Five theses on humor literacy in the public sphere

The emergence and evolution of the internet have reshaped the landscape of political communication and discourse, transforming it into a public sphere that transcends geographical boundaries and traditional hierarchies. This paper explores the role of the Internet as a platform for political engagement, communication, and mobilization. Reviewing different theories of the public sphere and empirical studies, it examines how digital technologies have democratized access to information, enabled diverse voices to participate in political discussions, and facilitated collective action. The internet's potential as a public political sphere is accompanied by challenges and controversies. Issues such as echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the spread of disinformation raise concerns about the quality and inclusivity of online political discussions. Moreover, the concentration of power among a few tech giants poses risks to democratic governance and freedom of expression. Despite these challenges, the Internet also presents opportunities for enhancing democratic practices and civic engagement. Platforms for citizen journalism, online petitions, and social media activism empower individuals to hold governments and institutions accountable. Moreover, digital tools enable marginalized groups to amplify their voices and advocate for social justice causes. If people can freely connect to the Internet without corporate, economic, and governmental restrictions, then the Internet can function as an open and democratic public sphere. This paper concludes by discussing future directions for research and policy interventions aimed at strengthening the Internet's role as a vibrant and inclusive public political sphere. This paper concludes by discussing future directions for research and policy interventions aimed at strengthening the Internet's role as a vibrant and inclusive public political sphere.

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

Theorists of democracy emphasize the importance of a public sphere, distinct from the apparatus of the state, where citizens can freely associate, deliberate, and engage in collective will formation. Discourse ethicists and deliberative democrats locate the public sphere within civil society and the manifold associations that comprise it. For Seyla Benhabib, the public sphere is constituted by the anonymous “public conversation” of civil society. By contrast, John Rawls has a much more limited conception of the public sphere. For Rawls, public reason, which establishes norms for democratic discourse, applies to a limited domain. I defend Rawls's view against the charge that it depends upon an untenable distinction between the public and nonpublic spheres. I argue that Rawls's more limited “liberal” conception better guarantees the heterogeneity of associational life in civil society. I then argue that Rawls violates his own principles by partially collapsing the public-nonpublic distinction with potentially illiberal consequences.

Egyptian Women Controversial Issues and the Digital Public Sphere:Can Social Media Debates Be Used as Indicators of Social Struggle in Society? Enas Abou Youssef (bio) 1. Introduction Can social media networks be used as indicators of social class conflict in society? This is the core research question of this study. Social media networks have opened a new digital public sphere era. In Egypt, ever since the uprising on January 25, 2011, social media networks are considered one of the focal communicative tools that encouraged civic participation from many socio-ideological classes to the extent that the uprising was called the "Facebook revolution."1 Since 2011, the country has witnessed many waves of polarization. At the beginning, polarization was political where Islamists were facing secular trends. That polarization shed its light in other [End Page 58] aspects of social and economic life in Egypt later on. Many cultural and socioeconomic issues were displayed on social media and reflected diverse attitudes, approaches, and even values specifically regarding women's issues. In Egypt, among other Arab countries, the assumption that digital public sphere has higher freedom ceiling with socio-cultural issues is true to a substantial extent. Based on this assumption, one can examine socio-cultural struggles in Egyptian society from social issues debated and displayed on social media. Facebook, twitter, Tik-Tok, and reels can be considered reflections of different social classes that have access and are digitally empowered to dominate in the digital public sphere.2 According to Pierre Bourdieu, social status can be analyzed by considering three exchangeable capitals: economic, social, and cultural. In general, economic capital consists of money, assets, and property the individual holds. Social capital includes actual or virtual groups to which the individual belongs, their durable networks, and more or less institutionalized relationships.3 Cultural capital refers to the type of education and socialization that allows individuals to demonstrate their knowledge and cultural consumption and that differentiates them from other social groups.4 This article aims to present an analysis of Egyptian women's controversial issues that are displayed on the social media "Facebook" from one side and their indications to types of socio-cultural conflict existing in society from the other side during June 2021-July 2022. The key question is: What are the recent social conflict characteristics concluded from debates addressing Egyptian women's controversial issues displayed and trended on social networks? [End Page 59] 2. Reviewing the Literature and Theoretical Conceptual Framework 2.1 Digital Public Sphere One of the major points Jürgen Habermas highlighted when presenting the concept of "Public Sphere" is that sphere is "open to all." A public sphere refers to a society that can become engaged in "critical public debate."5 Accordingly, the public sphere would be linked to media for information, communication, and access by all citizens. Media plays the role of promoting the open market of ideas in liberal societies. Habermas thereby stresses that the public sphere is not just a sphere of public political communication, but also one that enables social relations using media.6 However, some scholars have argued that the idea of a public sphere, which is free from state censorship and private ownership, does not exist. Niklas Luhmann, for example, assured that all social systems, including communication systems, are related to the power of money and the paid/unpaid in the economy or the power of who is in office/out of office in politics.7 It should be noted that media systems never function in a vacuum. They are part of the political, socioeconomic system in society. Yet, recent technological factors have loosened the public sphere and opened access to more societal participants. Social media networks created new public sphere horizons of political communication. In 2011, there were revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and beyond. The common aspects of these protests were the use of social media networks as tactics of political, economic, and social protests, creating a new public space that reflected a common crisis of society.8 The digital public sphere is a communicative sphere that is provided or supported by online or social media – from websites to social network sites, weblogs, and micro-blogs. These platforms provide...

