Emergent Public Sphere Research Articles

Re-visiting the Discursive Power of Chinas Generation Z: A Perspective on the Rise of New Populism in China Through Self-Media

While the authoritarian rule of China and its media censorship have been extensively researched, the emergence of self-media has introduced a dynamic new platform for political engagement, especially among Generation Z. This paper presents an innovative research perspective, examining the transformative role of self-media in reshaping and fragmenting discursive power, and its subsequent influence on the development of populism in China. It analyzes the Partys degree of tolerance towards self-media within its overarching media regulation policies, and studies how this emergent public sphere of politics catalyzed the transformation of populism along with broad discussions and critiques of societal issues. Focusing on Generation Zs extensive use of self-media for political engagement, the paper underscores the younger generations disillusionment with the current state of media-driven populism under the Party's regime. The paper highlights how the lack of discursive power has contributed to an excessive proliferation of nationalism, formalism, and disparities in wealth distribution. The study offers valuable insights for future research on discursive power in authoritarian settings and stimulates discourse on how self-media simultaneously constructs and deconstructs the frameworks and understanding of populist ideologies.

From Café Culture to Tweets

From Café Culture to Tweets

The making of the Malayalee public sphere and the exclusion of Mappila women: Language and communal politics in Colonial Malabar

This article discusses the formation and distinctive evolution of the Malayalee public sphere in Malabar from the second half of the 19th century. When the press was introduced, versions of Malayalam, such as Arabimalayalam, Suriyani-Malayalam, and Aryanezhuthu/modern-Malayalam, were seen to be associated with different communities. The varied community and religious orientations of Malayalam were reflected in the newly emerging Malayalee public sphere. The tensions that racked the public sphere on this count compelled the Mappila intelligentsia to turn to modern Malayalam in order to contest claims alluding to their criminality. It led to their withdrawal from Arabimalayalam which was the language of their community. The waning of Arabimalayalam had an impact on Mappila women annihilating the possibility of their voices being heard in the newly emergent public sphere.

Transformations in Afghan Media and Culture Through Cycles of Upheaval

This article traces how the Afghan cultural, media, and arts sectors have gone through cycles of boom and bust in tandem with the country’s tumultuous history in recent decades, starting with the prewar golden era in the 1960s and 1970s, then focusing on the post-9/11 internationally funded media expansion, and finally on the Taliban’s return to power. The current exodus of human talent, due to forced migration, dispossession, and displacement, amounts to a profound cultural loss. But the country has already been transformed by the influence of a period of media freedoms and an emergent public sphere that created space for democratic debate and cosmopolitan cultural expression.

From Fact‐checking to Value‐checking: Normative Reasoning in the New Public Sphere

AbstractThis article suggests that fact checking is a useful but incomplete framework for delivering an epistemically healthy public sphere. Through a brief history of the fact/value distinction, it is argued that there is no secure justification for limiting interventions aimed at improving the emergent digital public sphere only to factual claims. On this basis, the heuristic principle of ‘value checking’ is outlined, as a complement to fact checking in the epistemic regulation of democratic discourse. Value checking would accept that more sophisticated and deliberative communication is a vital requirement for a well‐functioning public sphere, and that this can be promoted through new forms of epistemic regulation. However, it would reject the notion that fact checking is sufficient to achieve this, suggesting that the promotion of healthy political communication should also extend to value‐based reasoning. The principle of value checking could be added to the fact‐checking paradigm as a means of further enriching the public sphere in the ‘post‐truth’ age.

Linguistic nationalism in early-colonial Assam: The American Baptist Mission and Orunodoi

This paper will attempt to map the emergence of linguistic nationalism as a direct offshoot of the language debate in early-colonial Assam. In 1836, Bengali was made the language of courts and schools in Assam. Ten years later, the Baptist Mission at Sadiya started publishing a monthly magazine called Orunodoi. Orunodoi gradually became a critical instrument in the effort to reinstate Assamese as the language of the province’s courts and schools. How did the emergent public sphere react to the debate on language? What was the power dynamic between an emergent native intelligentsia, the Baptist Mission and the colonial state in early-colonial Assam? What are the factors that prevented Assamese from being reinstated as the language of courts and schools in Assam until 1873? Was the debate on language merely about imposition of a ‘foreign’ language, or was the discourse more fluid with concerns like language standardisation operating as undercurrents? Can the language debate in early-colonial Assam be isolated as the first assertion of a sub-national identity based upon cultural and linguistic ‘uniqueness’? Through an analysis of some articles published in Orunodoi, read along with private letters and official correspondences of the American Baptist Mission in Assam, this paper will attempt to address some of these questions and recover the context of the debate around language in nineteenth-century Assam.

LEVERAGING TRUST: YOUTUBE ENTERTAINERS AND THE ROLE OF PROBLEM-SOLVING IN ENGENDERING TRUST.

