“Seeing photographically” is an act of cultural memory. In an era of AI-generated images, screenshots, “disappearing” or “view once” photographs, and myriad other practices that challenge the definitional boundaries of photography, the phrase invokes past understandings of the medium’s sensory affordances, transferring them into a continually changing present. Focusing on a case study of the digital “rescue” of found film chemical photography, the article excavates cultural memory processes that relocate photographic seeing to digital arenas. The memory of “seeing photographically” does more, it claims, than preserve photography as a “zombie category” that disguises the reality of computational imagery. Rather, it helps construct and maintain a media ideology of what photography was and is, and of its continuing cultural, and especially existential, significance. Mobilizing worldviews, social values, and moral obligations associated with photography in the past, “seeing photographically” reanimates them in contemporary contexts of media ubiquity, intensified visibility, and existential anxiety, with profound ramifications.

Democracy is backsliding in Europe and around the world as citizens’ trust in elected representatives and institutions wanes. Representation theories and studies have mostly centred on the representatives, rather than the represented. But how do citizens perceive political representation? Are their perceptions of any consequence at all? In this paper, we set forth a framework of representation in the eyes of citizens, based on Pitkin’s classic concept of representation in conjunction with Weissberg’s distinction between dyadic and collective representations. We use Israel as a proof of concept for our theoretical framework, employing an original set of survey items. We find that, in keeping with Pitkin’s framework, citizens perceive representation as multidimensional and depreciate the descriptive and symbolic—the standing-for—dimensions. Furthermore, citizens’ democratic attitudes are shaped by collective representation by the parliament rather than by dyadic representation by an elected representative. We conclude with a call for a greater focus on representation from the citizens’ standpoint.

This study questions to what extent state agents invest efforts in building interpersonal relations with their counterparts. It is based on data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Israeli president’s residence, where we observed credential ceremonies involving ambassadors from twenty-three states and interviewed the president’s advisors. We consider the credential ceremony an extreme case study regulated by highly formalized protocol, including the strictest guidelines existing in the world of diplomacy. We assume that if relation-building between statespersons takes place in the most unexpected spaces of international politics, we can detect it in all sites of diplomacy. Adopting a relational practice approach, we identified two methods of positive signaling for relationship building: preplanned by the organizers “from above,” directed at the individual-as-state-representative, and conveyed by participants “from below,” targeting the individual-as-guest/host. We conclude by discussing the implications of the prevalence of interpersonal relation-building in international politics, the role of diplomatic protocols as a communicative resource that affects the diplomatic environment, and how the concept of affordances provides a fresh look at one of the most fundamental debates in the field of IR: the relationship between agency and structure.

This article argues that interpersonal commitment is statespersons’ most highly coveted aim, the greatest benefit that interpersonal relations can yield in diplomacy. Accordingly, statespersons employ a range of relational practices in encounters with counterparts, seeking to create and harness commitment that will advance professional aims. We argue that statespersons can follow one of two paths to generate commitment: (1) creating feelings of gratitude and providing help that makes a counterpart feel indebted; or (2) cultivating friendly relations. Both demand the successful implementation of relational practices. On the basis of thirty semistructured interviews with past and present senior Israeli statespersons and an analysis of fifteen autobiographies written by senior Israeli diplomats and political figures, we demonstrate to what extent statespersons acknowledge the importance of interpersonal commitment and its ramifications; identify the relational practices that statespersons employ to elicit commitment from a counterpart; and discuss the conditions that facilitate the emergence of such a commitment. We conclude by discussing the differences between thin and thick interpersonal commitments and underlining the importance of interpersonal relations in diplomacy.

The concept of meso news-spaces refers to online spaces located between the private and public realms, where everyday users, more professional media actors, or both, can produce and share news-related content among each other, yet not to a wide audience. Such spaces are afforded by digital media platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook groups, X spaces, and group chats on WeChat, WhatsApp, or Telegram. This special issue is devoted to further understanding news-related communication that occurs neither in fully public nor fully private realms, but between or across the two. In the introduction to the special issue, we demonstrate the significance of meso news-spaces by considering the example of the use of WhatsApp groups in the mobilization of the pro-democracy movement in Israel in 2023. We then consider the challenges that meso news-spaces pose for researchers, in terms of conceptualization, research ethics, and context. We conclude with a review of the articles of the special issue, and with directions for future research around this phenomenon, that is proving to be a significant one in the digital news environment.