Background/Objective: The purpose of the study is to analyze the impact of illegal immigration on the national and regional labor markets as a national security indicator in the social and labor sphere. Methods: The economicmathematical and statistical methods were used to achieve the objectives of the study. The official statistical data in the field of labor and employment in the Russian Federation over the past five years served as empirical base of the research. With the help of statistical methods analytical indicators were designed, which allowed identifying the main trends in the labor market. Findings: Exogenous factors of national security become a priority in the economic aspect of Russia’s security, since it is the level of economic development of the country that largely determines the degree of its protection from external and internal threats. In this paper the author analyzes the factors affecting national security and focuses on illegal migration as a phenomenon actively involved in the social, economic and legal spheres. The impact of illegal migration on the national and regional labor markets viewed as an indicator of national security in the social and labor spheres has been studied. The use of outsourced manpower (studied in relation to its professional qualifications, distribution in Russia and industry labor markets) has been treated as a potential source of social and ethnic conflicts. Based on the empirical data the research provided quantitative and qualitative description of the real threats posed by illegal immigration, formed in the country in recent years, both in the economic and social sphere. Application/ Improvements: The interested executive bodies may use these results to develop management solutions aimed at more efficient management of migration processes and reduction of illegal immigrants, eliminating unnecessary administrative barriers for the mostly needed professionals. Keywords: Crime Rate, Illegal Migration, Labor Market, Labor Migration, Migration, National Security

This study aims to investigate whether TikTok can be regarded as a new public sphere for democracy in the Chinese media context. Previous studies focused on the investigation of Weibo (a Chinese counterpart of Twitter) as a public sphere. However, Jia and Han (2020) argue that Weibo is not an online space for public discussion anymore but a platform for marketing and advertising. With the commercialization of social media, plenty of researchers paid attention to TikTok’s commodification and its commercial implications, while research on the role of TikTok as a public sphere is still limited. By adopting theoretical frameworks from “public sphere” and “political economy”, this study questions: 1) why users participate in public issues on TikTok? 2) how do citizens use TikTok to participate online? 3) does TikTok contribute to the creation of a public sphere? The empirical method, 20 semi-structured interviews around China, is utilized to understand citizens’ views and participation behavior. This study argues that the reason why users participate in public issues on TikTok is entertainment. Users are attracted by the platform which offers creative and humorous videos to disseminate public information. Getting interested in its entertainment feature, users utilize TikTok to view pubic-related videos. According to respondents of the interview, 18 out of 20 users indicate they seldom use the “search button” or “create button” on TikTok, rather, they merely browse videos there. In this sense, TikTok is not a public sphere because of lacking critical interactions. In contrast to Habermas’s claim that social media is a “pseudo-public sphere” (Habermas, 1989), this study describes TikTok as a “limited public sphere” which do, to some extent, generate public discussions and debates about socio-political issues directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, the social impact of this sphere is restricted, that is, online public engagement is confined to liking, sharing, and short commenting lacking in critical discussions, and is ineffective in transferring online political engagement to offline participation (Kim and Ellison, 2021). Thus, TikTok facilitates citizens’ political engagement superficially and it is harder for that engagement to have any subversive impact on democracy.

