Women's Activism and the Public Sphere: Introduction and Overview

The articles in this special issue were among those presented at a workshop we organized for the Sixth Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, which took place from 16‒20 March 2005, in Montecatini, Italy. The purpose of the workshop was to examine the proposition that the public sphere in a number of MENA countries is changing and civil society becoming “feminized” due to women’s greater social participation, the proliferation of women’s organizations, their involvement in or initiation of public debates and national dialogues, and their access to various forms of media. Twelve papers were submitted and presented at the workshop, leading to a very lively discussion, but only a few could be included in this special issue. The papers lay out the complexity of various versions of women’s activism, their intricate relations with public space, and how that plays out in contemporary political and legal debates. In what remains, we provide a brief introduction to the guiding ideas and an overview of the papers’ arguments and findings. In Habermas’ conceptualization, the “public sphere” is a modern institution and a set of values that brings private persons together in public to engage in a context of reasoned debates (Habermas 1989). Civil society—the non-state realm of associational life, civility in public discourse, and state-society relations—constitutes an important part of the

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.

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

The transnational public sphere THE PUBLIC sphere is back. After a long period when it was associated with the liberal democratic ideal of a domain of pure rational discourse to counter the power of the centralised state, the public sphere is now being thought of in different ways. (1) In media and cultural studies as well as in cultural politics, re-invigoration of the public sphere as a site for critical analysis (along with a renewed interest in the citizen) has arisen from a certain loss of faith in oppositional, class-based critique of media and its role in the mediation of society (Mouffe, 1992: 225). This new direction in cultural and media studies has resulted in a concurrent shift away from the social aspects of media effects with its focus on the audience, to a concern for the discursive constitution of the public through media discourse. (2) This concern for the constitution of a media public lies at the heart of debates about the future of democracy, where democratic processes are tempered and indeed controlled by the management of public opinion within the mediated public sphere (Dahlgren, 1995: 2; Goode, 1996: 69-70). These days, it is increasingly difficult to speak of democracy without at the same time speaking about the `public debate', or the `public interest', staged through the media. The public needs to be differentiated from the audience. They are two different things. The audience exists as a social category brought into a certain relationship with the media, while the public is a creation of the media (in and of society itself). Ien Ang (1991: 26-32) argues that in addressing an audience, the media constitute publicness through projecting what they believe the audience to be like. The audience, for its part, becomes part of a media public through recognising itself in the mode of address adopted by the media in their attempts to create a public constituency. It follows then, that the mediated public sphere owes its existence to the media: It is an ephemeral space of mediated public address, debate and discussion in which various identities become apparent to audiences on a large scale. The mediated public sphere is also intimately caught up in the everyday social realities of the audience, whose sense of belonging is based on a public imaginary created through their interaction with the media. The public sphere and the audience are thus enmeshed through media mediation (mediazation), but with the media as its leading dimension. In this paper, I am concerned to address the emergence of a mediated transnational public sphere, its capacity to manage global issues on behalf of a democratic world order, and its affects within local and regional contexts. The possibility of a transnational public sphere has arisen because of the rapid spread of globalised media communication throughout the world. This has led to an acceleration of media circulation, an interlinking of live telecommuni-cation networks which draw disparate areas together in new arrangements. In effect a certain kind of transformation of the public sphere itself has begun. Public opinion has become much more immediately effective in the day-to-day conduct of government and political debate. What happens to political debate and public opinion when we consider the possibility of the emergence of transnational public spheres? National issues circulating within a domestic context are at the same time circulating within broader regional contexts in such a way that they affect responses at the local level. What kind of media publics does this process produce, and how might they be oriented to world issues in a democratic manner? Before pressing on, I would like to clarify what I mean by the term `transnational'. `Transnational' is not the same as `international' (Robertson, 1990: 24). From an international perspective, nations remain integrated wholes, relating to each other as independent entities. …

