘The spiritual’ implies our conceptualisation of spirituality as a ‘boundary object’ in music therapy and in related fields; “a hybrid construct which affords the co-existence of unfinished spiritualities as well as their multiple and heterogeneous translations” (Tsiris, 2018, p. i). Instead of applying an overarching definition of spirituality, this edition on the one hand recognises the plasticity of spirituality and its adaptations to local music practices, and on the other hand highlights how spirituality retains some commonly recognisable, even if fuzzy, patterns across intersecting disciplinary, professional and cultural contexts. As such, we are interested in the multiplicity of the spiritual in music and its heterogeneous translations and applications.[3] This has resulted in a rich edition embracing varying writing styles, perspectives, methodological approaches and perspectives. In each case, authors were asked to communicate openly their stance and intention of writing, and to position their arguments accordingly. Contents overview This special issue begins with Sara MacKian’s paper. Based on her keynote presentation in 2017 and drawing on her research experience as a human geographer (e.g., Bartolini, Chris, MacKian &amp; Pile, 2017; MacKian, 2012), this paper explores how and where the spiritual might be encountered in unexpected ways. MacKian advocates for an openness towards the challenges of encountering and of articulating spirituality. Re-orientating our analytical lens to the everyday, she stresses the importance of mystery in our engagements with spirituality, music and wellbeing in everyday life. Responding to MacKian’s paper, Lars Ole Bonde offers his perspective as a music therapist with specific reference to Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). Moving beyond a static-content-oriented approach, Bonde proposes a more dynamic process and interpersonal understanding of spiritual/transpersonal experiences with music. The emerging interplay between the extraordinary and the ordinary, and the open-ended stance adopted by MacKian and Bonde, is equally characteristic of the other papers contained in this issue. Bolette Daniels Beck and Martin Lawes, both using case examples from their GIM work, explore the concepts of ‘sacred moments’ and of spiritual experiences. Kate Binnie explores the ‘thin place’ between life and death through a case study of compassion-focused relational approach to music therapy with a hospice patient and she outlines a feasibility study protocol. Some authors, such as Astrid Notarangelo and Adam Kishtainy, present personal accounts of integrating spirituality in their own music therapy work. Other authors consider spirituality in relation to emerging research findings and literature themes from diverse disciplinary spaces. Efrat Roginsky and Cochavit Elefant, for example, consider spirituality in relation to transformative experiences of music as emerged in their research with parents of children with cerebral palsy and multiple disabilities. Focusing on spirituality from a different disciplinary perspective, that of metal music, Owen Coggins reviews some of the controversies that have characterised public, political and research debates on health and metal music since the 1970s especially in the US and the UK. Drawing on his own ethnographic study of violence, religion and health within the music culture of drone metal, Coggins explores how noise and extreme music can be positive, yet under-appreciated, resources for listeners’ health. On the other hand, Giorgio Scalici’s ethnomusicological study of music among the Wana people of Morowali in Central Sulawesi explores how music connects the human world and the hidden world of spirits and emotion. More specifically, he explores the role of music as a ritual marker transforming ordinary time into mythical/ritual time and allowing the healing of the patient and the community through emotional catharsis. Lastly, Faith Halverson-Ramos’ opinion paper explores music in relation to gerotranscendence. With a focus on the US social context, Halverson-Ramos discusses how music can be vital to a culturally responsive approach to ageing and transpersonal growth. These articles are followed by three book reviews by Tia DeNora, Marilyn Clark and Leslie Bunt. Two of these reviews concern the books Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal by Coggins (2018) and Spirituality and Music Education: Perspectives from Three Continents by Boyce-Tillman (2017) which were launched at the 2017 conference. The special issue concludes with a report by Karin Hendricks and Tawnya Smith offering a reflective overview of the 2017 conference alongside some photographic material. For the readers who did not attend the conference, this report may serve as a useful introduction