Publics

La comunicación organizacional, con sus tipos interna y externa, aparentemente da solución a diversas necesidades en cuanto a comunicación en el amplio espectro de las actividades corporativas; no obstante, existe un público flotante y cambiante, sobre todo en entidades de puertas abiertas y con flujos poblacionales intermitentes que precisan alternativas comunicacionales que se ubiquen en planos menos extremos. Es así que subyace una posibilidad intermedia de la comunicación organizacional, que desarrolle estrategias con públicos que no son exactamente considerados como externos o internos. Este artículo es resultado de un estudio que busca conocer el estado de la comunicación intermedia en una empresa del sector educación superior, donde convergen públicos intermedios, representados en este caso por 20 sujetos entre familiares de estudiantes, visitantes y funcionarios de empresas y, 30 sujetos más, representados por estudiantes de la universidad inscritos en diferentes programas, facultades y jornadas de estudio; y además tres especialistas en comunicación organizacional que a la luz de los hallazgos discuten los análisis. La investigación permitió a los investigadores conocer y legitimar, al interior de una organización, una forma alterna de comunicación que existe y ha sido debatida, pero quizá no con amplitud.

Abstract
This paper follows the testimony of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian physician who bears witness to his experiences working, living, and suffering under Israeli rule. He presents his story as a doctor’s story, drawing on his identity as a medical professional to gain credibility and visibility and to challenge the limited legitimacy of Palestinian grievances. In this paper, I explore his testimony as a medical voice that at once recounts the suffering and loss endured by the Palestinian people and also struggles to negotiate the values associated with being a “reliable” witness. Consequently, I ethnographically examine the social life and reception of his story in Jewish-Israeli publics. In comparison with most Palestinian narratives, Abuelaish’s testimony achieved an extremely rare degree of visibility and sympathy, a phenomenon that calls out for analysis. I identify the boundaries that typically render Palestinian grievances invisible to Israeli publics and suggest how medicine’s self-proclaimed ethos of neutrality served as a channel for crossing them. Finally, I reflect on the political possibilities and limitations of medical witnessing to render suffering visible and arouse compassion toward those construed as a dangerous/enemy Other.

Keywords
Medical neutrality * Witnessing * Medical professionals * Publics * Israel/Palestine

(2015) Reviewing music sociology in the light of its recent epistemological challenges G. Stöck, P. F. de Castro, K. Stöck (Eds.), Essays on Music, Meaning and Society in Honour of Mário Vieira de Carvalho_, Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder-Verlag/Lisbon: CESEM, 2015. ISBN 978-3-926196-67-5.

This small hands-on seminar teaches students how to make anthropological research accessible to public audiences. This includes experimenting with a range of genres including creative nonfiction, op-eds, podcasts, and visual essays. We begin by an investigation of the terms ‘public’ and ‘publics’ as they have been debated in the anthropology of media. Next, we will engage with a wide range of non-traditional anthropological ‘texts’ to identify the possibilities and constraints of different genres. Equal emphasis will be placed on analyzing and creating novel materials that communicate anthropology’s findings to audiences beyond the academy.

published in: Publictionnaire. Dictionnaire enciclopédique et critique des publics. Béatrice Fleury, Michelle Lecolle, Jacques Walter (eds.).
Link: http://publictionnaire.huma-num.fr/notice/relations-publiques/
Résumé: Cette notice présente la notion de "public" telle qu'utilisée dans le domaine des relations publiques (RP). Cette notion a une nature complexe. Les discours sur les publics des RP restent en effet pris dans différentes oppositions : celle entre la pluralité et l’unicité de ces publics et celle entre la condition de cible plutôt passive de stratégies, d’un côté, et la condition d’interlocuteurs, de partenaires « coopérateurs » et co-énonciateurs de l’autre.

This chapter traces major transformations in Syrian literature and cultural expression post-2011, with a move to publication in multiple languages, online formats, and addresses to multiple, shifting publics. This explosion of expression with the Syrian uprising is read against an earlier, less studied period in Syrian literature: the post-2000 decade, when the novel housed Syrian writers' development of a major literary and social dynamic, defined here as the literature of the Events. The chapter uses circulational methods to trace the local publics of these novels against the backdrop of the Damascus Spring.