Introduction. The world economic crisis of 1900-1903, which was accompanied by a crisis in the social sphere and resulted in the emergence of protests among the working class, became one of the significant factors that led to the First World War of 1914-1918. Therefore, there was the keen necessity to form a new international law and order with social and economic components. The League of Nations’ creation ensured its establishment, and the social and economic cooperation of states was concentrated within the framework of the ILO, in order to resolve social conflicts, protect the rights of workers, improve working conditions and increase their living standards. However, the continuation of the crisis was the next stage of the Second World War of 1939-1945 and taking into consideration the duration of this crisis in the XXI century the threat of a new world war in the nearest future cannot be excluded. The instability of international relations is the result of the destruction of the international law and order, which is replaced by protectionism in the form of regionalism. Conclusions. Within the framework of international organizations, in particularthe UN, ILO, EU a set of anti-crisis measures is adopted in order to overcome the consequences of the global crisis. However, they are not sufficient, often improvisational ,and the urgency of crisis management requirements leads to non-optimal solutions. Current legal order cannot be considered without the social and economic rights and activities of the ILO. The organization is designed, in particular, to ensure the establishment of universal peace based on social justice; develop and implement norms and principles in the field of labour; provide decent employment and social protection for all; develop international measures and programs for the implementation of human rights, improving working and living conditions; develop international labour standards etc. The states’ efforts to overcome this crisis should cover all levels of cooperation between states in the social and economic sphere, the adoption of appropriate effective measures, and decisions that would be characterized not situationally, but by systematic preparation for various crisis situations, including more active application of forecasts and different scenario planning. Key words: International Law, Social and Economic Rights, League of Nations,United Nations, International Labour Organization, World Economic Crisis, Anticrisis Measures in the Social Sphere.

Undoubtedly, the contribution of public opinion and involvement is a critical aspect in shaping and influencing the political, social, and democratic courses within a nation. The concept of the public sphere acknowledges the presence and studies the initiation of integral discourses conducted by the public. Indeed, the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, instigated and established the understanding of such a concept. He critically highlights that the presence and participatory nature of the public sphere is crucial for a democracy. His theory, espoused in his 1985 Theory of Communicative Action, is predicated upon the principle that how we communicate, affects the content of that communication in the reasonable discourse of a mature democracy (Lock and Strong, 2010, p. 78). Nevertheless, it is evident that the development of technology and the internet has led to immense changes in the manner in which the public is able to become involved in such activities. Unquestionably, newspapers, writing letters, television and public meetings are no longer the only public sphere sources of the communication of information and the rise of social media and the virtual world provides many new sorts of opportunities for the exchange of views (Masip et al, 2019). Jürgen Habermas’ theory was established over a decade before the advent of social media, which raises critical questions as to the placement of the public sphere in the context of the realm of social media. The public sphere has been fundamentally developed by digital communication and the emergence of the immediacy of opinion making via social media platforms, introducing a less personally interactive but much broader participatory base, increasingly sophisticated and more contentious (Mahlouly, 2013). This paper will examine the nature of communication in the contemporary public sphere and verify whether the rise of social media and the virtual world extends the public sphere or diminishes the level of rational conversation through exploring the public sphere; and monitor his structure, function and places of work, according to Habermas’ theoretical vision. Moreover, to explain its components in the political and social field in the lifeworld. Also, to what extent of the contemporary sphere's applicability to Habermas' communicative theory. While Habermas' vision of the public sphere and communication was emphasized, it has been argued the perspective of Hannah Arendt and her “public realm”. In addition, many contemporary thinkers, particularly Fraser, argued about the concept of the contemporary public sphere in the postmodern.

