The emergence of the car-oriented city: Entanglements and transfer agents in West-Berlin, East-Berlin and Lyon, 1945–75

It is well known how the planning model of a “car-oriented city” was common among Western experts in the post-Second World War period, but here we claim this approach was common in both sides of divided Berlin. Investigating East- and West-Berlin’s reconstruction, here we analyse the relationship between the transnational sphere of circulation and its local realisations. Focusing on the leading figures of urban planning in West- and East-Berlin (who acted as “transfer agents”, participating in the transnational discourse) let us to better frame Berlin’s urban history in the 1960s and 1970s. The example of Lyon as France’s most “car-friendly city” is included in the analysis, so to transcend traditional perspectives of Cold War-antagonism, as well as to show the diverse and multilateral ways of exchange. Finally, the findings of the article will put the established periodisation of the “car-oriented city” in question.

The transnational discourse of political protests: setting the agenda through social media

This article analyses the role of social media as a transnational discursive space and the impact of networked communication on the formation of the traditional mass media agenda regarding political protests that began in June 2019 in Hong Kong. The aim of the present research was to indicate the degree of impact of the dominant themes in networked communication during the anti-extradition bill protests in the transnational network discourse and the impact on the news media agenda, taking into account the activity of user-generated network traffic around the published content. The research was based on two theories shaping the perception of political protests in an international context - theory on transnational discursive spaces and theories of agenda setting. The research was carried out using quantitative content analysis and confirmed that global social networking sites Facebook and Twitter are important channels in creating transnational discursive spaces that affect the news media's agenda. Findings show that social media plays an important role in organizing political protests, and is a tool for establishing transnational discursive spaces; despite the fact that the protesters used applications protecting their data for communication, with the assistance of information and integrated collaboration by other entities. The results obtained contribute to the research on media studies which highlight the role and importance of social media in the process of communicating about political protests.

Patient Centeredness from a Perspective of History of the Present: A Genealogical Analysis

The overall aim of this study, performed in Sweden, was to problematize the contemporary national and transnational discourse on patient centeredness, which during recent decades has become a given, having become established as a dogma in conversations, writing, and thinking about patients and health care. We did that by showing that ideas such as patient centeredness can be seen differently from the way they are depicted in contemporary discourses about health care. In the presented analysis, we drew on Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, ‘history of the present’ and genealogy. This means that we reflected on contemporary conceptions of how phenomena, such as the care seeker, have been constructed within other discourses about health care. Empirically, we used different health policy documents—government reports from three different historical periods. The analysis showed that contemporary narratives about centeredness are neither more, nor less, care seeker-centered than the narratives of yesteryear. Rather, the phenomenon of the care seeker is given different frames and meanings within the framework of different economic and historical discourses about health care. Our analysis raised questions about the contemporary construction of patient centeredness. In a world with such huge economic differences between nations, as well as between citizens within most nations, the contemporary discourse may be limited as it does not problematize structural issues in the same way as previous discourses had done. Perhaps what is needed today are national and international patient-centered or person-centered discourses which also discuss policies and practices that are population- and social group-centered. In the final discussion of the analysis, we identified a new patient-centered discourse, which views the patient as a resource among other resources. The most important limitation of this type of study is that it is only about discourses and policy issues and not about daily practical activities.

Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women

Chapter 4 offers analyses of several images from Lalla Essaydi’s photographic series Converging Territories (2004), Les Femmes du Maroc (2006-2008), and Harem (2009), in which she exclusively depicts women from Morocco or the Moroccan diaspora. The chapter focuses on the feminist transnational discourse that emerges from Essaydi’s inscription of her biography—more specifically her experience growing up in a harem and living as an adult woman in Saudi Arabia and the United States—and her training in Western art. The chapter is structured around a set of key questions. Does Essaydi’s juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes and poses from canonical nineteenth-century European Orientalist paintings with the veil, calligraphy, henna tattoos, and Moroccan architecture disrupt or reinforce stereotypes in the depiction of Arab and Muslim women? Can Essaydi’s hybrid language be read as a form of feminist ‘double critique’ that resists Western and Islamic patriarchy? How do Essaydi’s images intervene in relation to the transnational and transcultural discourse and positioning of the ‘Muslimwoman’? What is the economy between the transnational, transglobal and translocal, and the simply local in Essaydi’s images? How do Essaydi’s photographs contribute to the critical (re)thinking of gender in the context of globalization?