... He offers a triangle of lines that link gods, poets, and audience ... Friedhelm Hardy in his book VirahaBhakti (1983: 489–91) observes similar inter-referential traits between South ... and the Bhågavata Purå~a, what he calls an “opus universale,” a text composed in South India in the ...

Ideas like public space, public policy, public affairs, and public opinion have been prominent objects of study within the discipline of political sociology. With his scathing critique of political philosophythat there can be no such thing -Jacques Rancière could, at least to a certain extent, take issue with the idea that "political sociology" could properly exist. For Rancière, "philosophy" and what can be called "political" are in a constant paradoxical relationship with each other 1 , where the former consists of objects that come out of a reflexive process borne of specific encounters with politics, art, science, etc., and the latter being actively realized through an a priori principle of equality. This paradox is realized when philosophy takes its objects and through certain reflexive encounters with them, prescribes the "ought" or "is" that inevitably endorses a specific ordering or hierarchy of things and people. When the philosophical object is "political", it embodies a certain social order or hierarchy that legitimizes some sort of inequality parts of the whole who are left uncounted and unheard. 2 Politics on the other hand, is an action antagonistic to the product of philosophy. For Rancière, a political object constitutes a temporary and variant mode of expression that has the effect of challenging the order, and therefore cannot be stabilized as a prescriptive philosophical norm.

This paper examines the absence of the state from the discourses and practices of "livable" urban spaces. Drawing from an ethnography of Atlantic Station, the USA's largest new urbanist infill development, we argue that "livable" urban spaces are increasingly arenas for luxury, theater, and consumption, and that the state, while an important actor in the creation of urban spaces such as Atlantic Station, has largely been made invisible. We see this in the absence of public institutions, such as schools, parks, and libraries, and in the absence of a collective political identity among Atlantic Station patrons. The disappearance of the state in the material spaces of the city suggests that the neoliberal project of individualism and consumerism is transforming the very notion of livability and the democratic possibilities of what makes urban space "livable".

When the euro crisis hit Europe, so did recurring claims of an 'unprecedented' politicization of European integration charcterized by increased attention to the EU in the media and claims of rising euroscepticism among EU citizens. These are characteristic of the media-based analyses that dominate politicization research. This dissertation disputes the generalizability of these claims from the media to lay citizens and to other political arenas. It argues than an approach that differentiates between the various dimensions of politicization (i.e. salience, scope and contestation) and between the various arenas on which it plays out (i.e. institutional, intermediary and citizen) is necessary for an accurate understanding of the character and development of politicization. Through a mixed-methods quantitative-qualitative analysis that applies equivalent indicators longitudinally over parallel time periods, it investigates how the politicization of the EU compares between media debates and citizen discourse. It then maps how it evolved comparatively between them over the duration of the crisis.

Politicization in the Irish news media, observed through media content analysis of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent in chapter 4, is then compared with that among Irish citizens, observed through focus group discussions and Eurobarometer surveys in chapter 5. This dissertation finds that contrary to claims of an 'unprecedented' degree of politicization, politicization of the EU in the Irish news media during the crisis can be characterized as a moderately salient, deep, moderately euro-critical polarization that is becoming somewhat wider in scope over time with no consistent trend in either the salience or contestation of EU politics. In contrast, in the citizen arena it was characterized as a week to moderately salient, wide, moderately polarized politicization that is slowly progressing in a wider but not deeper euro-critical direction. It finds that even where the intensity of politicization does not change over time, there can still be significant changes to the character of politicization in any one or more of its three dimensions.

This essay discusses Bob Gosani's famous 1954 photograph of the Number Four prison courtyard in Johannesburg, published alongside Henry Nxumalo's article in Drum magazine in the early days of Apartheid. The article discusses the making of the photograph, and theorises its significance as a photographic event in the social relations of apartheid.

Gillespie, K. 2014. ‘Tausa: The making of a prison photograph and its public’ in Kurgan, Terry and Murinik, Tracy (eds) Wide Angle: Photography as Participatory Practice. Johannesburg: FourthWall Books.

