Counterpublics

This article discusses the relationship between violence and public space in light of a collectively perpetrated and widely televised arson attack that took place in 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, and its recent on-site commemorations. It draws on critical theoretical perspectives developed since the 1990s to consider conventional models of public space as entangled in violence, while also aiming to contribute to contemporary scholarship on contrarian responses to this entanglement. The tendency in this scholarship is to identify these responses as bottom-up, unscripted, performative and direct, and therefore as diametrically opposed to those identified as top-down, scripted, rational, and legislation-facing. The multifarious initiatives and interventions involving contextually shifting priorities, positions and strategies that mark the case discussed in this article call this tendency into question. Unassimilable under such binary oppositions, these initiatives and interventions have not refrained from engaging conventional models of public space while also developing and mobilizing contrarian ones. This article ultimately argues that public space is not just where violence occurs but also where its semantic disambiguation is pursued; this pursuit, which involves various forms of socio-political work, in turn defines and continually redefines the very distinction between conventional and contrarian imaginaries of public space.

Th is article argues that throughout the 1950s and 1960s the communist-sponsored Arabic literary journal al-Jadid played a central role in creating a Palestinian-Arab counterpublic within Israel by challenging Zionist discourses and championing Arab and Palestinian causes. As a result, when Palestinian writers, activists and intellectuals in Israel were reconnected with Palestinians outside Israel after the 1967 War, they played a vital role in the development of a broader Palestinian public sphere that emphasized perseverance, ties to the land, and resistance to Zionist hegemony. Th rough content analysis of over 140 issues of al-Jadid published between 1953 and 1967, this article demonstrates al-Jadid 's signifi cant role in communicating politically subversive discourses to an increasingly literate public living under military rule, as well as its part in the social circulation of these discourses in the region following the 1967 War. In doing so, it sheds new light on the nexus of media, literature and nationalism in the Palestinian context.

COMS 490 – History and Theory of Media (Special Topic: Queer Media Theory). Advanced undergraduate seminar on intersections between queer and media studies, with particular emphasis on debates on the archive and affect theory. (Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University)

"Half a century ago Jürgen Habermas published his seminal work Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962–2012), in which he formalized his ideal-typical model of the public sphere.

The influence of the Habermasian paradigm in the following decades has been such that it has given rise to an autonomous interdisciplinary field of study, bringing together historians, literary scholars, political scientists, and philosophers.

For fifty years Habermas's theory has been the catalyst for the historiographical debate about public opinion and has been recognized as an interpretative paradigm of the development of Western modernity.

Despite the heralding of a post-Habermas era; despite the fact that some historians have mused over a possible – and in the minds of a few even desirable – total eclipse of the Habermasian doctrine; Habermas's model still boasts a significant scholarly vitality. Many answers that the German philosopher supplied have turned out to be inaccurate, but for historians the bigger questions that he posed remain relevant: how – and when – was the critical power of public discussion born? How are «the public» and «public spaces» defined? What is the relationship between public discourse and authority? What, ultimately, is the power of communication?

Inspired by the fundamental question of the relationship between power and communication, the current research paths explored by historians of the Ancien régime have consolidated the critical dialectic with this analytical paradigm, but at the same time have led in a direction that goes beyond the public sphere.

This volume combines empirical research on early modern Europe with the most recent theoretical approaches in the historiography of political communication. Leading North American and European scholars in the field engage critically with this fundamental concept of political modernity and present a new way of thinking about early modern politics."

Reviewed in American Historical Review; Cromhos; Francia; European History Quarterly; European Review of History; Historische Zeitschrift; Journal of Early Modern History; Renaissance Quarterly; Renaissance Studies; Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine; Revue Historique; Storicamente.

