Global Publics Research Articles

Re-Imaging an Ancient, Emergent Superpower: 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Public Memory, and National Identity

On August 8, 2008, Beijing orchestrated a grand opening ceremony for the Twenty-Ninth Olympic Games. Amid the People's Republic of China's inexorable emergence as a superpower in the world, the ceremony provided a valuable glimpse into contemporary Chinese political and social circumstances. Employing public memory as the conceptual framework to unravel this momentous spectacle, this essay argues that the Chinese government erected a new national identity, through historico-cultural invocations and reconfigurations of Chinese and global memories. Yet such rhetorical exploits also betrayed the Chinese government's intense pursuit of politico-ideological legitimacy in the globalizing world, which has increasingly been challenged by Chinese and global publics.

Occupied Territory at the Interstices of the Sacred: Between Capital and Community

During the Occupy London protests of the autumn of 2011 and the spring of 2012, rhetoric and images associated with anti-capitalist protest informed by an imaginary of a moral, territorially defined community caught the imagination of British and global publics. For a brief moment, the ideal of an emplaced community was mobilized to contest some of the most glaring contradictions of the neo-liberal city. I argue that the Occupy protests in London registered a sense of public outrage at the violation of certain otherwise taken-for-granted and thereby concealed, ‘sacred’ norms surrounding what it means to live with others. More concretely I argue that Occupy London was an experiment initiated to open out questions of community, morality and politics, to ask not only what these words mean but also to try to experiment with how they might be mobilized and put to work. These questions were articulated not merely intellectually or verbally between expert interlocutors but lived out through the spatially and temporally embodied occupation of urban space.

Values and the conditions of global communication

This article examines the role of values in the shaping of futures from the perspective of global communication. It argues that the prospects for a democratic world society depend on the creation of global deliberative publics as a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition. It explores how the new media that facilitate globalization of trade and production can also provide technical infrastructures for grassroots dialogue across borders. The contrast between alternative trajectories is used to indicate the stakes and available value choices. Rejecting resilient notions of technological determinism, the article analyses how different social actors create the new mediascapes according to diverging values and abilities of involvement. Corporate interests command more resources and better access to law-makers and treaty negotiators, but users and civil society initiatives can increase leverage through imaginative practices and value appeals.

The values of global futures

This article provides concluding reflections for the monograph on Values and Culture by focusing on the role that values can play in the shaping of global futures. It discusses the emerging reconceptualizations of values and culture vis-a-vis accelerated financial flows and neoliberal deregulation, transnational migration, social movements and incipient global publics. It emphasizes that the study of values is not just about social cohesion but also about social transformation. Social reality is never stagnant but always in the making. Sociology should thus not shy away from reflecting on the future but use its critical imagination to inspire and push public debates further.

The Concept of 'Law' in Global Administrative Law

What constitutes ‘law’ in the efflorescent field of ‘global administrative law’? This article argues for a ‘social fact’ conception of law, emphasizing sources and recognition criteria, but it extends this Hartian positivism to incorporate requirements of ‘publicness’ in law. ‘Publicness’ is immanent in public law in national democratic jurisprudence, and increasingly in global governance, where it applies to public entities rather than to identifiable global publics. Principles relevant to publicness include the entity's adherence to legality, rationality, proportionality, rule of law, and some human rights. This article traces the growing use of publicness criteria in practices of judicial-type review of the acts of global governance entities, in requirements of reason-giving, and in practices concerning publicity and transparency. Adherence to requirements of publicness becomes greater, the less the entity is able to rely on firmly established sources of law and legal recognition. ‘Private ordering’ comes within this concept of law only through engagement with public institutions. While there is no single unifying rule of recognition covering all of GAL, there is a workable concept of law in GAL.

