Volume 4, Issue 3

This paper explores how nationhood is being affected by the contemporary processes of globalization. Through the lens of Robertson’s theory of the global field, I analyze documentary data and fieldwork data collected from 165 in-depth personal interviews and 39 focus-group discussions in the globalized city-state of Singapore. Data analysis shows that both government officials and Singaporean citizens hold a “relativized” view towards its key nation-building pronatalist policies. Moreover, individual citizens actively questioned the effectiveness of policies by comparing them with policies perceived to be in operation in other national contexts. Globalization thus enhances citizens’ capacity for imagining the nation. This study opens up the possibility that, under certain conditions, state authority may be weakened but, paradoxically, nationhood may be strengthened.

This article examines how American youth activists and youth workers looked outside the United States in their quest to resolve a citizenship crisis of the Depression Generation. It focuses on three organizations—the American Youth Congress, the National Youth Administration, and the YMCA—that studied youth conditions abroad to develop tools for increasing civic engagement and social reform. The goal of these programs was to transform the relationship between American youth and the state.

People in the contemporary global social realm are increasingly working, attending, watching, participating in, sympathising with, supporting, organising and studying global media events. These events could be considered as being naturally global and mediated through new technologies while implying certain collective ritual performances, both spectacular and cyclical. Furthermore, they produce their own emotional climate and emotional dynamics, and they have been portrayed as special moments in which cultural meaning is (re)shaped and made clearly visible. This article draws upon “neo-durkheimian” and “post-durkheimian” approaches together with certain insights from the sociology of emotions in an effort to present a “post-durkheimian” theory of global media events. Specifically, it focuses on global media events in terms of cultural meanings and cognition, emotion and ritual performances. I will explore what Hoover refers to as the “actual form or constitution of the phenomenon itself, its elements, its extents, its limits” as a way of rethinking global media events. It also discusses “the breach-outcome problem,” which has dominated this field. Perhaps, “the myth of the social coherence and social continuity” has obscured our knowledge of global media events. These discussions will lead me to consider whether it is reasonable to consider global media events as increasingly autonomous global social situations that may constitute a global media event culture.