Social media's role in violence against Muslims in Myanmar has been emphasized extensively, appearing in academic articles and blogs, policy briefs, NGO reports, and the popular press. The argument (often implicit) is that uncontained 'hate speech' circulating across Burmese Facebook in a 'viral' fashion has incited incidents of violence in Myanmar by deceiving an ignorant and credulous public into believing the worst about their Muslim neighbors. While this epistemological function cannot be dismissed, this article presents a fuller account of Burmese Facebook by exhibiting a wider array of content (messages, memes, and cartoons) and showing how users are able to parse claims, endorse metaphorical (rather than literal) truths, and espouse political orientations. To illustrate these processes, the article examines a particular sub-genre of texts that it calls 'hate bait.' These do not directly cast hatred on their objects, but associate those objects with hate and danger. In this way, social media has abetted a general project of demonizing Muslims and ratifying mass violence against them by creating a discursive and symbolic environment in which Muslim claims to political membership in Myanmar are rejected. The paper closes by proposing that 'micro-publics' conjoin with a 'national' conversation about national identity, bringing average people into a position of generating and ratifying that new identity, a rare and empowering opportunity for subjects long excluded from Myanmar's 'public' sphere.

Following postmodernism, for the past four decades, History of Art, heritage and museum studies have evolved towards an encounter with other disciplines. Traditional research in artworks has led to studies on cultural institutions themselves. Studies in art sociology has allowed us to evolve from an understanding of art production to understanding the people; those who create as well as those who perceive and all the individuals in between: artists, donors, collectors, audiences, etc. These researches conducted a shift of paradigm in museums administration, increasingly taking into account visitors’ needs, demands and cultural experience. It is at this moment when a will to render heritage accessible also manifest in public policies. For instance, in 1959, the Ministry of cultural affairs of France is created. André Malraux assumed the head of the ministry in its first decade of existence and stated among its fundamental missions to “make capital artworks of humanity accessible (…) and to ensure the largest audience possible to our cultural heritage”.1 With the time, other ministries of heritage and culture were created all along Europe.
Ever since, they have all little by little integrated the notions of inclusion, cultural democratization and universal accessibility.

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)

The present work centres around the question of the virginity imperative, a social contract and regime of power that regulates women’s bodies through disciplinary devices surrounding the socially constructed notion of female virginity. Through participant observation and interviews with young people of Iranian origin residing in Montreal, I explain why the virginity imperative persists among this population. Through description of women’s social navigation (Vigh 2006) of marriage and education, I argue that women’s apparent collusion with restrictive norms does not undermine their agency, but indicates their ability to make decisions that maximize social benefits given their particular circumstances. The argument extends to women’s performance of virginity, which is a face-saving tactic and instrumental in the practice of hypergyny among women I interviewed. Nevertheless, I argue, the virginity imperative operates to categorize women according to a virgin/whore dichotomy, rendering unliveable the lives of those who do not adequately perform virginity. Attitudes that define sex as defiling to women
contribute to a gendered politics of knowledge resulting in women’s limited expression of sexuality as compared to men’s, which, along with the patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti 1988), plays a role in women’s lack of expression of dissent. I argue that men’s preference for virgin women is incompatible with the love marriages they claim to aspire to, and that men lack reflexivity of the consequences for women of attitudes that reinforce the virginity imperative. Bringing an end to these painful consequences requires public discussion to replace their relegation to, and management within, the private sphere.