to this special edition. Filoxenia This special issue would not have been possible without the diligent work of the editorial board who also served on the scientific committee of the 2017 conference: Lars Ole Bonde, June Boyce-Tillman, Owen Coggins, John Habron, Frank Heuser, Koji Matsunobu, Simon Procter, Neta Spiro, and Liesl van der Merwe. We thank each and every one of them for fostering a dialogic and reflexive peer-review space where scientific rigour was balanced by a genuine spirit of curiosity and openness towards aspects of the spiritual in music which are perhaps located on the edge of existing theoretical frameworks and may be more slippery to the scientific eye. Moving beyond polarisations and a sense of ‘mutual suspicion’, which may be observed between different professional fields in the wider music, wellbeing and education arena (Tsiris, Derrington, Sparkes, Spiro &amp; Wilson, 2016), the peer-review process was characterised by an awareness of the multiplicity of the spiritual in music and a willingness to enable diverse voices to enter the professional discourse and come together. We argue that this coming together of different voices is a key contribution of this special issue given that such papers would typically, and perhaps more comfortably, remain within the conceptual and methodological boundaries of their profession and discipline. This special issue fostered an epistemological culture of filoxenia (etymology from the Greek filo [= love] + xenos [= stranger]); a spirit of openness, trust and generosity betweenauthors and reviewers. Instead of being uninvited or misunderstood guests in each other’s disciplinary discourses (Frank, 2009; Tsiris, 2013, 2014), authors and reviewers collaborated as partners and equally important co-creators of this interdisciplinary environment. This seemingly romantic view was, of course, underpinned and shaped by the negotiations and controversies as well as the uncertainties and vulnerabilities which are inherent to each field’s professional and disciplinary advancements. Mercédès Pavlicevic, who sadly died a few months after the 2017 conference, has been a vital voice in music therapy articulating vividly some of these negotiations and controversies around our cultural constructions of music, health and healing (Stige, 2018). In her article with Cripps, she characteristically proposed a ‘messy hybridity’ to reflect the sociocultural and cosmological fusions required for contemporary music therapy practices: Straddling the South and the Global North, we propose that Western (and at times bio-medically informed) healing and health practices might well consider reclaiming and re-sourcing their own, and other, traditional and indigenous healing cosmologies, whatever their respective and situated ideologies and ontologies. Despite apparent (and possibly intellectual and ideological) segmentations and separations of disciplines by Western scholarship and economics, we propose that ‘the ancestors’ and ‘the aspirin’ need to embrace rather than view one another with suspicion. Just possibly, each might become enriched (and discomforted) by the silenced coincidences of one another’s desires to know and experience our common humanity through music. (Pavlicevic &amp; Cripps, 2015) With the publication of this special issue, we pay tribute to Mercédès, a close colleague and dear friend to both of us. Mercédès was instrumental in the establishment of the Nordoff Robbins Plus Research Conference series and contributed to the scientific committee of the 2017 conference. Although Mercédès had become too unwell to contribute to the editorial board of this special issue, her commitment to exploring music and spirituality in-context and in-action informed our editorial work and indeed remains a passionately alive voice within us. We are grateful for everything that Mercédès brought and shared with us: The fruit of Mercédès’ endeavour is becoming clear and is our gift from her: an influential legacy of thinking and practice for music therapy and beyond music therapy… but also a life-lesson for us all:Stir it up… get moving… be bold… share your energy… be naughty sometimes and shake things up… but also… create beauty together, party, believe in people, cherish each other…And also… know when to leave, know how to let go – with dignity and grace. (Ansdell, 2018) We encourage readers to keep Mercédès’ endeavour and gift in their mind and in their heart as they turn the pages of this issue. LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN Looking ahead, we hope this special issue expands our horizons by generating new questions and directions in our explorations of the spiritual in music. We hope it becomes a springboard for further practice, theory and research developments questioning traditional assumptions and venturing beyond familiar knowledge and methods. Marking also the tenth anniversary of Approaches, this publication reflects the journal’s ongoing commitment to the advancement of music therapy through interdisciplinary dialogue bridging local and global aspects of music, health and wellbeing. As we close this editorial, we leave the door open… and we call for a critical engagement with the creative uncertainties characterising the evolving interdisciplinary landscape of the spiritual in music. References Ansdell, G. (2018). Mercédès’ endeavour. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 18(2). Retrieved from https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/2526 Bartolini, N., Chris, R., MacKian, S., &amp; Pile, S. (2017). The place of spirit: Modernity and the geographies of spirituality. Progress in Human Geography, 41(3), 338-354. Boyce-Tillman, J. (Ed.). (2017). Spirituality and music education: Perspectives from three continents. Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd. Coggins, O. (2018). Mysticism, ritual and religion in drone metal. London: Bloomsbury Academic. DeNora, T., &amp; Ansdell, G. (2014). What can’t music do? Psychology of Well-being, 4(1), 23. DeNora, T., &amp; Ansdell, G. (2017). Music in action: Tinkering, testing and tracing over time. Qualitative Research, 17(2), 231-245. Frank, A. W. (2009). The renewal of generosity: Illness, medicine, and how to live. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hendricks, K.S. (2018). Compassionate music teaching. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hendricks, K.S., &amp; Smith, T.D. (2019). The 4th Nordoff Robbins Plus Research Conference and the 4th International Spirituality and Music Education (SAME) Conference ‘Exploring the spiritual in music: Interdisciplinary dialogues in music, wellbeing and education’. Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, Special Issue 11(1), 191-200. MacKian, S. (2012). Everyday spirituality: Social and spatial worlds of enchantment. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavlicevic, M. (2014). Afterword: Knock knock… Psychology of Music, 42(6), 894-896. Pavlicevic, M., &amp; Cripps, C. (2015). Muti music – In search of suspicion. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 15(3). Retrieved from https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/2286 Spiro, N. (2017). The Nordoff Robbins Plus Research Conference Series. In G. Tsiris, G. Ansdell, N. Spiro, &amp; O. Coggins (Eds.), Exploring the spiritual in music: Interdisciplinary dialogues in music, wellbeing and education (p. 11). London: Nordoff Robbins. Spiro, N., &amp; Schober, M. F. (2014). Perspectives on music and communication: An introduction. Psychology of Music, 42(6), 771-775. Stige, B. (2018). Moments and open doors: A tribute to Mercédès Pavlicevic. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 18(2). Retrieved from https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/2524 Tsiris, G. (2013). Voices from the ghetto: Music therapy perspectives on disability and music (a response to Joseph Straus’ book “Extraordinary measures: Disability in music”). International Journal of Community Music, 6(3), 333-343 Tsiris, G. (2014). Community music therapy: Controversies, synergies and ways forward. International Journal of Community Music, 7(1), 3-9. Tsiris, G. (2018). Performing spirituality in music therapy: Towards action, context and the everyday. Doctoral thesis, Nordoff Robbins / Goldsmith’s, University of London, London, UK. Retrieved from http://research.gold.ac.uk/23037/ Tsiris, G., Derrington, P., Sparkes, P., Spiro, N., &amp; Wilson, G. (2016). Interdisciplinary dialogues in music, health and wellbeing: Difficulties, challenges and pitfalls. In M. Belgrave (Ed.), Proceedings of the ISME Commission on Special Music Education and Music Therapy(20-23 July 2016, Edinburgh, Scotland) (pp.58-70). Edinburgh: ISME. [1] Two years after the 2017 conference, and under the leadership of June Boyce-Tillman, SAME developed into the International Network for Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing, which aims to embrace the social, personal, spiritual and political aspects of wellbeing. [2] Pointing to a similar questioning of methodological conventions, Gary’s work with Tia DeNora (e.g., DeNora &amp; Ansdell, 2014, 2017) opens a space where some of the unobservable processes by which music helps can be traced and become known. [3] Further details about the proposed hybrid spiritual discourse and the notion of spirituality as a ‘boundary object’ can be found in Giorgos’ ethnographic study which explores the performance of spirituality in everyday music therapy contexts (Tsiris, 2018).

The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). 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