Civil Society in China: A Dynamic Field of Study Guobin Yang (bio) Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth Perry, editors. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ix, 449 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 0521474108. Paperback, ISBN 0521479436. Deborah S. Davis , editor. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii, 366 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 0520216393. Paperback, ISBN 0520216407. Randy Kluver and John H. Powers, editors. Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities. Stamford, Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1999. xii, 296 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 1567504426. Paperback, ISBN 1567504434. Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, editors. Civil Society in China. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. xii, 244 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 0765600919. Paperback, ISBN 0765600927. Richard Madsen . China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xiii, 183 pp. Paperback, ISBN 0520213262. Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan. In Search of Civil] Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. x, 241 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 0198289561. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, editors. Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. London: Routledge, 2000. xii, 249 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 0415204909. Paperback, ISBN 0415223342. The seven books under review here were not chosen in any well-planned way to reflect all the major recent achievements in research on civil society in China. Some of them happened to be sent by the publishers for review; a few came at my request. While this short list is far from complete, it provides an adequate starting [End Page 1] point for a general review of the field. Much of my discussion will refer to these books but will not be limited to them. My main goal is to delineate the achievements and challenges of this new field. I will start with a brief discussion of the initial academic interest, followed by a survey of the first major debate in this area. I will then devote three separate sections to the four central components of civil society: public sphere, social organizations, individual autonomy, and popular resistance. The classification of civil society into these four components is based on my understanding of how the concept is defined and used in the current literature. Some scholars may focus more on associational life than on individuals. Others may be more interested in the public sphere than in popular protest. But it is helpful, if only to structure the analysis that follows, to think of these as interrelated elements of a civil society, a more or less organized public realm for the protection of the rights of citizens and the construction of civic values, sometimes through collective protest. In the concluding part of this essay, I will make several general observations about the state of the field and describe some future research areas. My general conclusion is that the study of civil society in China has been a dynamic field and will remain so because many new research questions invite explorations and answers. Initial Interest Academic interest in civil society in China arose in response to the world-historical events of 1989: the student protests in China and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Eastern Europe. Xin Gu provides a useful review of the initial interest.1 He credits the Danish scholar Clemens Strubbe Ostergaard as the first to introduce the concept of "civil society" into this academic discourse and the American scholar Craig Calhoun as the first to use the related concept of "public sphere." In both cases these concepts were used to analyze the 1989 student movement. Ostergaard argues that the significant changes in Chinese society before 1989 had created a "nascent civil society" of citizen groups and thus provided a social basis for the movement.2 While Calhoun's analysis focuses on how the movement itself transformed Tiananmen Square from an official ceremonial space into a public sphere of critical discourse, he suggests that the cultural debates and mass media discourse (especially that surrounding the TV series River Elegy [Heshang]) before the movement had an impact...