This chapter explores the modes through which vernacular music traditions may catalyze publics in contemporary India through an ethnographic focus on the Kabir Yatra in Bikaner, Rajasthan. As vernacular repertoires increasingly circulate beyond the contexts of their customary practice, they are accompanied by discourses that frame these forms as valuable resources. The chapter traces the mediations of these valorizing discourses, and the sounds of the repertoires that diffuse through live concerts, studio recordings and online networks. It unpacks the intertwining of the affective, the aesthetic, the political and the material-technological in the constitution of what Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2006) calls an ‘aural public sphere.’ I suggest that studying such intertwining gives us unique tools to think through the means and motivations around which publics may be summoned, may stabilize or disperse.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This book (http://ow.ly/440U50CBWTb) traces the emergence of the monumental statue genre onto the Indian religious and political landscape from the 1990s onwards, in tandem with neoliberal economic reforms. It draws on over a decade of research with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, at multiple sites across India and the diaspora, from 2007 to 2018, when India built the world’s largest statue. Describing this form’s material intertwining of aesthetic, political, social, commercial, and religious efficacies, it demonstrates the importance of images and the aesthetic as sensible infrastructures of the political. Here the patronage of monumental statues is layered onto existing forms of religious and social power in India’s democratic public sphere, not least the sensible regime of caste. A concern with the aesthetics of caste is at the heart of this account.
The book’s method is framed in terms of a processual art history, which confronts secular developmental narratives and linear periodization with the contemporaneity of religion and the uneven temporality of postcolonial modernity. It treats the monumental statue form as an assemblage of multiple processes, including neospiritual religiosity, caste assertion, neoliberal governmentality, the development of the automobile industry, and construction in concrete. In the process it revisits core concepts of the image such as cult value and exhibition value, scale, spectacle, and darshan (a key term for describing the devotional engagement with icons in South Asia), their relation to the political valences of publicness, and hence to the aesthetics of democracy.

While studies of the public sphere in early modern England have focused on politics, news, and rational critique, this essay—excerpted from my dissertation and currently under review at English Literary Renaissance after an invitation to revise—proposes that we move beyond Habermas’s public sphere to consider the thoroughly public dimension that characterizes all style. London’s acute expansions, this essay argues, altered the structure of social relations within the city by making anonymity, rather than familiarity, a normative pre-condition of day-to-day encounters. This new condition had the vexing effect of making Londoners public to one another in a way that they had not been before: always present to and scrutinized by other strangers as strangers themselves. This essay proposes that the city comedies of Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston offered a solution to this novel condition of anonymity by extolling various styles of theatrical dialogue as novel models of social competency within an urban environment newly and uncomfortably defined by publicity and anonymity. That social competency comes from the power of various styles to resolve, exploit, or even intensify the newly public shape of urban, social relations. The essay ends by proposing that in modeling the capacity of styles to negotiate public, urban life, London’s city comedians were contending with the thoroughly public dimension of style itself.

The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, " language " functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as an autonomous object, entangling it with other semiotic modalities and thereby displacing it beyond its putative borders.

In this course, we will explore spaces that might be marked as 'publics' and 'privates' in an area of the world popularly known as the 'Pacific Rim.' Plotted around the geological formation of the 'ring of fire,' the Pacific Rim is a geography of aspiration. The hope, for those who buy into this formation, is that integrating the markets of the Asia-Pacific in East and Southeast Asia and the west coast of the Americas would result in world peace wrought by multicultural harmony brokered through trade. In such a market-driven region, we will explore how the terms 'publics' and 'privates' might be used to mark out different kinds of places, with both historical and contemporary case studies. The purpose of this course is to understand the cultures around the terms 'public' and 'private' as an asset to comprehending how things might be done in this region.

This thesis investigates the characters, plots, and images in BioWare’s videogame trilogy Mass Effect and its transmedia universe with the aim of informing what is political about videogames and where politics is found in videogames. By focusing on a critical assessment of gender and sexuality politics in the making and playing of videogames, this thesis highlights the configurative nature of interactions that inform videogames culture and discusses how the political appears in videogames content, production, consumption and media. I critically approach the extensive literature produced by scholars interested in videogames, particularly those of ludology, narratology and cultural studies, evaluating their theoretical and methodological contributions to the field. I expand the interdisciplinary nature of game and videogame studies through a) an interface with concepts from political sciences, and b) a dialogue with French-Brazilian perspectives of communication theory. Furthermore, I advocate that the current methodological approaches to videogames studies are insufficient to explore the complexity of videogames and, specifically, its political potential. Thus, aiming towards a comprehensive and in-depth study of Mass Effect as an example of ‘the political’ in videogames, I develop the configurative analysis framework. The framework proposes a holistic approach to videogames research based on the use of extensive sets of data and layered stages of analysis, accounting for the configurative dynamics within three spheres: medium-sphere, gaming-sphere and culture-sphere. This approach, built upon a theoretical refinement of the concept of configuration, allows the research to account for several instances of subject's interaction with gaming and the overall network of relations that encompasses and influences the industry, the gameplay moment, and videogames culture. The thesis concludes that videogames are a site where politics have persistently taken place since its origins. However, the use of videogames for political conversation of gender and sexuality is a movement that must emerge both from those involved in its production and the publics that consume it. Videogames can counter conservative discourses of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity, enabling new forms and stages for the voice of marginalised publics to be heard.