Aristotle has been continuously at the frontier of philosophical reflection for almost 2400 years. Throughout the 20th century the influence of his practical philosophy has been growing. His «non-modernist» concept of phrónêsis or practical wisdom is attracting increasing interest as an alternative to both «modernism» and «post-modernism». This book is a meticulous study of Aristotle's phrónêsis and its applications to the fields of personal development or character formation and of ethical virtues. It also relates phrónêsis to the wider context of Aristotle's theoretical philosophy and of his different ways of knowing, and to both theoretical and practical concerns within modern social and action research. The whole of Aristotle's thinking is radically practice-based and directed. However, it never loses its theoretical focus. His theoretical philosophy is fundamentally dialogical. Hence, the relevance of Aristotelian thinking is striking for the current reconfigurations in the social organisation of learning and knowledge production.

Several years ago, a negotiated, consensual abduction scenario took place in downtown Toronto, Canada. Following the public abduction the captive was taken to a secure, private location and (consensually) subjected to physical and sexual aggression: ‘gang-rape’. The public abduction involved five queer and trans persons, some of whom are people of colour. In a Foucaultian context, an abduction scenario eludes surveillance and remains invisible until revealed. During the abduction scenario some citizens stopped, observed, and considered using their cellular phones, visibly concerned with what they were witnessing. At one point the scenario paused for consultation and explanation with bystanders troubled by what they interpreted as potentially criminal behaviour. This response can be understood as policing non-normative, public, physical activity. What are the limitations of Sadomasochism (S/m) in the public sphere? And how are identifications of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality positioned in this analysis? To those inexperienced with S/m, unfamiliar with consensually aggressive activity, there can be a questioning of psychological contiguity. In the 21st century there has been a mainstreaming of kink. Yet, there remain limitations of public tolerance for S/m as counter­-conduct. Through the work of Warner and Munoz, this paper suggests the scenario can be interpreted as a counterpublic. This research is an autoethnographic account of the scenario and represents a lacuna addressing the limitations on S/m scenarios conducted in the public sphere.

Key words: abduction; Sadomasochism; counterpublic; governmentality; intersectionality; Foucault.

"In this paper, which is based on his Doctoral research at the Centre for the Studies of Culture
and Society (CSCS) in Bangalore, India and the Graduate School of the University of
Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Ansari makes new meaningful connections
between international contemporary academic debates on pluralism and democratic social
transformation on the one hand and discourses circulating within Indian subaltern spaces on the
other. Through a particular case study of ‘the pasmanda counterpublic’, Ansari aims to enrich
the debates within civil society as well as open new possibilities for engagement with social
change."

This article draws upon research with an Arab Muslim blogger on Tumblr to introduce “remonstrative agitation” as feminist counterpublic rhetoric. Farrah (the blogger’s chosen pseudonym) uses remonstrative agitation to challenge discursive and rhetorical imperialism, provoking accelerated circulation of counterdiscourse in response to impositions and harassment from white nationalists and white feminists. It functions as a performative, parrhesiastic rhetoric to claim rhetorical agency in the face of epistemic injustice while offering her counterpublic audiences discourse to learn from, relate to, and circulate. This article ultimately offers insights, methods, and visualizations for digital counterpublic rhetoric and future research.

This paper traces the origins of the New Brazilian Right, regarding the emergence of new leaders, new forms of expression and organization, as well as new sets of ideas, namely libertarianism and anti-globalism. Based on more than thirty in-depth interviews, conducted between 2015 and 2019 with right-wing leaders and activists; on a collection of historical data from right-wing organisations’ archives between 2015 and 2018, and on public data, I argue that this phenomenon started in the mid-2000s, after the onset of a corruption scandal related to the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the dissemination of the pioneering social network Orkut in Brazil. This social network, founded in 2004, preceded Facebook’s popularity in Brazil and enabled the creation of alternative and disruptive spaces of debate, referred to here as “counterpublics”. By mid- to late 2010s, during the 2014 protests for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign, this emerging new right would be at full throttle.