Social innovation is acknowledged as one of the most promising tools of civic engagement and cross-sector partnerships to address social problems. It benefits society by improving its ability to organize and act and represents a new model of interaction between the state and civil society in addressing social problems. The article assesses the capacities and actual input of the Russian third sector (non-government not-for-profit organizations, or NGOs) in developing social innovation. It considers the essence of social innovation, discusses the critical role of the third sector as a favorable environment for the production of such innovation, and describes structural characteristics of third sector organizations which allow them to play a subjective role in developing and promoting innovative solutions in the social sphere. Based on empirical data on the state of Russia’s third sector and civic participation in NGOs, certain conclusions are made about the potential of the sector as a driver of innovation. We argue that the domestic third sector cannot be regarded as institutionally mature and ready for the production and dissemination of social innovation. In this respect, it is much inferior to European and American counterparts. Innovative initiatives developed by individual citizens as well as by NGOs are rather fragmented. Additional efforts are required to enhance their viability and replicability. Nevertheless, in spite of some inconsistencies, the dynamics of the third sector development and supportive public policies are in general going in the right direction. Policies in this field aim to create favorable conditions for NGOs and thereby strengthen their capacities in facilitating innovative changes in the social sphere.

Reviewed by: Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films by Jennifer L. Creech Qinna Shen Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films. By Jennifer L. Creech. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Pp. xxi + 280. Paper $38.00. ISBN 978-0253023018. The tension between gender and socialism is inherent in many DEFA films. The first DEFA children’s film, Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin (1946), ends with a group of boys helping Gustav’s father rebuild his automobile workshop. The only girl present, Lotte, is tasked with holding Uncle Kalle’s coat and does not participate in the reconstruction efforts. The scene’s implication that women would be excluded from building East Germany’s future is a gender-blind oversight on the filmmaker’s part. At the end of Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964), Rita chooses to subordinate her sexual desire to the collective good by returning from Berlin-West. Yet [End Page 203] GDR studies with a feminist bent have engaged more extensively with GDR women’s literature than with DEFA films. Although several excellent articles have addressed how women are portrayed in DEFA films, more research in the vein of Jennifer Creech’s Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films will help to round out conclusions drawn from literature alone. Creech’s book focuses on selected DEFA women’s films that belong to the post-Kahlschlag Alltagsfilm, which the author argues represent the filmmakers’ attempts to deal with the politics of the personal and are not to be dismissed as “a retreat from political engagement” (32). Creech observes that DEFA film narratives shifted from the public sphere in the 1950s to the private in the 1960s and 1970s. The women’s films she discusses are well placed to expose the underlying contradictions between the socialist claim of emancipation and women’s unfulfilled desires. They offer realist, not socialist realist, representations of the “woman question.” The author applies Western feminist concepts to these DEFA films and in turn revisits those foundational concepts through the lens of socialist women’s films. Since feminism is a fraught concept in socialist countries, a feminist-oriented critique of the dominant socialist ideology is often covert. Creech’s goal is to tease out and make explicit such implicit critique by analyzing how these films work both narratively and visually. The preface begins with a detailed analysis of the opening scene in Egon Günther’s Der Dritte (1972), foreshadowing the close analysis of scenes and sequences that will be an important part of the book. In the introduction, Creech also delineates key contexts for her analysis of DEFA women’s films. In her conclusion, Creech compares DEFA women’s films with Berlin School films by Christian Petzold and Maria Speth. Chapter 1 focuses on one of the first East German Frauenfilme of the Alltagsfilm genre, Egon Günther’s Lots Weib (1965), and the critical potential of female desire. Creech discusses Lots Weib as an East German New Wave film within the context of the Italian, French, and West German New Waves, which discovered the feminine as a discursive tool for political engagement. Using Laura Mulvey’s and Kaja Silvermann’s theoretical approaches to gaze and voice, Creech asserts that “the female protagonist does not function as the object, but rather as the subject of gaze and of voice” (39), and indeed that Lots Weib had anticipated those approaches before they were formulated. Chapter 2 focuses on two DEFA women’s films—Evelyn Schmidt’s Das Fahrrad (1982) and Hermann Zschoche’s Bürgschaft für ein Jahr (1981)—that posit motherhood and reproduction as forms of critical resistance against socialist regimentation of progress and productivity. Creech uses Julia Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time” to analyze the cyclical temporality of motherhood, which contravenes the socialist notion of progressive and teleological time. The author compares these two DEFA films with West German feminist films as well as with East European films, in which motherhood is associated with loneliness and abandonment. [End Page 204] Chapter 3 discusses the importance of interpersonal relationships in Iris Gusner’s Alle meine Mädchen (1980) and the...