World Civil Society and the International Rule of Law Gordon A. Christenson (bio) I. the Idea of “Civil Society” In the Tanner Lectures delivered just before Soviet Marxism/Stalinism fell, the late Ernest Gellner said, “Civil Society . . . is first of all that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue.” 1 What did he mean? If this residue is large, powerful, and organized, the idea “contains the assumption that civil society . . . is in a position to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” 2 But what of other civilizations in an emerging global society? Do they, too, limit the activities of states? Do they give meaning to the idea of a “state?” Is not the better ideal a democratic society which itself defines the parameters of power of a contemporary state under international law? Democracy and the rule of law are concepts whose core lies in Western civilization. Yet might civil society as an idea extend beyond Western origins? In a later work, Gellner answered that question, but only in part. He thought the idea of civil society to have priority even over democracy. “‘Civil Society’ is markedly superior to a notion such as ‘democracy,’ which, though it may highlight the fact that we prefer consent over coercion, tells us precious little concerning the social pre-conditions of the effectiveness of general consent and participation.” 3 In customary and traditional societies, [End Page 724] for example, “civil society” also keeps an informal check on the arbitrariness of rulers from within a tradition, as Ummas do in Islamic civil socie-ties. 4 The idea of “civil society” most often has accompanied social contract thought in liberal political theory from Locke, Rousseau, Ferguson, Kant, and other Europeans, 5 although modern French and German equivalents use “civil society” to denote the social totality, including the state. Anglo-American usage within capitalistic society separates the voluntary, religious, and private spheres from the state’s public spheres. Strands of Scottish Enlightenment, influential in eighteenth century America, were the first to embrace a moral philosophy that questioned the old natural law basis for civil society. 6 This unique contribution demonstrated the independent influence of customs, practices, and institutions that resisted formal law but still maintained a rational morality as social fact. 7 Civil society was a moral arena in which commerce and exchange entailed mutual recognition or identity of individual moral selves without a necessary theological basis. 8 After Hume extended this humane skepticism to its rational limits of doubt, Kantian thought made the distinction between the public and the private spheres absolute. The private sphere harbored individual integrity of self and consciousness. The public sphere operated through reason in deliberating with others with equal dignity in a civil public forum for the common good. For Hegel, on the other hand, civil society provided the dialectic tension from outside an existing equilibrium of public and private power to create a dynamic movement toward world state and spirit, [End Page 725] integrating state with society. Building on Hegel’s dialectic, Marx attempted to merge the private moral sphere with the public sphere, which was ever more closely allied with the actual power of the state. The state thus became society by the process of dialectic through class struggle involving material private and public interests and historical change. In the West, “civil society” thus grew from different points of view, each in its own way aimed at filling a communal void as medieval society and its feudal system were replaced by the modern national state with a central monopoly of coercive power operating under some semblance of law. This central public monopoly is vital because it authorizes coercion as a legitimate restraint against savagery from blood feuds and private wars and inhibits ethnic and religious violence as well as ordinary crime, delicts, and private conflict. From among the European varieties of thought about civil societies, two viewpoints stand out conceptually. The first viewpoint, in the tradition of Hobbes and Pufendorf, held that hostile human nature organized within and between nations in a state of nature required the state to hold in check the natural hostilities...

It is commonplace nowadays to speak of "transnational public spheres," "diasporic public spheres," "Islamic public spheres," and even an emerging "global public sphere." And such talk has a clear point. A growing body of media studies literature is documenting the existence of discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states. Numerous scholars in cultural studies are ingeniously mapping the contours of such arenas and the flows of images and signs in and through them. The idea of a "transnational public sphere" is intuitively plausible, then, and seems to have purchase on social reality.

How the rise of civil society intersects with globalization can be seen in the of cities. Here called spaces - inclusive social with a high degree of autonomy from the state and corporate economy - the focus is on identifying and tracing the on-going uses and transformations of these in Pacific Asia cities. Taking the view that civil society is as much 'for itself' as it is potentially engaged in the public sphere of politics, the concept of civic space is defined in contrast to exclusive civil society and state or corporate economy colonization of public spaces. A general timeline of globalization processes is presented to show that not only do local contexts matter greatly but also that the world system is dynamically changing through time. Particularly since the mid-1980s, the confluence of the globalization of the factory and assembly system, finance capital, franchise consumerism, and international worker migration in Pacific Asia has been part of the radical growth and social as well as physical restructuring of cities. At the same time, globally-linked economic growth and access to information beyond that provided by state-controlled media have promoted the rise of civil society calling for popular inclusion in the decisions about rights to the city. These converging forces are intensifying contestations from within civil society over urban governance. Six general contemporary trends and related issues with regard to civic are identified from on-going research in urbanization and civic space: (1) the acceleration and polarization of urbanization; (2) the shift from national civil society-state contestations to civil society-global economy and cultural confrontations; (3) increasing multicultural make up of metropolitan regions and the impending crisis of citizenship; (4) growing inequality and social fragmentation; and (5) the city, civil society and the search for new forms of governance.