This article takes note of affordances for counterpublic communication on social networking sites (SNSs). Because of the important ways that counterpublic communication is tied to specific platforms, it is necessary to understand why certain platforms are especially conducive (or are seen to be conducive) to counterpublic address. This article uses the example of the asexual community’s use of the SNS Tumblr to explore the affordances of the Tumblr platform for counterpublic communication, comparing Tumblr to the bulletin boards on the popular Asexuality Visibility Education Network website. This article modifies and extends boyd’s analysis of SNSs as networked publics to account for the technological affordances for networked counterpublics. It ends by briefly considering ways that networked counterpublics can be antagonized.

In this research, we investigate the citizen hijacking of the Twitter hashtag #myNYPD in response to a public relations campaign by the New York City Police Department in April of 2014. Using counterpublic sphere theory, we examine how Twitter was used as a platform to organize, generate, and promote counterpublic narratives about racial profiling, police misconduct and police violence. Through a combination of large-scale network analysis and qualitative discourse analysis, we detail emergent counterpublic structure and leadership, specific discursive strategies deployed by crowdsourced elites within communities of resistance, and the reception of online counterpublic activism in mainstream media. We conclude with implications for understanding the evolving nature of counterpublics in the second decade of the 21st-century, with particular consideration to the roles of new and old media in (re)shaping public debates around marginalization, profiling, and policing.

The 'two communities' model of Northern Irish culture has contributed to the erasure of a discursive space, a public sphere, to which Northern Irish subjects might have access. The essay suggests that these 'two communities' (unionist/loyalist and nationalist/republican) actually comprise at least four publics (unionist, nationalist, loyalist, and republican). The rhetorical conflation of these publics as 'two communities' reifies their opposition, limits political discourse, and replaces a public sphere with a set of clashing 'cultures'. The essays concludes by examining the Northern Irish queer counterpublic and suggesting the ways it constitutes a more imaginative and effective model for public discourse by imagining a public sphere.

We usually associate memory with facts. A simple gesture of leaving a lipstick trace, a kiss, used for several decades by Ewa Partum, is a form of leaving your mark, as well as representing your emotional state. It has become the artist’s trademark. At first, it was her individual gesture, a kind of artistic signature. In 2006 Partum invited a group of South American immigrants to perform the signature with her. I’d like to find out what is actually included in this artistic act, how it surpasses the border between the private and the public and how it becomes a specific form of materialised universalism, the practice of a shared thing.

The abstruse and visionary delineation of how a public sphere formulates itself and its subjects across social variety, despite the evident possibility of this gendered and hierarchical concern, has of course become rather standardised. “The idea of the public sphere in Habermas’s sense is a conceptual resource that designates a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk.” (Fraser, 1990) What if rather than a conceptual resource, the notion was given physical space. As an artspace attempts to get us to feel for or engage in site specific works (whether within a museum or elsewhere), its primary usage is that of discussion, of the removal of socio-economical boundaries and restraints, of free speech, for all, often curated and dominated by a predefined issue; artspace as public sphere.

Species counterpoint involves the addition of a melody above or below a given melody. The added melody (the counterpoint) becomes increasingly complex and interesting in each of the five species. The given melody is called cantus firmus, which means "firm" or "unalterable melody". We shall use the following canti firmi throughout the species unit.

This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective "we" for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordinated action, neoliberalism envisions a public of atomistic individuals who compete with one another for comparative advantage. Flattening difference and obscuring inequality, a neoliberal public presumes a universal subject that obscures its own particularity and discounts the uneven burdens faced by those who cannot seamlessly identify with its mode of subjectivity. Further, for a neoliberal public, inequality serves as the condition and end of competition. Resistance to neoliberalism may arise in the networked locals of a multiple public sphere, as advocates reclaim connections that neoliberalism seeks to deny.