Scottish Transnational Discourse of the Great War: A Genealogy of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and Hugh MacDiarmid’s “At the Cenotaph”

A comparison of a 1971 popular song, Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” with a 1935 poem, Hugh MacDiarmid’s “At the Cenotaph,” enables this article to produce a transnational, trans-genre and trans-historical discourse analysis of memories of the Great War of 1914-1918. While an ethonosymbolic approach allows for the discovery of resemblances and continuities, Nietzschean genealogy criticizes such monumental, associative views of the past and focuses instead on the casual connections between disperse moments in time. Critical discourse analysis, in turn, offers a possible synthesis by distinguishing historical narrative structures, cultural practices (the Anzac parades and cenotaphs to honor the heroic dead), and textual events, in this case the satirical representation of the Great War in later song and poetry.

A Tradition Contested

The seventh chapter situates the Deobandi brand in the context of an emergent Muslim anti-apartheid politics and how public debate about Deobandi critiques of Sufi devotions became inseparable from public debate about the very authority of the Deobandi `ulama. The chapter begins with an overview of Islamic activism and anti-`ulama sentiment in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. With a flashback to 1920s India, it shows how Thanvi articulated his opposition to Muslim participation in anticolonial politics, and South African Deobandi scholar Ahmed Sadiq Desai, in turn, deployed Thanvi’s critiques to criticize Muslim participation in the anti-apartheid movement. As Deobandi scholars criticized Muslim activists for mobilizing against apartheid alongside activists of other faiths and justified that position through Sufi vocabularies, a growing number of Muslims lambasted Deobandis for their alleged collaborationist stance toward the apartheid regime and articulated their politics through devotional practices like the mawlud. Many of these local activists, moreover, defended their activism precisely through transnational politics that Deobandis mostly abhorred, drawing variously on the Shi`i Islamist vocabularies of revolutionary Iran and the nascent transnational discourse of progressive Islam.

The Public Life of Contemporary Australian Poetry

Since the late 1990s, complaints about the status of poetry, and the parlous state of poetry publishing, have been commonplace in Australia and other Anglophone nations. Concomitant with this discourse of decline (a transnational discourse with a surprisingly long history) is a discourse of return, in which poetry is presented as returning to public culture (often through the literalized voice of the poet) to reoccupy the place it putatively held in earlier, if not premodern, times. Poetry’s engagement with public themes and the public use of poetry continue to be important, if sometimes overlooked, elements of Australian literary culture. Indeed, despite its apparent marginality, contemporary poetry could be said to have what may be called an “ambiguous vitality” in public life. While other forms of media continue to dominate public culture, poetry nevertheless remains public, in part by occupying or being occupied by those other forms of media. In other words, contemporary poetry’s ambiguously vital presence in public culture can be seen in the ways it figures in extra-poetic contexts. Such contexts are manifold. For instance, poetry—and the figure of the poet—are mobilized as tropes in other media such as films and novels; poetry is used as a form of public/political speech to articulate crisis and loss (such as at annual Anzac ceremonies); and it is used in everyday rituals such as weddings and funerals. Public culture, as this list suggests, is haunted by the marginal discourse of poetry. In addition, poetry’s traditional function of commenting on the body politic and current political debates continues, regardless of the size of the medium’s putative audience. Recent poetry on the so-called “War on Terror,” the Stolen Generation, and asylum seekers illustrates this. But contemporary Australian poetry engages in public life in ways other than the thematization of current public events. Poets such as Jennifer Maiden, John Forbes, and J. S. Harry exemplify a group of poets who have figured themselves as public poets in a self-consciously ironic fashion; acknowledging poetry’s marginality, they nevertheless write poetry as if it had or may have an extra-poetic efficacy.