Building on research on public spheres, sociotechnical imaginaries and transnational social movements, this contribution examines the relationship between the new climate movement and the European Union. Based on an analysis of frames we focus on justification strategies of Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the field of climate change and a just transition. Using material produced by the two movements, we identify frames on political and economic order and relate these to the political communication concerning the EU. We combine this with data obtained from surveys of climate protest participants and narratives associated with EU climate and energy policies. Our results highlight the paradox that while climate protest participants in the EU are more trusting the EU than the general public, their political communication exhibits limited attention to the EU as a significant actor. Based on Fraser’s distinction between weak and strong publics, our analysis suggests that the climate movement in the EU functions as a ‘weak public sphere’, lacking substantial influence on political decision-making and would need to leverage traditional avenues like political parties or public opinion to enact change.

Gripsrud, J. and H. Moe, eds. 2010. The digital public sphere: challenges for media policy. Goteborg: Nordicom, 167 pp (ISBN 978-91-86523-02-2) The concepts of 'the public', 'public sphere', 'civil society' and media regulation have dominated media studies for some time. Scholars have attempted to explore the nexus between regulation and the audience/public's access to the media/public sphere (Curran 2000; Eribo & Jong-Ebot 1997; McChesney 1999; Venturelli 1998). In most of these writings, regulation is seen as hindering access to the public domain and as stifling freedom of expression. However, these scholars are concerned with traditional media, (1) while the authors in The digital public sphere: challenges for media policy extend the critique to the digital public sphere. They examine the problems of regulation in a digitised environment and conclude that political and commercial interests take precedence in the crafting of media policy, mainly because end users of such digitised media are not perceived as a public (2) but as audiences or consumers. The issues discussed in this collection are relevant across the world, even though the digital public sphere in most Third-World countries is not as developed as it is in Europe, largely because of political, economic and technological challenges. In Chapter 1, Slavko Splichal grapples with the concepts 'public', 'public sphere' and 'civil society'. The author looks at the movement from the angle of one homogenous public sphere to many public spheres. He argues that the public may be 'dispersed physically but mentally/spiritually tied together' (p. 32). The public is distinguished from the crowd in that its members act rationally. The public is distinguished from public opinion, which safeguards against the 'misrule of those in power [and] is also a means of coercion in the hands of the majority against any minority of those who would not share the majority opinion' (p. 26). He adds that the public is only a social category, while the public sphere is the infrastructure which enables public opinion to flourish. Therefore the public's infrastructure is the public sphere. On the other hand, civil society is said to generate the public sphere and to enable citizens to wield power over those in power through 'public discussion and persuasion' (p. 30). He also rightly notes that through this persuasion and discussion 'civil society influences regulative forces of the state and corporate institutions' (p. 31). He aptly sums up the problem by stating: 'There is no public sphere without civil society, but there is also none without the public' (ibid.), then points out that the Internet popularised the concept of the public sphere and helped launch the notion of an international/global public sphere. However, this is debatable as stories broadcast via satellite, radio and digital technology before the advent of the Internet, were able to cut across geographical boundaries and spark debate worldwide. As Thussu (2006: xvii) argues: 'Although the Internet has received greater attention in recent public debates on international communication, television, being much more widely accessible, is perhaps more influential in setting the global communication agenda.' For example, The Beatles were a worldwide phenomenon. Besides the above, Splichal (2010) corrects the misconception that all mass media are public spheres, by pointing out that some are not and that there are other actors (such as the state, political parties, interest groups, media gatekeepers and businesses) who are already in the public sphere to influence it. Finally, Splichal points out that the 'citizens qua citizen--either as publics or as audiences--are not among key actors in the public sphere anymore but rather, as in the old Lippman's theorization, spectators observing the public stage from the balcony'. In Chapter 2 Hannu Nieminem looks at global copyright law by taking a case study of the Finnish TVkaista. …