This paper aims to better understand the role that problem-solving plays in building the trust necessary to sustain online fan audiences, and so support the careers of influential social media entertainers. Problem-solving in this context means a video, where the theme deals with the problems of modern life experienced by young fans. A mixed methods approach – in this case in-depth interviews, discourse analysis and participant observation at YouTube Creator Day events – is used to better leverage the strengths of each method and triangulate results. Sample size is at least 20 YouTubers at the most culturally significant, artistic end of the spectrum with an average of at least 1mn subscribers, established TV producers and Multi-Channel Network leaders. Preliminary results suggest that leading YouTube creators – including A-listers – use a conscious strategy of identifying the problems fans experience, so establishing trust and building audiences for their videos around their own solutions. Moreover, trust is engendered through two main means say these Australian YouTubers: first, the considerable time creators spend listening to their fans across creators’ YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Patreon channels; and second, via online and analogue interactions with fans that open their lifeworld’s to the creator, and in turn shape the themes of their short video products. This phenomenon of collaborative problem-solving, independent of traditional state, school or family structures, represents an important shift with significant potential for youth agency in an emergent public sphere.

The rise of a Muslim middle class in Britain: Ethnicity, music and the performance of Muslimness

This paper uses original fieldwork data to examine the role of class and ethnicity in shaping performed identities for Muslim musicians. It claims that the emergence of a Muslim public sphere in Britain – which includes music as one important cultural component – is implicated by dominant notions of Muslimness that are developed in a field of power relations structured by class and ethnicity. The central claim of this paper is that an assertion of middle-class values and tastes can inform notions of Muslimness and that these are interwoven with the differential experiences of diverse Muslim ethnic groups in Britain. As evidence for this, the paper examines the ways in which this relationship between class and ethnicity is manifested in the Muslim public sphere through the performed identities of Muslim musicians. This includes a consideration of the influence of a broadly defined Middle Eastern/middle-class consumer culture on an ‘Islamic pop’ music scene in Britain, as well as the strategic responses – including acquiescence, navigation and resistance – from South Asian and Black Muslim musicians to the dominance of this cultural context. Overall, the paper concludes that the intersectional nature of Muslimness, with particular reference to class and ethnicity, must be examined further to fully understand the developing dynamics of an emergent Muslim public sphere in Britain.

A Paper Puritan of Puritans: The Liberator’s Protestant Spirit the Antebellum Public Sphere

This essay argues that the anti-slavery periodical The Liberator cast itself as heir to a revolutionary tradition of Puritan print to sanction its critiques of the American church and state. This reimagination of Puritanism spoke to readers by tapping into desires for spiritual revival within a secularizing public sphere and a print culture shifting from Protestant scarcity to Victorian abundance. By tracking how The Liberator both utilized these new print technologies and imagined their reclamation of Puritanism, this essay ultimately reveals a more ambiguous negotiation between the sacred and the secular in the emergent public sphere than is often supposed.

Cosmopolitan recognition: three vignettes

This paper examines recognition in the cosmopolitan sphere of recognition – a sphere of ethical life and social freedom formed in the processes of recognition between individuals and groups across, over, and beyond, the state. The paper contends that Axel Honneth’s recognition theory can overcome many of the limitations inherent to established cosmopolitan paradigms, and, through normative reconstruction, provide a unique methodological framework from which existing cosmopolitan social relations can be examined. This will provide the foundations for arelationalcosmopolitanism. The paper argues that only a form of mutual recognition that satisfies both local and cosmopolitan ties of political community could adequately secure the intersubjective conditions necessitated in the Hegelian, ontological notion of freedom (freedom as ‘being at home with oneself in one’s other’). This contention is pursued through three interrelated arguments: (i) an engagement with Honneth’s analysis of the intersubjective conditions necessary for leading a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ life through mutual recognition; (ii) deploying the method of normative reconstruction to identify social freedoms in the cosmopolitan sphere, and; (iii) by exploring the existence of cosmopolitan recognition as a unique form of personal relations, an extension of rights in transnational civil society, and, as a unique form of solidarity in an emergent cosmopolitan public sphere.

Struggles over access to the Muslim public sphere: Multiple publics and discourses on agency, belonging and citizenship (Introduction to the Themed Section)

This introductory essay provides the context for the articles in this Themed Section. Despite the diversity in locations, historical backgrounds and contemporary processes of change, all contributors to this Themed Section focus on the struggle of Muslim groups over access to an emergent Muslim public sphere. They highlight the contestations of and shifts in the notions of agency, belonging, and citizenship in nation-states with Muslim communities within its borders. The introduction consists of two parts. The first part reviews the notion of the public sphere as conceptualized by Habermas and critiqued by scholars of a diversity of backgrounds. In relation to the concept of the Muslim public sphere, three aspects of critique are given closer consideration in this first part: the value of thinking in terms of multiple publics, the loss of legitimacy of traditional religious authorities, and the importance of agency and identity that allow individuals to engage in a diversity of publics. The second part introduces the various contributions in the Themed Section.

Africa's Emergent Public Sphere

[There] appears to be a generally more assertive public sphere, with an ebullience strikingly in excess of the technological resources at its disposal. Seventh in a series on public spheres around the world.

Is the Internet an Emergent Public Sphere?