Este estudio revisa y clasifica algunas investigaciones recientes sobre la teoría situacional, detectando que la mayoría tratan de incorporar nuevas variables a la teoría o buscan su aplicación conjunta con otros modelos, aunque pocas actúan sobre su estructura o modifican sus elementos básicos. El estudio concluye que pocas de estas propuestas han tenido continuidad y la mayoría carecen de estudios empíricos posteriores que confirmen su validez; sin embargo, todas corroboran la teoría situacional y, al vincularla con temas de actualidad, demuestran su permanencia.

This thesis presents the results of a research on music in cinema and the extension of the cinematographic experience out of the cinematographic model by listening to the film score. More specifically, it addresses the issue of the film score being the emblematic music of the film environment. Being such, it generates a reflexion about the role of music in our lives and its capacity to create and recreate aesthetic experiences of our daily lives. Based on Jean Molino’s semiotic tripartition, we propose to tackle Disney’s film score starting from its production context, that is, the “poietic” level. We then proceed to analyse the film and musical environment by placing ourselves on the “neutral” level of the work. Finally, through the use of a questionnaire survey made in a experimental context, we will analyse the film score reception at a “aesthetic” level.
Mickey Mousing, film technique that syncs the actions in the movie with music is tackled as a way to aestheticize the world. Between the synchronisation, the token and the aestheticized reality, the research is eventually about the cinematographic aesthetisation of the daily-life through music. From movie soundtracks to life soundtracks, the emblematic fonctions of music are described through an ethnography of the daily usage of music (festivals, trains, Disneyland, music stores).

Amid Myanmar's fraught democratic transition, some local Pentecostals took up new opportunities to publicly evangelize to Buddhists, efforts that were met mostly with indifference. This article explores the role of indifference in mediating encounters across difference. Drawing together scholarship on recognition and sincerity, it argues that these evangelists were occupied not just with the challenges of hailing an audience in a tentatively more open public sphere, albeit one shot through with heightened tension around religious belonging; they were also concerned with what I call the performance of publicity: the ways in which publicity is itself publicized, celebrated, circulated, and received — especially online.

Cette thèse s’appuie sur les poétiques de la lecture pour étudier le lecteur tel qu’il s’inscrit dans la littérature franco‑canadienne (de l’Acadie, de l’Ontario français et de l’Ouest francophone). Comme toutes les littératures minoritaires, celle‑ci se caractérise par un public lecteur réduit. Dans les circonstances, à qui les œuvres franco‑canadiennes s’adressent-elles? Quelles stratégies d’écriture déploient-elles pour rejoindre leur cible? Ces stratégies servent-elles à interpeller ou à repousser les lecteurs?

S’il est vrai que les littératures minoritaires ont accès à un petit nombre de lecteurs, elles ont cependant conscience d’avoir à leur disposition un grand nombre de lectorats, auxquels elles ne cessent de songer. Dans leur ensemble, les quatre chapitres proposent une typologie des différents lectorats auxquels s’adresse la littérature franco-canadienne tout en analysant les stratégies d’écriture mises au point pour en inclure ou en exclure. Ils montrent combien la question du lecteur, pourtant abordée sporadiquement par les chercheurs jusqu’à maintenant, occupe une place centrale dans cette littérature. En effet, le lecteur oriente sans cesse la construction des textes littéraires.

Le premier chapitre examine deux œuvres qui ciblent le lecteur endogène (qui provient de la communauté de l’auteur) : la pièce Moé j’viens du Nord, ’stie d’André Paiement et de la Troupe universitaire de l’Université Laurentienne ainsi que le roman Bloupe de Jean Babineau.