Reviewed by: The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan Kōichirō Matsuda (bio) The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan. By Kyu Hyun Kim. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2007. xviii, 520 pages. $49.50. This book attempts to examine a period of history spanning from bakumatsu to the opening of the first national Diet. It mainly examines political writing of the 1880s, the decade usually associated with the rise of the jiyū minken movement. The book’s aim appears to be an analysis of the history of ideas of “parliamentarianism” as seen in these sources. Yet, in this reviewer’s opinion, it is difficult to classify this book as a “history of ideas” because the author, Kyu Hyun Kim, shows little interest in looking beyond the textual surface to the complex web of intentions behind the political writings he deals with. The phrase “for the first time in the English language” is found throughout Kyu Hyun Kim’s book. Kim appears proud of a number of achievements of his work which he regards as firsts in modern Japanese historiography. In the introduction, for example, Kim claims that “the present study reformulates [End Page 419] the state-society relationship in Meiji Japan by adapting for the first time in the English language the notion of ‘civil society’ and ‘public sphere’ to the historical context of late nineteenth-century Japan” (p. 5). I am a bit dubious about this claim. To begin with, what Kim means by “civil society” and “public sphere” in the context of the topic he is writing about is never made sufficiently clear. Quoting Charles Taylor, Kim defines “civil society” as “a web of autonomous associations of people.” However, he never really discusses whether the minken associations, political parties, and journalism in the period and place he is looking at were truly “autonomous.” It is widely known that most minken associations, political parties, and journalists were “in a web of” state control and money.1 Other definitional problems include the author’s use of the phrase “national public sphere” without ever explaining the difference between (or equivalence of) “national” and “public.” His use of this phrase, seemingly to commend the nature of political discussion in early Meiji times, opens up other questions. For instance, some readers might wonder why a “national” public sphere must necessarily be better than a “local” or “universal” one. According to the introduction, the aim of Kim’s study is to point out that the Meiji state compromised with civil society’s visions of “parliamentarianism.” Even though the Meiji constitution was drafted by a closed group of bureaucrats and politicians in a hidden chamber, the Meiji state was sensitive to currents of public opinion. Of course, there is nothing new in this point. If this review had been written in Japanese and published in a Japanese journal, most readers would stop reading it here because the idea of this book sounds too conventional. So are there any new discoveries in this book? Kim would claim yes. According to Kim, the first generation of postwar Japanese studies “in the English language” was strongly influenced by the Japanese Marxist school, which focused mainly on issues of class struggle and revolutionary consciousness in the jiyū minken movement. Therefore, less attention was paid to the diversity of visions on the constitution and parliament within the Meiji government or on the jiyū minken side. In contrast, the next generation learned from Japanese scholars who had a critical position on or distance from Marxism, such as Itō Takashi and Banno Junji. Consequently, the second generation had more interest in the power games of competition between political interests and among actors in the political process, whether they were in the government or in the broader political world of the media and political parties. Kim argues that he is not content with either the Marxist or political process approaches because both neglected to pay sufficient attention to [End Page 420] visions of political form as important motives of political commitment. His book is an attempt to bring these visions back into the...

Being a master of metaphors

Globalization and Europeanization processes have led to an increasing public sphere deficit. This deficit can be addressed by a transnationalization of the individual countries’ national public spheres. This requires a perception of discussions in other national public spheres, a condition which is met if citizens of a nation-state follow reporting of issues in other countries. Using Eurobarometer surveys, we examine the extent to which citizens of 27 European countries engage with foreign media and the factors that determine participation in a transnational public sphere. Only a small minority of EU citizens engage with foreign media, and there are considerable differences between countries and citizens. Using multilevel techniques we find that besides other factors education, professional status and multilingualism play a crucial role in explaining participation in a transnational public sphere, resources which are distributed very unevenly among citizens. Thus, participation in a transnational public sphere is an issue of social inequality.

In research on the transnationalization of the public sphere, speakers are coded in claim analysis (Adam, 2007; Koopmans & Statham, 2010) and in research on European identity (Lichtenstein & Eilders, 2015, 2019). Speakers are politicians, societal actors or journalists who are given voice in a news story. In claim analyses, a speaker directs, for instance, a thematic demand or decision towards another actor. In research on European identity, speakers address an EU frame in a news story. The variable “speaker” provides a broad categorization of the first or most important speaker in an article. He or she is more precisely classified using further variables which target the actors’ degree of organization, his or her country of origin and his or her more detailed function within the EU or other international institutions.
 
