Transnational Public Spheres as Spaces or Processes? International Broadcasting and the Imagined Public

• In Event: Transnational Collective Action and the Public Sphere

Abstract

This article examines two questions that the transnationalisation of public spheres entails: what is their composition, and can they have critical normative value as vehicles for legitimising collective political choices? A qualitative study of the way international newsworkers ‘imagine’ the public (and its implied boundaries) provides the empirical context for examining these questions. Interviews with newsworkers reveal a public characterised by a variety of participants and a plurality of sites of political allegiance that is at odds with spatial conceptions of the public sphere, which view publics as coextensive with territorially unified states. To address such conceptual problems, that arise under transnational conditions, I propose conceiving the public sphere as communicative processes of collective choice formation. A process conception of the public sphere unfetters compositional questions from spatial constraints, while allowing its normative function to be realised through non-spatial arrangements.

Author

• Max Hanska Ahy, U of Gothenburg