This essay offers an ideological analysis of the rhetoric of the Islamist Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in its official English-language Web site, Ikhwanweb, between 2005 and 2010 — years preceding the Egyptian uprising of January 2011. The purpose was to examine the ideology manifest in the rhetoric and uncover the instrumental function the rhetoric served. Analysis brought forth a post-Islamist ideology manifest through a rhetoric of dialectics. The instrumental function of the Egyptian MB's rhetoric in Ikhwanweb was to alter Western societies' monolithic understanding of Islamism — radical, undemocratic, inflexible. The cyber-rhetoric was also used as a means to disapprove certain Western agents' support for authoritarian regimes. During Mubarak's rule, Ikhwanweb was used as a communicative medium to demonstrate to the West the Egyptian MB's need to be valued — respected regardless of ideological differences, understood rather than essentialized, stereotyped, and prejudged, and supported as a pragmatic, political entity within Egypt.

Every user knows the importance of the “@” symbol in internet communication. Though the symbol barely existed in Latin America before the emergence of email, Spanish-speaking feminist activists immediately claimed it to replace the awkward “o/a” used to indicate both genders in written text, discovering an answer to the challenge of symbolic inclusion embedded in the internet. In repurposing the symbol, they changed its meaning.

In Interpreting the Internet, Elisabeth Jay Friedman provides the first in-depth exploration of how Latin American feminist and queer activists have interpreted the internet to support their counterpublics. Aided by a global network of women and men dedicated to establishing an accessible internet, activists have developed identities, constructed communities, and honed strategies for social change. And by translating the internet into their own vernacular, they have also transformed the technology. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in feminist and gender studies, Latin American studies, media studies, political science, as well as anyone curious about the ways in which the internet shapes our lives.

There exist some rare private schools that attempt to mitigate the anti-democratic qualities of the private schooling sector in England. This article reports on a study of private schools that aim to promote equality and participation through some aspects of their operations. It considers to what extent the governance structures within the schools support their aspirations and what this means for the public good more generally. English private schools are accountable to the state under The Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014 (hereafter Independent School Standards, 2014), corporate law and the majority are accountable under the Charities Act, which requires them to demonstrate public benefit. The schools reported here have a commitment to the public good that extends beyond these limited accountabilities, demonstrating the weaknesses of the public good as it is presently defined by the state and also advancing understanding on the extent to which the schools can be regarded as Fraser's (1990) counterpublics.

Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers original readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere’s shifting forms.

In Turkey, four people die every day due to accidents in the workplace. Moreover, both the inspection responsibility and the authority of the state in the workplace have been privatized. For these reasons, a group of families, lost their loved ones in workplace accidents, started a periodic protest (the Watch for Conscience and Justice) requesting public to monitor workplace accidents and related legal regulations and procedures. In time, thanks to their persistent protests, both in the public opinion and courts workplace accidents are started to be reframed (at least in popular cases). Although mainstream media ignore these incidents unless death tolls are relatively high, these families could initiate a counterpublic to discuss workplace and economic development in terms of workers’ safety. Analyzing this case, I argue counterpublic formations are vital to keeping social negotiation on common concepts alive. Furthermore, it forces the society to renew its “civic” contract to survive as a society.

O objetivo deste artigo é apontar o papel desempenhado pelo contra-público ultraliberal na convocação e direção dos primeiros protestos pelo impeachment de Dilma Rousseff. Para tanto, procurei apontar a pertinência da utilização do conceito de contra-público para caracterizar as dinâmicas que perpassavam os integrantes de grupos e espaços de debate relacionados ao ultraliberalismo. A partir de uma triangulação de dados empíricos, foi realizada uma reconstrução histórica, bem como demonstrada a existência de um contra-público ultraliberal com base no conteúdo de entrevistas em profundidade com militantes. Conclui-se que a reunião precoce deste grupo, na internet, deu início à formação de um contra-público ultraliberal calcado na existência de uma identidade coletiva por parte de seus membros. A permanência e institucionalização de tal contra-público foi facilitada pelo suporte organizacional e financeiro de uma rede pré-existente de think tanks liberais no país, possibilitando que seus membros pudessem convocar e liderar os primeiros protestos pró-impeachment de 2014. Isso se deu em virtude de mudanças na estrutura de oportunidades políticas relacionadas às revoltas de Junho de 2013 e à reeleição de Dilma Rousseff em 2014.