The vast collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies presents invaluable historical insights but poses challenges for manual analysis. This paper leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore the USC Shoah Foundation Holocaust testimony corpus. By treating testimonies as structured question-and-answer sections, we apply topic modeling to identify key themes. We experiment with BERTopic, which leverages recent advances in language modeling technology. We align testimony sections into fixed parts, revealing the evolution of topics across the corpus of testimonies. This highlights both a common narrative schema and divergences between subgroups based on age and gender. We introduce a novel method to identify testimonies within groups that exhibit atypical topic distributions resembling those of other groups. This study offers unique insights into the complex narratives of Holocaust survivors, demonstrating the power of NLP to illuminate historical discourse and identify potential deviations in survivor experiences.

The dove, the most frequently mentioned bird in the Hebrew Bible, appears in diverse contexts, spanning its appearance as an element in the narrative (as in the case of Noah’s ark), and as an allegory and metaphor (as in the cryptic “sword of the dove”—twice in Jeremiah—and “the city of the dove”—Zephaniah). The dove even appears as the proper name of a prophet (or possibly of two, both named Jonah, son of Amittai). This article applies a communication perspective to better interpret some of these texts. We argue that the dove’s communicative attributes, to include unique acoustics, remarkable power of flight, but primarily the trait of returning home—the basis for the use of doves as carrier pigeons—may either explain or deepen the interpretation of many of the references to the pigeon in the Bible. In this vein, a major focus of the article is on using the dove’s homing ability as a key for reinterpreting the Book of Jonah. We conclude by suggesting that the dove’s trait of returning and, hence, its use as envoy made it a useful symbol of the deity’s presence in the world. In the Jewish reading, it became an emblem of one of the main political and eschatological themes of the Bible: the return home from exile, beginning with the exodus and return of Jacob’s sons to Canaan and ending with the Eschaton.

Celebrity CEOs espousing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are receiving increasing media attention. However, researchers have not yet examined how CEOs and journalists co-create meaning about CSR in broadcast talk, an unscripted genre of news making, rife with contestation and cooperation. This paper presents a Conversation Analysis of six interviews featuring Dan Price, a CEO who pledged to “solve income inequality” by restructuring salaries in his company. Findings suggest that CSR anchored a process of double branding in which the CEO promoted himself and journalists reaffirmed their news philosophy. Price’s warm embrace by journalists across the political spectrum demonstrates a collaborative process of “celebrification”. Price created a transferable persona that appealed, through a mixture of political targeting and strategic ambiguity, to diverse audiences. Journalists elevated this persona by serving pseudo-criticism and showing identification. The story thus provided corporate media with the opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to “responsible capitalism”.

Media Storms, dramatic outbursts of attention to a story, are central components of media dynamics and the attention landscape. Despite their significance, there has been little systematic and empirical research on this concept due to issues of measurement and operationalization. We introduce an iterative human-in-the-loop method to identify media storms in a large-scale corpus of news articles. The text is first transformed into signals of dispersion based on several textual characteristics. In each iteration, we apply unsupervised anomaly detection to these signals; each anomaly is then validated by an expert to confirm the presence of a storm, and those results are then used to tune the anomaly detection in the next iteration. We demonstrate the applicability of this method in two scenarios: first, supplementing an initial list of media storms within a specific time frame; and second, detecting media storms in new time periods. We make available a media storm dataset compiled using both scenarios. Both the method and dataset offer the basis for comprehensive empirical research into the concept of media storms, including characterizing them and predicting their outbursts and durations, in mainstream media or social media platforms.

How do religious citizens’ election projections influence voter turnout? While previous studies have demonstrated the significant impact of religious orientation on individuals’ general future outlook, little is known about the influence of religion on voters’ electoral expectations and how these expectations affect voter turnout. In this paper, we employ a nuanced conceptual framework of election projections and examine the impact of religion on both the affective and probabilistic aspects of citizens’ expectations regarding election outcomes. Our analysis draws upon original panel survey data collected in two countries, focusing on the 2021 Israeli general elections and the 2022 French presidential elections. The findings reveal a mobilizing effect of religious citizens’ election projections in both Israel and France. Specifically, religious voters tend to have more positive affective forecasts about their projected election outcomes, consequently resulting in increased voter turnout. While affective forecasting plays a significant role in religious citizens’ turnout, probabilistic certitude does not have a similar effect. We discuss the contribution and implications of these findings for research on religion and political behavior.