Transformation of Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity. Gaurav Desai, ed. London, UK: Routledge, 2013. 307 pp. $105 hbk.To participate in today's public sphere, one must necessarily participate virtually. To have any agency as a world citizen, one must engage with individuals and communities through conduit of virtual space. proverbial conversation begins, ends, and extends in perpetuity in cyberspace.So what is public sphere in digital era? What are its rules of engagement? How and why do identities, artifices, and intertextualities of digital communication intertwine to yield a virtual space for deliberation of political, social, and cultural?Editor Gaurav Desai's compendium of eighteen essays originally presented at a conference in Chandigarh, India, in 2010 offers a variety of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to ponder topic of possibilities for public deliberation and civil society in cyberspace. Desai states that the book is best read as a freeze frame on how a particular group of scholars were thinking about issues at a very specific time and place. Well enough.Although perspectives in Desai's compendium are certainly diverse, authors share an overarching sense that today's virtual public sphere (VPS) is rhizomatic, a multiplicity of interlocked networks of (more-or-less) mutual influence. Fittingly, essays in collection overlap and/or intersect just enough to justify their inclusion in this collected work.The book examines ways that participating in VPS impacts communities (both virtual and in lived world), aesthetics, identity, commerce, subject positions, subconscious, and unconscious. essays are consistently sharp, well written, and provocative.Like VPS itself, volume's many articles are broad in subject matter and scope. As such, for me to attempt to summarize eighteen dense, highly theoretical essays in limited space of this review would be to give them all even shorter shriftthan what I will provide in brief synopses of select essays to follow. For expediency, I will focus on articles (with truncated titles) that match my own interests- both as a scholar and as a (at times reluctant and begrudging) participant in VPS.Nicholas Mirzoeff's The Right to Choose contrasts act of looking upon one another from a perspective of love and friendship with regimes of overview imposed by panopticons of slave states, repressive societies, capitalist states (after all, we are surveilled as consumers) and, especially, militaries. Mirzeoffasserts that today's televisual recognizance of the enemy yields modern warfare that is something like a video game-distanced, disconnected, and deployed from a point of remove.Sukhdeep Ghuman's The Ever-Expanding Sphere of Cyber Communities examines political engagement (or simulation of political engagement) in VPS, positing that much of communication touted as political empowerment and engagement actually serves to isolate, disengage, and disempower.Contrastingly, Hiba Aleem's Virtual Activism, Real Repercussions notes that while sites like Facebook and Twitter can indeed facilitate faux political engagement, these forums are also capably used to transcend cyberspace. …