In the 1995 movie La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz’s stinging vision of the plight of the Parisian suburbs, one of the characters tells a joke: “Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: ‘so far, so good … so far, so good … so far, so good.’ How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land.” In Warsaw, this joke has recently come back in style. We repeat it at numerous social occasions, though the majority of our friends do not find it funny. It is too accurate.

In this thesis I compare the social history of movements against hydropower projects in two states of India, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, from 1921 to 2004 in three phases. The specific aim of this project is to demonstrate the shifting notion of subaltern political subjectivity and `state-formation' in postcolonial India. Here I argue that the subalterns played significant causal and constitutive roles in transforming the structure of postcolonial Indian state in a more democratic direction and in that process considerably changed their political discourses, practices and strategies. The two extended historical cases of movement against large dams illustrated in this thesis mark the different types of subaltern politics that emerged in postcolonial India.

Unfortunately, this book (my PhD thesis defended in 1993) was written in Norwegian, which gives it a much smaller audience than it deserves. The book follows the inner connections between the Greek concepts of experience (empeiría), dialogue or dialectics, and politics (in its original, Aristotelian meaning). The book explores these connections logically and historically from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle throough Stoic, Skeptical, and other ancient philosophical schools, to where they transform into religious philosophy (in Philo Judaues / from Alexandria). The whole endeavour was started as an attempt at a critical "Ausainandersetzung" with modern social research methodology as "empirical". The discussions are based on a thorough reading of primary sources. Cf. the uploaded index locorum.

This article discusses Liz Laribee's subversive remix rhetoric for her Tumblr blog, Saved by the bell hooks. Laribee's mashup memes feature image stills from Saved by the Bell and direct quotes from bell hooks. These memes facilitate the uptake of feminist discourse through the use of popular media while subverting the assumptions of that media. Laribee therefore uses these subversive mashup memes for social critique. I also illustrate the evolution of Laribee's practices for the mashup memes based on her reflections on the ethics of racial representation in her remix rhetoric. I conclude with implications for academics who wish to use academic theory in response to sociopolitical issues in public discourse.

weight, exercising an influence in the fields of bibliography, the history of the book, and the history of libraries which is quite disproportionate to a comparatively small collection with perhaps 25,000 books. Matthew Yeo’s book, and the AHRC collaborative doctoral award (Manchester University and Chetham’s Library) which led to it, is to be seen in that light. It is an impressive and laudable achievement. The history of libraries and book collecting, despite monolithic national surveys like the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, remain, as a subject, strikingly undeveloped. There are still many questions which remain to be asked, whether we are interested in how societies create libraries, or how libraries mould the societies within which they are situated. Yeo has made a significant contribution to the subject, and his analysis is considerably more broad-ranging that his title initially suggests. He examines, in fascinating detail, not only the creation of the library in the first place, but the processes and mechanisms which it deployed in the selection and arrangement of its books, and the influences and motivations brought to bear by the central cast of characters among the feoffees. Chetham’s is an especially useful case study in this regard. Not only was it a new foundation, but it was also (as Yeo astutely remarks) a very wealthy institution. During the course of a long association with Chethams (which ended only with his own death in 1695), its London agent Robert Littlebury spent something in the region of £2500 on books for the new library. By contrast with longer-established but poorer libraries Chetham’s was in a position to make positive choices about what it wanted, rather than simply accept whatever benefactors and wellwishers decided to offer. It did just that, over an extended period of time, and in consequence Yeo’s description of its activities not only casts real light on this very active programme, but reveals a good deal about the operation of the seventeenth-century book trade in practice, and in particular the connections between London and provincial centres. Yeo’s book, handsomely produced and elegantly written, is a significant and admirable contribution to his subject. More than 300 years ago, one visitor acclaimed Chetham’s as ‘better than any library in Cambridge’. This study goes a long way towards explaining why he and others were so impressed.