Dans le chapitre suivant, il est question du lecteur exogène (qui provient d’une autre communauté que celle de l’auteur, le plus souvent du Québec), auxquels s’adressent le paratexte des nombreuses éditions de La Sagouine, monologues d’Antonine Maillet, ainsi que le texte des Trois exils de Christian E., pièce de Philippe Soldevila et de Christian Essiambre.

Le troisième chapitre s’appuie sur les romans Pour sûr de France Daigle et La belle ordure de Simone Chaput pour montrer que certaines œuvres minoritaires refusent de trancher entre les publics endogène et exogène. Elles travaillent plutôt à les rejoindre simultanément, en les plaçant sur un pied d’égalité.

Deux cas de figure supplémentaires occupent le dernier chapitre. Il porte d’abord sur le lecteur du roman Frog Moon de Lola Lemire Tostevin, qui se situe à la frontière de deux communautés linguistiques. Il s’attarde ensuite aux difficultés que pose le recueil de poésie Péristaltisme. Clystère poétique d’Éric Charlebois, qui propose une lecture indigeste à partir d’une thématique pourtant universelle, la digestion.

Le recours aux poétiques de la lecture pour examiner le corpus franco‑canadien contribue à résoudre une importante aporie du discours critique sur les petites littératures, qui tend à privilégier les analyses thématiques. Or tenir compte à la fois de la représentation et de l’énonciation des œuvres – c’est-à-dire de ce qu’elles disent, mais aussi de comment et à qui elles le disent – permet de faire véritablement ressortir toutes les possibilités à la disposition des écrivains minoritaires de même que la richesse de leur travail.

Does the Pharmaceutical industry take advantage of the death of the expert and creation of issues to control the formation of publics for their own means and for financial reasons? This essay reviews relevant papers and thinking and demonstrates the power of design tactics in the creation of publics with pharmaceutical tools, such as Direct-to-Consumer pharmaceuticals and the decline in the trust of the expert and the imbalance in power. From this the report then goes on to suggest different routes to try and create balance, understanding and debate with speculative/critical and constructivist theory.

Recent reforms in Myanmar afford local Christians new opportunities to more actively share the gospel with Buddhists. In doing so they enter into a public sphere tentatively emerging from five decades of censorship and other restrictions on expression. This article explores the place of misunderstanding and translation in encounters between evangelists and Buddhist audiences. For evangelists, to go public is to open oneself to the possibility, even the likelihood, of being misunderstood. Such misunderstandings emerge in part from the negotiation of similarity and difference entailed by translation practices. I situate these practices in a conceptual and linguistic space partly shaped by nineteenth-century missionary efforts, and also by state attempts to regulate the public use of Buddhist language.

COMS 200 (3 credits) – History of Communication I

This course surveys the important social and cultural implications of major developments in communications from prehistory to the electronic era.

Required lecture course given in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University.

Multiple variations on this syllabus taught since then.

This article builds on Michael Warner’s theory of “damaged publicness” to examine virtual queer counterpublics in Uganda. Online spaces have become a viable platform for LGBT Ugandans, locally known as kuchus, to network, organize and gain visibility. Gay “hook-up” apps, like Grindr, Scruff, and online chatrooms such as Planet Romeo provide opportunities for users to express what often cannot be expressed in public. I investigate these virtual LGBT counterpublics ethnographically through fieldwork in Kampala from June 2015 to June 2016. I argue that Uganda’s virtual queer spaces, however “private” or “public” are counterpublics, a form of space ownership bringing legitimacy to the being of “deviant” and utilized to meet specific social, cultural and economic needs.