The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college students, subsistence farmers, AIDS activists, genomic scientists, and free-software programmers have mobilized to challenge the contours of intellectual property (IP) law. Very recently, some from these groups have begun to develop a shared critique under the umbrella of access to knowledge (A2K). Existing accounts of the political economy of the field of IP have suggested that such a was unlikely. This Article takes the emergence of the A2K as an opportunity to develop a richer and less deterministic account of the contemporary politics of IP. It draws upon frame mobilization literature, which illuminates the role that acts of interpretation play in instigating, promoting, and legitimating collective action. The frame-analytic perspective teaches that before a group can act it must develop an account of its interests and theorize how to advance these interests. These acts of interpretation are both socially mediated and contingent. Ideas can be a resource for those engaged in mobilization, but one that is not fully in their control. Frames thus can lay the scaffolding for a countermovement even as they pave the way for a movement's success. Law is a key location for framing conflicts because it provides groups with symbolic resources for framing, and because groups struggle within the field of law to gain control over law's normative and instrumental benefits. Law thus exerts a gravitational pull on framing processes. Engagement with law can influence a group's architecture, discourse, and strategies, and can also create areas of overlapping agreement and - as importantly - a language of common disagreement between opposing groups. The Article closes by suggesting some implications of this point, which should be of interest to those who design legal institutions and who engage in social mobilization. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the role it suggests that law may play in the creation of global publics and polities.

The Concept of 'Law' in Global Administrative Law

What constitutes 'law' in the efflorescent field of 'global administrative law'? This article argues for a 'social fact' conception of law, emphasizing sources and recognition criteria, but it extends this Hartian positivism to incorporate requirements of 'publicness' in law. 'Publicness' is immanent in public law in national democratic jurisprudence, and increasingly in global governance, where it applies to public entities rather than to identifiable global publics. Principles relevant to publicness include the entity's adherence to legality, rationality, proportionality, rule of law, and some human rights. This article traces growing use of publicness criteria in practices of judicial-type review of the acts of global governance entities, in requirements of reason-giving, and in practices concerning publicity and transparency. Adherence to requirements of publicness becomes greater, the less the entity is able to rely on firmly established sources of law and legal recognition. 'Private ordering' comes within this concept of law only through engagement with public institutions. While there is no single unifying rule of recognition covering all of GAL, there is a workable concept of law in GAL.

American Television as a Global Public Sphere

This article examines the hegemony of the American media industry, and the effect that American teltevision has on global publics and global citizens. On the one hand, American television newa (and other global news service) produces the subject position of the hlobal audience that encourages a new type of attentiveness, a new form of collective monitoring, and a new politics of publicity. This new subject position encourages social reflexivity, but it does so in an uneven way, which also provides a number of distancing mechanisms that allow viewers to escape from ethical responsibility. On the other hand, genres of American entertainment programming produce technologies of transnational cultural citizenship, allowing the popular to come into contact with the civil spherein public debates about cultural policy, in aesthetic publics (which combine cultural criticism and social commentary), and at the level of the social imaginary. In this way, American television provides a kind of hybrid public space, which combines local and global publics in a way that denaturalizes both, creating a situation of ideological competition between multiple discursive forms and competing forms of cultural origin.

The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college students, subsistence farmers, AIDS activists, genomic scientists, and free-software programmers have mobilized to challenge the contours of intellectual property (IP) law. Very recently, some from these groups have begun to develop a shared critique under the umbrella of “access to knowledge” (A2K). Existing accounts of the political economy of the field of IP have suggested that such a mobilization was unlikely. This Article takes the emergence of the A2K mobilization as an opportunity to develop a richer and less deterministic account of the contemporary politics of IP. It draws upon “frame mobilization” literature, which illuminates the role that acts of interpretation play in instigating, promoting, and legitimating collective action. The frameanalytic perspective teaches that before a group can act it must develop an account of its interests and theorize how to advance these interests. These acts of interpretation are both socially mediated and contingent. Ideas can be a resource for those engaged in mobilization, but one that is not fully in their control. Frames thus can lay the scaffolding for a countermovement even as they pave the way for a movement’s success. Law is a key location for framing conflicts because it provides groups with symbolic resources for framing, and because groups struggle within the field of law to gain control over law’s normative and instrumental benefits. Law thus exerts a gravitational pull on framing processes. Engagement with law can influence a group’s architecture, discourse, and strategies, and can also create areas of overlapping agreement and— as importantly—a language of common disagreement between opposing groups. The Article closes by suggesting some implications of this point, which should be of interest to those who design legal institutions and who engage in social mobilization. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the role it suggests that law may play in the creation of global publics and polities. author. This Article has benefited greatly from the suggestions of more readers than I can thank here. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my colleagues at U.C. Berkeley School of Law and Yale Law School, and particularly to Professors Catherine Albiston, Jack Balkin, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Lauren Edelman, Terry Fisher, Oona Hathaway, David Lieberman, Peter Menell, Robert Merges, Robert Post, Carol Rose, Pamela Samuelson, Reva Siegel, and Molly S. Van Houweling. I note, finally, that I have engaged in advocacy work around access-tomedicines issues in connection with some of the groups discussed herein. All views expressed here are, of course, my own. 0804.KAPCZYNSKI.0885.DOC 3/12/2008 8:47:12 PM the new politics of intellectual property 805 article contents