While post-Rawlsian Analytical Political Theory extensively discusses whether it is the theorist’s vocation to seek ‘impact’, little has been written on how she might go about this in practice. I draw on work by Lea Ypi and Nancy Fraser to suggest a multi-stage model of activist political theory in which the theorist takes a front-line role in communicating her ideas into the public sphere, through targeting delineated ‘normative counterpublics’. I illustrate this approach via the case study of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement.

Este artículo propone una crítica de la noción habermasiana de esfera pública ; esta, desde sus orígenes, se encuentra estrechamente ligada a la literatura. La esfera pública es descrita como una idealización en la cual el público de la literatura es concebido a partir de una triple supresión (el cuerpo, el espacio y el sonido). Esta representación no describe correctamente las prácticas contemporáneas, entre las cuales las performances literarias, las lecturas públicas y las publicaciones fuera del libro se encuentran cada vez más en el centro de la producción.

Prodnik, Jernej. A public sphere without public(s)? Publics and counterpublics in post-fordist capitalism. In: Correira, João Carlos Ferreira (ed.). Public sphere reconsidered: theories and practices. Covilhã: LabCom Books, 2011.

Also available via: http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/pdfs/20111222-public_sphere_reconsidered_ebook.pdf


Abstract

The author of this text questions conceptualizations of the public sphere that take its existence for granted, without reflecting what in fact constitutes this public discursive field (or public “infrastructure”). It is argued that when considering the idea of the public sphere, it is public(s) that should first and foremost play the crucial role in determining how we understand and characterize it and how it should develop in practice. This epistemological presumption raises an important prerequisite for all more comprehensive debates on the public sphere, as it is the emergence (or eclipse) of public(s) that constitutes fully-working, active, and democratic public sphere. Even though public(s) have largely been ignored in the last two decades this concept has again been gaining in prominence (e.g. Angus, 2001; Gilman-Opalsky, 2008; Hind, 2010), especially with social transformations and bottom-up social developments. This reinvigoration of critical-theoretic discourse was also partially prompted by the new media technologies which opened up possibilities for transnational connections that can possibly influence wider society. Earliest normative approaches regarding the question of the public (and publics) are followed up in this paper, concentrating especially on John Dewey’s (1927/1989) seminal work “The Public and its Problems” and C. Wright Mills's (1956/2000) “The Power Elite”. This presents a suitable basis to connect them to later developments in theorizing this important concept and for analyzingcounterpublics, which were perhaps most notably described by Nancy Fraser (1991), but later-on furthermore developed by several other authors. Author’s reconsideration of the public sphere through focus on publics and counterpublics is theoretically based in the project of alternative modernity (Negri and Hardt, 2009), through which post-modernistic approaches can be rejected, but which also provides foundation through which this concept can be detached from some of the questionable influences of modernistic line of thought. It is claimed that changes and developments in the material basis of society should not be neglected when approaching these issues. This is achieved through contextualization of the Imperial governance and post-Fordist capitalism.

El presente libro reúne un conjunto de textos y autores que, de diferentes formas, inciden sobre las posibilidades de los derechos humanos como gramáticas emancipadoras de dignidad humana. La reflexión propuesta parte de la idea de que las concepciones convencionales de derechos humanos necesitan ser reinventadas de manera que se sitúen al servicio de agendas de transformación y reconocimiento. Se trata de una validación de lenguajes y formas del ser humano no contempladas por el “universalismo estrecho” de los derechos humanos hegemónicos o convencionales, que, desde nuestro punto de vista, lo son porque derivan de un origen monocultural occidental, por haber estado al servicio de los dobles criterios y de las justificaciones imperialistas en el ámbito geopolítico, y por constituirse hoy como denominadores mínimos de derecho, aunque congruentes con el orden global individualista, neoliberal y norte-céntrico.