İnsanoğlunun var olduğu andan itibaren hemen her dönem iletişim çabasında olduğu yadınamaz. Bu iletişim çabası içerisinde yer alan iletişim araçları da ayrı bir önem taşımaktadır. Gündelik yaşam pratiklerinin yanı sıra iletişim teknolojilerinde yaşanan değişimler ile bu sürecinde şekil değiştirdiğini söylemek mümkündür. Özellikle internetin var oluşu ve bilgisayarın icadı ile birlikte bu yeni iletişim ortamının temelleri atılmıştır denilebilir. İnternetin sivil kullanıma açılması ile birlikte başlayan bu iletişim sürecinde kişisel kullanım pratiklerinin yanında markaların da dahil olduğu görülmektedir. Son dönemlerde marka-takipçi iletişim sürecinde internet tabanlı uygulamalardan biri olan sosyal medya araç ve ortamlarının yeri ve önemi göz ardı edilememektedir. Bu iletişim sürecinde ortaya çıkan çevrimiçi etkileşim faktörünün de ayrı bir önem taşıdığını söylemek mümkündür. Bu çalışmada, kurumsal boyuttan sosyal medya kullanım pratiklerini belirlemek ve bunların bir uzantısı olarak karşımıza çıkan etkileşim unsurlarını içermektedir. Bu noktadan hareketle, 2018 yılında Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyeti’nde yılın kuruluşu seçilen Limasol Türk Kooperatif Bankasının sosyal medya kullanım pratiklerini ortaya koymak ve bu pratikler ile meydana gelen etkileşim unsurlarını belirlemek adına söz konusu bankanın resmi sosyal medya hesaplarına yönelik içerik analizi gerçekleştirilmiştir. Gerçekleştirilen içerik analizinde Facebook ortamına yönelik oluşturulan kodlama cetveli, Waters ve ark.’nın (2009: s. 104) “Engaging Stakeholders Through Social Networking: How Nonprofit Organizations are Using Facebook” isimli çalışmalarında kullanılan kategori cetvellerinden faydalanılarak oluşturulmuştur. Bunun yanı sıra sosyal medya yönetim birimi ve kurumsal iletişim birimi ile araştırmanın amacına yönelik derinlemesine görüşme gerçekleştirilmiştir. Görüşme soruları oluşturulurken Parveen ve ark.’nın (2015, s.77) “Social Media Usage and Organizational Performance: Reflections of Malaysian Social Media Managers” isimli çalışmasından faydalanılarak soru formu oluşturulmuştur.

This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin Gray, and first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2016. Following an agonistic (Chantal Mouffe), rather than a consensual (Jürgen Habermas) model of the public sphere, it argues that under globalisation, three cumulative and interwoven senses of the public sphere, the discursive, the spatial, and the individual and his/her/their relation to a larger form of organisation, despite persisting hegemonic structures that perpetuate their containment, have become undone. This is the kind of unbounded model of public sphere Greig’s version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women seems to suggest by precisely offering undoings of discourses, spaces, and individualisations. In order to frame the first kind of undoing, that is, the unmarking of theatre as contained, the article uses Christopher Balme’s notion of ‘open theatrical public sphere’, and in order to frame the second, that is, the undoing of elements ‘in’ Greig’s version, the article utilises Greig’s concept of ‘constructed space’. The article arrives then at the notion of the open constructed public sphere in relation to The Suppliant Women. By engaging with this porous model of the public sphere, The Suppliant Women enacts a protest against exclusionary, reductive models of exchange and organisation, political engagement, and belonging under globalisation.

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, t

Social cohesion as a concept suggests that societies need some sort of glue to sustain them over time, some broadly shared orientations to the world among their populations, and ways of testing the commonality or divergence of ideas and values. It is a contentious concept because it can produce a very simplified model of society, denying important dimensions of social conflict. Social cohesion has one locus in which it can be negotiated and experienced: the terrain of ‘the public sphere’, which can provide the opportunities for discursive engagement among the many social groups that make up contemporary societies (Habermas 1989). The public sphere is in part constituted through the mass media, which in all their diversity accommodate the sweep of the social in today's open societies. The public sphere is a space of the mind as well as the body, a space where creative energy is invested in ‘imagining communities’ (Anderson 1991) as well as enabling face-to-face interaction, engagement, negotiation, accommodation and resolution. As public concern about social conflict intensifies (in part due to media influences) (Jakubowicz 2005), so the media increasingly address the factors perceived to lie beneath disengagement, violence and intergroup antipathies. In complex societies there are always processes that tend to bring people together, and others that may deepen divisions, what some have described as the building and demolition of social capital. Social capital contains two elements: bonding processes that build links within groups, and bridging processes that build links between groups.