Museums and Mexican Indigenous Territoriality

Huichol Indians from western Mexico have contributed on various levels to exhibits about their culture, history and territoriality in Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropología and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. The article compares these projects and their precursors since the 1930s in terms of changing modalities of institutional power, clientelism and indigenous agency. It also links this history to revalorizations of ethnic art and changing representations of culture and territory in legal claims. As Huichols engage new regional and global publics in these diverse contexts, they rework received images of sovereignty and the national space.

Translation in global news agencies

This article presents news agencies as vast translation agencies, structurally designed to achieve fast and reliable translations of large amounts of information. It maintains that translation is of the utmost importance in the news agencies and that it is inseparable from other journalistic practices that intervene in the production of news. Rejecting the naïve view that translations are often improvised by people who do not have the necessary training, the article claims that the news editor has the specific skills required for the elaboration of such translations, and that the organisation of news agencies has been conceived in order to facilitate communication flows between different linguistic communities so as to reach global publics with maximum speed and efficiency. If news translation has traditionally been neglected by Translation Studies it is because it usually is in the hands of journalists rather than translators. A detailed examination of the nature and processes involved in news translation problematises central concepts such as authorship and equivalence and leads Translation Studies in new directions.

Globalisation, world trade and the cultural commons: Identity, citizenship and pluralism

There is no consensus on the role that culture plays in the processes of globalisation for the very simple reason that culture is a difficult and elusive term to define,1 and is subject to global p...

Journalism and Feminist Cultural Studies: Retrieving the Missing Citizen Lost in the Female Audience

This article explores the relations between journalism and feminist cultural studies to underscore the crucial importance of studying forms of popular knowledge that claim to foster citizenship among audiences. The article begins by examining the history of feminist cultural studies scholars' sustained interest in feminine genres of popular culture rather than journalism. Crossing over to the other side, I then outline some of the reasons for journalism's early resistance to cultural studies and trace new developments that suggest the growing acceptance of cultural studies within the institutional apparatus of journalism. As a case study, news magazines' representations of globalization illustrate the distinct ways in which journalism employs discourses of gender to produce hegemonic ideas of modernity, prosperity, and achievement for global reading publics. Finally, the article points to new directions for international audience research in the arena of globalization, gender, and journalism.

Knowing a socially sustainable forest when you see one: Implications for results-based forestry

The wider forestry community is struggling to define what the third leg of sustainability—social sustainability—actually means. While work is now underway to develop better social Criteria and Indicators for sustainable forest management in BC and elsewhere, it is already becoming clear that the social process of decision-making and management can be as important to society as the social outcomes. This has significant implications for a results-based system such as certification or a new Forestry Code in BC. This paper explores what a truly open and accountable planning process might look like. The achievement of social sustainability depends in part on society seeing tangible proof that forestry is ecologically sustainable and carefully designed. For many of the local and global publics, the forest landscape itself provides strong evidence of forest manager's performance. The concept of Visible Stewardship, the obvious expression of care and commitment to sustainable forestry, and emerging tools such as computer visualisation of future forests, may be vital to building trust in sustainable forestry. Key words: social sustainability, social criteria and indicators, public involvement, forest stewardship, visual quality, visualization, public perceptions

C. PEW RESEARCH CENTER FOR PEOPLE AND THE PRESS, ““VIEWS OF A CHANGING WORLD 2003,”” INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY, PHILADELPHIA, 3 JUNE 2003 (EXCERPTS).

Subtitled ““War with Iraq Further Divides Global Publics,”” this latest survey of the Pew Global Attitudes Project is based on the responses of 16,000 people in twenty countries plus the Palestinian Authority in May 2003 and covers a range of issues including perceptions of the United States and U.S. policies, opinions on the Iraq war, democracy, globalization, and various social issues. The complete report and topline results are available on the center's Web site at people-press.org.

Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?