Confrontando este pesado legado, que ha limitado en mucho las posibilidades de emancipación de dichos derechos humanos, procuramos mostrar cómo, a partir de las Epistemologías del Sur, las luchas por el derecho a ser humano (el derecho a la vida digna y a la memoria de las indignidades históricas ampliamente silenciadas) tienen que ser fundadoras de una concepción renovada contrahegemónica de los mismos. En un tiempo que carece desesperadamente de narrativas de transformación social, más que ver los derechos humanos como la gramática salvadora que sobrevivió en medio de las ruinas de utopías pretéritas (Samuel Moyn), es importante que entendamos que el trabajo de traducción es hoy la única alternativa.

On February 15, 2003, millions of people from around the world participated in anti-war protests in anticipation of war on Iraq. The BBC estimated that 6 to 10 million people rallied in approximately 800 cities in nearly 60 countries. Despite this concerted opposition, the protests did not prevent the United States and a “coalition of the willing” from launching war on March 19, 2003. This paper explores U.S. media coverage of the international protests. Previous research of U.S. media coverage of the pre-war period suggests that war advocates, especially in the Bush administration, were able to construct a successful narrative about Iraq threats that precluded significant opposition to the forthcoming war. The public discourse was dominated by  pro-war forces what successfully framed the proposed attack as an integral part of the “war on terror” in response to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. The paper investigates whether anti-war rallies constituted a counterpublic sphere that permeated the public debate in the U.S.

The paper presents findings of a research carried out among pro-refugee individuals in social media in Hungary. During the so-called refugee crisis that emerged during the summer of 2015, anti-immigrant sentiments in the Hungarian public were fueled by a strong governmental campaign. Nevertheless, a pro-refugee counterpublic opposing the hegemonic discourse also emerged. The paper discusses existing scholarly literature on the phenomenon and how it
appears in and is shaped by the digital sphere. The empirical findings focus on two characteristics of the pro-refugee counterpublic. First, we look at whether this counterpublic can be described as a homogenous group with a clear ideological profile and political affiliation. Second, we ask if counterpublics behave differently from other groups online, as
‘thick’ communities with distinct activity hierarchies. The methodological ambition of the paper is to present a digital data-driven approach, based on data provided by Facebook, which allows the individual profiling of each user. The connections and schemata of these profiles provides the analytical background of the present research. We aim to illustrate that such a post-demographic digital approach has a number of advantages over traditional sociological methods, especially in terms of granuality, behaviours, sensuality and temporality.

In "Beyond the Oikos-Pólis Divide - Historical Transformations of the Private-Public Relationship, and Current Work Life Developments", Olav Eikeland argues that it is important to rethink conventional ways of distinguishing between what is private and what is public, what is political and what is economic. The distinction between "private" / oikos ("economy") and "public" / pólis ("politics") is important for understanding changes in current organisational conduct and thinking. He shows how the concepts of "public" versus "private" have changed historically. The lineage for these distinctions stretches through most of European history back to antiquity and the beginning of political thinking among Greek philosophers. Eikeland discusses how a reconstruction of these concepts today may contribute to an understanding of the relationships not only between moderne public authorities and private firms, but even more the changing relationships inside current work life organisations. The contention is that distinctions like these are not merely historical and arbitrary and conventional, but that in a certain sense they are necessary for competence development, collective learning and (action) research.

In this article we investigate the hijacking of the Twitter hashtag #myNYPD following the launch of a public relations campaign by the New York City Police Department in April of 2014. Theorizing networked counterpublics, we examine how Twitter was used as a platform to generate and promote counterpublic narratives about racial profiling and police misconduct. Through a combination of large-scale network analysis and qualitative discourse analysis, we detail counterpublic structure and leadership, discursive strategies deployed by crowdsourced elites, and the reception of counterpublic activism in mainstream media. We conclude with implications for understanding the evolving nature of counterpublics, with particular consideration to the roles of new and old media in (re)shaping public debates around marginalization, profiling, and policing.