Much has been made of the power of the Internet and related communication technologies to serve as a new public sphere in which democracy can flourish. The evidence, however, has been limited; like the telephone and the postal letter before that, the Internet has powers as a capable tool for organizing social action and protest. Otherwise, though, it seems to have been co-opted by commercial interests and to be used by the public for arguments concerning already settled opinions, a far cry from the fruitful and thoughtful debates demanded by a true public sphere.

Impolite Interventions? English Satirical Prints in the Presence of the Academy, c. 1750–1780

This article examines the reciprocity between satirical and academic modes of image making, and locates that relationship within the context of an emergent bourgeois public sphere. The cultural and commercial imperatives of that sphere enabled its inhabitants to engage with conflicting modes of cultural output, consuming grotesque and bawdy satire as an exercise in political autonomy, while simultaneously emulating 'elite' politeness. In particular, the commercial growth and increasing visibility of satirical prints challenged the polite hierarchy of art as it was understood by the nascent academies and societies of art established in the same period. This process of establishment needs to be re-framed in the context of satirical intervention, and will be examined via two paintings that provoked distinct satirical responses: Benjamin West's The Death of Wolfe and Francis Hayman's The See-Saw. Correspondingly, satirical print culture itself can be reframed in light of its use (and parody) of academic visual tropes and techniques.

War, Trade and Desire: Urban Design and the Counter Public Spheres of Bangkok

This paper analyses an emergent public sphere in Bangkok in order to reveal the gap between ideals of public space as representation of power, nationhood, and modernity, versus its social production in everyday political struggles. The setting for political demonstrations recently shifted from royalist-nationalist Ratchadamnoen Avenue to the Ratchaprasong intersection, the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district. Ratchadamnoen, formerly a stage-set for royalist and nationalist pomp, has been continuously occupied for political uprisings. In contrast, as the political base of protest in Thailand widened, the glittering shopping malls at Ratchaprasong became a new site of protest, fuelled by urban and rural working poor who sensed they could not afford to partake in Bangkok’s phantasmagorical splendours. The paper argues that in following Bangkok’s historical cycles of blood and massacre in the street lies the possibility of finding new forms of urban design and a public sphere not yet imagined in the West.

War, Trade and Desire: Urban Design and the Counter Public Spheres of Bangkok

This paper analyses an emergent public sphere in Bangkok in order to reveal the gap between ideals of public space as representation of power, nationhood, and modernity, versus its social production in everyday political struggles. The setting for political demonstrations recently shifted from royalist-nationalist Ratchadamnoen Avenue to the Ratchaprasong intersection, the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district. Ratchadamnoen, formerly a stage-set for royalist and nationalist pomp, has been continuously occupied for political uprisings. In contrast, as the political base of protest in Thailand widened, the glittering shopping malls at Ratchaprasong became a new site of protest, fuelled by urban and rural working poor who sensed they could not afford to partake in Bangkok’s phantasmagorical splendours. The paper argues that in following Bangkok’s historical cycles of blood and massacre in the street lies the possibility of finding new forms of urban design and a public sphere not yet imagined in the West.

Urban Workers’ Leisure Culture and the ‘Public Sphere’: A Study of the Transformation of the Workers’ Cultural Palace in Reform-Era China

This article looks into urban Chinese working-class leisure culture through a case study of the transformed Workers’ Cultural Palace in Zhengzhou in Henan province. Making timely and engaging contribution to the discussion on changing working-class subjectivities in post-Mao China, the author investigates Zhengzhou workers’ cultural and communicative activities, including songs, dramas and political discussions in an urban space. The case study provides hints of a re-politicized space which constitutes a public sphere, attended by the working class, of free discussion on class inequalities and related issues. In the emergent public sphere inhabited by urban workers, class consciousness is nurtured as distinct from the Chinese middle class. The findings point to contested public spheres in China’s increasingly class-divided society and the return of class politics at the bottom rungs, taking issue with seemingly conventional wisdom purporting to declare the end of class in practical Chinese politics and scholarly Chinese studies.

New Media and the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd Ed.

New Media and the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd Ed.

Specters of Horatio

Throughout Hamlet , Horatio is a figure privileged to interpret, and this privilege emerges in the doubled-edged spectrality of his social position. The justness of his interpretive authority ultimately depends on a class position that does not appear to be a class position at all. Social class in Hamlet consequently is not a pre-existing structure that becomes unearthed and located in the empirical truth of economic fact. Instead, class is a never-ending, unstable process of making social distinctions characteristic of the emergent public sphere of the seventeenth century. Social class in the play always deconstructs itself.

‘Repentant’ artists in Egypt: debating gender, performing arts and religion

This article explores the emergent public sphere in Egypt in the early 1990s by analysing the debates about the ‘repentant’ artists. Many artists, mostly women but also a few men, stepped down from art for religious reasons. Some of them even started to preach against art because they considered their former profession haram. The ‘repentance’ of so many famous performers led to fierce contestations in the media. Art became an issue par excellence for debating notions of the ‘common good’ and the ‘good Muslim.’ Media were intensively used by secularists, conservative Muslims, Islamists, the regime and repentant artists to publicise their version of Islam. The different voices in the debate are analysed to investigate whether they constitute a counterpublic.