1 Introduction: Why Information Feudalism'? * The Risks * Health-Hell in Africa * Why Sign TRIPS? * Efficiency * Freedom, Democracy and Intellectual Property * Overview. 2 Piracy: Cultural Trespassers * 'A pyrate and a rover on the sea' * Intellectual Property Piracy * A Little Intellectual Property History. 3 The Knowledge Game: Knowledge Profits * Laboratories of Knowledge * Patent Locks on Public Goods * Patent Locksmiths - the Patent Profession * Global Knowledge Cartels * The Knowledge Game * The Changing Knowledge Game. 4 Stealing from the Mind: Messages * Last Rites * The Problems * Pfizer's World of Ideas * Getting on Committees. 5 The Illusion of Sovereignty: Sovereign Poverty * Most wanted * The Caribbean. 6 The Bilaterals: The Trade Defence Initiative * The US Generalized System of Preferences * Section 301 * Designers, Lobbyists and Petitioners * Pinocchio's Nose * The Wolf at the Door. 7 Agendas and Agenda-setters - The Multilateral Game: The GATT * The WIPO Talkshop * Getting Intellectual property on the Trade Agenda: the Quad and the IPC * Punta del Este * 8 Persuasion and Principles Becoming a Community Standing on Principle: the 'Basic Framework' The Coalitionist Sweeping House. 9 At the Negotiating Table: Kick-off and Final Siren * Circles of Consensus * The Joy of Text * The Great Hero * 'DDT' * When the Chips are Down. 10 Biogopolies: Patent Privatization * Patent Addiction * Mother Nature's Software * Patent Engineering * The University-Industrial Knowledge Complex * Hard Core Cartels. 11 Infogopolies: Private Copyright * Software Blues * Hollywood Trade Ballyhoo * 'Mary had a little lamb'. 12 Democratic Property Rights: Good and Bad Property * Democratizing Intellectual Property * The puzzle of TRIPS. 13 Resisting the New Inequality The New Inequality Rethinking Piracy Reforming Patent Office Regultion Deliberation on the Council for TRIPS. 14 On the Importance of the Publicness of Knowledge: Propertyless Creativity * Protecting Private Property, Protecting Public Universities * Global Publics, Public Goods and Knowledge.

Plurality in Place: Activating Public Spheres and Public Spaces in Seattle

The redevelopment of Lower Manhattan has shown that urban designas well as the economics, politics, and drama that surround and inform itcan capture wide public attention. Several trade journals have proclaimed that the World Trade Center design competition has placed architecture and planning on the popular cultural radar screen. The World Trade Center project has become the publics project.1 Local, regional, national, and international publics have realized that this small corner of New York City will be called upon to represent not only the citys identity, but also the nations and the globes. The new World Trade Center will have to reflect the ethos and ideologies of a newly awakened world. Global publics follow the design process and form opinions, however uninformed, on the proposals. Design journal editors have also challenged design professionals to ask themselves whether they want such public attention to be measured as public opinion (as nothing more than a popularity contest: a charmed public voting for the design team with the best public relations campaign) or whether they want to transform that public attention into meaningful public engagement with and input into the process of design. And this decision raises a host of questions. Why should those publics be uninformed about design, and how could they become informed? Could such design and development projects give rise to a public sphere despite their highly technical and political nature? And if so, who would be included in that public sphere, and how should their input be weighted and evaluated? Further, how can designed and developed spaces foster the growth of (and sustain) public spheres? How can a public see itself reflected in its physical spaces, and how can those representative spaces become actual sites for congregation to further the development of public spheres? These same questions arose in a smaller-scale and less well publicized context a few years before in a city across the country from New York. Seattle, Washington, like many second- and third-tier cities undergoing redevelopment during the boom years of the late 1990s, was reassessing its position in relation to first-tier global

Postmodern Puma

Postmodern Puma

Mining, Displacement and the World Bank: A Case Analysis of Compania Minera Antamina's Operations in Peru

The transformation in the structure of the world mining industry over the last decade has opened up enormous new regions for mineral exploration and development by transnational mining companies in countries in the South. This new access has inevitably brought mining companies into conflict with local communities. With the involvement of transnational advocacy networks and new global publics, these conflicts have prompted a growing transnational debate on the principles that ought to govern mining and community relationships. One effort to provide guidance on this question comes from the World Bank's Operational Directive 4.30 on Involuntary Resettlement. This paper examines the regulatory impact of this policy upon relationships between mining companies and communities, as well as its "legitimation effect" in providing standards which, once met, can serve to certify a degree of responsible behaviour on the part of the company. The analysis of the effects of the directive is taken up in the form a case study involving a transnational mining company operating in the Andes of Peru and the local communities impacted by its land acquisition project.