Sociology requires a robust theory of how local circumstances create social order.
When we analyze social structures not recognizing that they depend on groups
with collective pasts and futures that are spatially situated and that are based on
personal relations, we avoid a core sociological dimension: the importance of local
context in constituting social worlds. Too often this has been the sociological stance,
both in micro-sociological studies that examine interaction as untethered from local
traditions and in research that treats culture as autonomous from action and choice.
Building on theories of action, group dynamics, and micro-cultures, I argue that a
sociology of the local solves critical theoretical problems. The local is a stage on
which social order gets produced and a lens for understanding how particular forms
of action are selected. Treating ethnographic studies as readings of ongoing cultures,
I examine how the continuing and referential features of group life (spatial arenas,
relations, shared pasts) generate action and argue that local practices provide the
basis for cultural extension, influencing societal expectations through the linkages
among groups.

La teoría puede entenderse como teorética, como discusión bibliográfica, como posicionamiento dentro de un contexto teórico, o como estructuración de un saber que se obtiene en el trabajo de campo, en la investigación empírica, según los recaudos de cientificidad exigidos por los métodos escogidos y sus criterios de validación. Los textos y los sujetos, entonces, contienen proposiciones teóricas compactadas, que el investigador extrae en el análisis.. Los primeros tres capítulos de "La producción del sentido" responden a la teoría como debate de autores, los capítulos tres y cuatro, en cambio, a la construcción de teoría a partir de los hallazgos de la investigación.
La reflexión sobre los conceptos que lideran cada capítulo ("Paradigmas", "Sentido", "Relato", "Casos" y "Públicos") sigue un orden relativamente cronológico. He querido reunir aquí el marco teórico de sucesivos estudio teóricos o empíricos ya concluidos y publicados de otra manera. Los textos originales están ahora recordatos de sus contextos
originales, reelaborados y reorganizados según otro propósito: el de presentar un marco teórico para la investigación sobre medios. Además de cronológicamente, el libro progresa de lo general a lo particular, de lo filósófico a lo aplicado.
De modo que hay varias definiciones teóricas en "Producción de sentido en los medios de comunicación": el concepto de paradigma interpretativo, el triángulo del sentido como modelo de comprensión de los textos, la propuesta narrativa de la verdas periodística, la noción de caso mediático conmocionante y su estructura, la caracterización de la audiencia como público.

Outside the Lettered City traces how middle-class Indians responded to the rise of the cinema as a popular form of mass entertainment in early 20th century India, focusing on their preoccupation with the mass public made visible by the cinema and with the cinema's role as a public sphere and a mass medium of modernity. It draws on archival research to uncover aspirations and anxieties about the new medium, which opened up tantalizing possibilities for nationalist mobilization on the one hand, and troubling challenges to the cultural authority of Indian elites on the other. Using case-studies drawn from the film cultures of Bombay and Kolkata, it demonstrates how discourses about the cinematic public dovetailed into discourses about a national public, giving rise to considerable excitement about cinema's potential to democratize the public sphere beyond the limits of print-literate culture, as well as to deepening anxieties about cultural degeneration. The case-studies also reveal that early twentieth century discourses about the cinema contain traces of a formative tension in Indian public culture, between visions of a deliberative public and spectres of the unruly masses.

In this essay I want to chart a space for understanding bhakti that moves between the two dominant, and in some ways mutually contradictory, modes of describing bhakti in modern scholarship. 1 These two positions are the idea, on the one hand, that bhakti forms a social movement and, on the other, that bhakti is an act of personal devotion. In between these poles of the broadly social and the strictly personal, I want to suggest that bhakti seeks to form publics of reception rather than communities that imply a single cohesive issue or idiom. I advance the thesis that all manifestations of bhakti are performances and, more to the point, public ones, that is, performances that are part of, or help form, publics of reception. While I would not argue that bhakti never describes a private affair of devotion, the sense in which bhakti enters the history of India is not through the private realm, but through the social world of caste, labor, media (both written and non-written), and markets outside the home and the heart of an individual.

This article examines the state of political public relations in the European Union by specifically focusing on reputation management and relationship management. Its arguments are based on a theoretical review of the literature of political public relations, reputation and relationship management, and EU communication. The article suggests an in-depth examination of the nature of some of the EU’s major problems in political public relations, and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities and limitations of applying reputation and relationship management constructs to a political context. The nature of the analysis is exploratory rather than definitive, and specific investigations are needed to thoroughly explore and better theorize political reputation and relationship management in various political contexts.