Mapping US Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century

This article tracks how the US is adapting its public diplomacy architecture to suit the needs of the information age. The areas of public diplomacy used to influence foreign target audiences are media diplomacy, public information, internal broadcasting, education and cultural programs, and political action. The agencies involved are the State Department, the International Broadcasting Bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy. Key features are the use being made of the Internet as a major tool for information dissemination and interactive communication between US public diplomacy practitioners and their target publics and the 'deep coalitions' being fostered with civil society actors to shape the norms and values of the post Cold War. This strategy is described by Arquilla and Ronfeldt as 'noopolitik' as opposed to state-centred realpolitik. Noopolitik emphasises the shaping and sharing of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics though soft power and is recognised by its authors as being very similar to the academic school of constructivism.     

Oskar von Miller and the Art of the Electrical Exhibition: Staging Modernity in Weimar Germany

Within the larger framework of understanding how modernity wasframed within and through the domestic sphere, this articleconsiders the efforts of Bavarian electrical engineer Oskarvon Miller to electrify and modernize Germany against the backdropof Weimar reform movements. Unlike modernist reformers associatedwith such projects as the Bauhaus or the Werkbund, Miller wasa practical systems-builder who sought to encourage consumptionwithin traditional frameworks of home and Heimat. For Miller,exhibiting the benefits of technology was a key element in securingits success, and his reliance on consumers rested on a corporatistideal that would create a new kind of community centred on technology.Whereas in the Imperial era Miller focused on Handwerker andsmall machines as the guarantors of both progress and socialstability, in the Weimar era he turned to housewives and housework.Through his involvement in electrification schemes as well asin his work in founding the Deutsches Museum, one of the firstmuseums of science and technology in Europe, Miller createda powerful narrative of technological progress that was bothtraditional and modern.     

Performing identity within a multicultural framework

The role of music in community festivals is often to assist in constructing a particular identity of place, and music functions in such instances as a means to provide a sense of belonging for participants. However, multicultural festivals complicate any simple relationship between place and identity, because such festivals demonstrate the heterogeneous state of both identity and place. Anxieties that arise around issues of cultural authenticity within such festivals point to concerns of hybrid identities that may challenge and threaten the maintenance of clearly demarcated identities in the face of transnational relations. Drawing on ethnographic material and theoretical conceptualizations of the self, this paper explores the dynamic and fluid constructions of identity at two Australian community music festivals, and raises questions on the sorts of practices that seek to regulate the ways in which these identities are constituted and performed.     

Home sounds: experiential practices and performativities of hearing and listening

We argue that a closer attention to the everyday visceral experiences of hearing and listening offers new insights into geographies of home and practices of sustainability. We suggest that this approach is significant to understanding how sound helps to assemble and reassemble the relationships that comprise home. We concentrate on a group of 10 amenity-led migrants in their ‘new coastal home’ in Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia. Each participant recorded a sound diary composed of their everyday sounds. Our interpretation explores the visceral connections in the processes of making bodies feel ‘at home’. First, we discuss how the rhythmic affordances of both human and non-human sounds help configure and reconfigure the spatiality and temporality of home. Second, our interpretation explores how sound is bound up with sustainability politics of homemaking. We investigate experiential practices and performativities of listening and hearing that may help constitute and reconstitute ‘a’ subject. This approach extends current thinking that encourages engagement with the corporeal, affective and emotional dimensions of home.