 Field of application/theoretical foundation:
 In research on the transnationalization of the public sphere, speakers are coded to measure interactions between countries (horizontal transnationalization) and to analyze the extent to which EU actors get a voice in the coverage of national media outlets (vertical transnationalization). They are also coded to analyze to which extent civil society actors are heard compared to politicians. The share of EU and international speakers differs between countries, media outlets, and policy fields. In research on European identity the variable additionally enables to differentiate between the kinds of speakers who are given a voice in the collective construction of European identity.
 
 References/combination with other methods of data collection:
 Content analyses that examine the claims of speakers in transnational public spheres has been combined with interview studies with journalists, politicians, and interest groups (Koopmans & Statham, 2010).
 
 Example study:
 Koopmans & Statham (2010)
 
 Information on Koopmans & Statham, 2010
 Authors: Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham
 Research question/research interest: Analysis of the visibility of the EU level in the transnational public sphere, the inclusiveness of public demands, and public contestation regarding EU decision making
 Object of analysis: National quality newspaper, popular press, regional papers from seven countries
 Timeframe of analysis: 1990–2002
 
 Information about variable
 Variable name/definition: speakers
 “If a claim has more than one actor (e.g., a coalition), the following priority rules apply: 1) actors mentioned in the article as 'leaders', 'organizers', 'spokespersons', etc. have priority, unless, of course, they do not make any claims; 2) organizations, institutions or representatives thereof (e.g., 'National Organization of Peasants') have priority over unorganized collectivities or individuals (e.g., 'peasants', 'farmer X'); 3) active actors or speakers have priority over passive audiences/rank-and-file participants (e.g., if a party representative addresses a crowd at a peace rally, the party representative has priority). If there are several actors or no actor at all who have priority according to these three criteria, the order in which they are mentioned in the article decides (with, again, the main headline as the start of the article). If of one physical actor two functions are mentioned, the highest level capacity in terms of the scope variable (see below) is coded. E.g., if the article says “Portuguese prime minister and current Chair of the EU Presidency Guttierez” would be code as “EU presidency” even if Portuguese prime minister would be mentioned first. However, the precondition would be that the EU presidency function is really mentioned in the article - that you know that the Portuguese prime minister is present Chair of the Council is not decisive, it should be explicitly mentioned. (…) Only if two capacities are at the same scope level the rule is that the first mentioned is coded.” (Koopmans, 2002, p. 24; https://europub.wzb.eu/Data/Codebooks%20questionnaires/D2-1-claims-codebook.pdf)
 Level of analysis: Claim
 Scale level: Nominal
 Reliability: 84%
 
 References
 Koopmans, R. & Statham, P. (2010) (Eds.). The Making of a European Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on four popular UK based, desi food blogs by Anjali Pathak, Hari Ghotra, Mallika Basu, and Chintal Kakaya, who are ambassadors of the global justice charity Find Your Feet's (FYF) ‘Curry for Change’ (CFC) campaign. Reconfiguring and challenging geographical parameters and national boundaries, the bloggers team up with FYF to help fight hunger in African and Asian rural communities. Using the Internet as a platform to create awareness about the charity, the blogs share recipes and meal plans for dinner parties hosted in honour of the charity and invite the public to fundraising events. Concerned with human rights, these bloggers affect social change by empowering individuals and communities to participate in civic engagement, and occasionally to even challenge unfair government policies/practices. The blogs’ efficacy can also be measured through the funds raised, the public attention they receive from channels such as Indian food network and London Live, local/regional newspapers such as the London Evening Standard, and magazines like India's Complete Wellbeing Magazine. Food blogs that actively contribute to global justice movements cannot be seen as domestic reflections or exercises in nostalgia anymore. Referring to Habermas's notion of the public sphere and Nancy Fraser's concept of the transnational public sphere, I examine these food blogs as transnational public spheres. Based on textual analysis of blog entries related specifically to the CFC campaign and an examination of FYF's annual reviews, this paper examines how these food blogs have expanded in form and function by engaging in cyberactivism.