The visual design of urban public spaces (hereinafter “cityscape”) has an important impact on city life – it can channel interpersonal communication into certain directions while excluding others; it can powerfully communicate notions of what is socially acceptable or important. Yet, while everyone may access urban public spaces, cityscapes are designed by a very limited social group. This paper focuses on the narratives embedded in the cityscapes. Analyzing legal conflicts arising around expressions that seek their way into the shared visual environment, as well as expressions whose presence in the cityscapes is disputed, we trace the dynamics of battles over urban narratives. The discussion of legal rules is complemented by photographs. Rather than illustrating the text, the photographs will relate to the discussed topics in their own way, enriching the discussion and broadening its perspective.

In this article, we locate a tendency to revert to ‘Western,’ ‘national,’ and/or ‘racial’ times during periods of intense uncertainty or ‘crisis’ when individuals and societies seek to make sense of the present through the past, drawing upon the concept of a ‘time-border.’ We suggest this tendency is a ‘conventional’ pull in temporal thinking that has recurred in modern time cultures. In our own present, this reversion appears to be occurring despite novel approaches to time and periodization in historical research over the past thirty years, prompting a radical reformulation of how historians study the past (in terms of the influence of the global turn or Deep Turn and big history on notions of historical time, or new periodizations of the Anthropocene and posthumanism). This innovative approach to time jostles uneasily against the pull towards ‘conservative,’ linear, and national/racialised time often found in public discourse — highlighting the tension, as well as the reciprocity, between linear and cyclical approaches to time in lived experience and historiography. Throughout the essay, the urgency to reconsider notions of historical time and periodization in view of the coronavirus pandemic is a key theme tying together an analysis of time, periodization, and historiography.

Higher education organizations in countries where English is not the native tongue must function in a multilingual mode, using English as their primary language for scientific exchange and academic publication and relying on the native language for instruction and administration. When operating in a multilingual mode of communication and identity expression, a higher education organization runs the risk of becoming a “tower of Babel”; however, by operating solely in single-language mode, it may become an “ivory tower.” Investigating Israeli higher education organizations and focusing specifically on their mission statements, we analyzed the built-in tension of this multilingual self-identification through how they introduce themselves in the lingua franca of global academe, namely English, and in the local language, Hebrew. In our analysis, we found: (a) differences between the English- and Hebrew-language mission statements in length, style, and context; (b) differences in thematic emphases and thus in the narration of organizational identity; and (c) that such thematic differences patterned according to the three categories of state-mandated higher education organizations and, to some degree, time. We conclude that multilingualism serves both as an arena for the negotiation of organizational identity and as a state of being for higher education organizations in non-English-speaking countries.

While the sociological theories of world sociey and glocalisation have different intellectual emphases, both conceptual and empirical, they are highly compatible and mutually supportive. The aim of this chapter is to explore this link between world society theory and the study of cultural glocalisation. To this aim, we review the principal concepts, core claims and exemplar studies of world society theory and relating this theory to the issues of the variation and differentiation that are accentuated by glocalisation studied and, according to world society theory, are inherent to global institutional dynamics. After explaining the synergy between these two theoretical research programs on such matters, we propose four lines for fruitful research at the nexus of the two theoretical and research traditions.

Meet the “JewToks.” A squad of Jewish-American TikTokers who have decided to dedicate their accounts to combatting antisemitism online and creating a different kind of digital atmosphere. They are part of the emerging #JewishTikTok community in the United States, transforming TikTok into a space to communicate and educate on Judaism. This chapter explores JewTok’s unique ways of translating Jewish traditions and customs into TikTok’s vernaculars using memes, dance, challenges, and multiple communicative features. Those performative strategies facilitate dialogic modes that enable users to encounter and learn about the JewTok’s community’s burning day-to-day issues. However, TikTok’s playful environment that allows the celebration of Judaism comes with a price as the JewToks face two significant threats: (1) Human—TikTok’s dark side in which hate trolls are attacking JewToks accounts and spreading hate content. “Haters are hijacking Jewish content and giving it an antisemitic remix,” said one of the JewToks interviewed for this chapter; (2) Algorithm—TikTok’s moderation system constantly blocks JewToks’ responses to discriminating and humiliating content. The fight against antisemitism on TikTok might be a double-edged sword, but the JewToks believe their harness of the platform’s creative, engaging, and highly visible tools can change the toxic environment of hate speech, racism, and antisemitism in the digital realm.

Israeli immigration to Berlin has increased significantly over the past decade, giving rise to a nascent Hebrew culture. Consequently, Hebrew letterforms, once seldom found outside the traditional context of synagogues, cemeteries or memorials, are nowadays also found in public spaces and restaurants across the city. While research on Israeli immigration to Germany has greatly increased in recent years, the visual characteristics of this community have, however, yet to be researched. Using two Israeli cafés in Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts as case studies, this article will examine the expression of Israeli cultural identity in the German capital through letterforms. I will argue that the logo designs of both cafés express a connection to Israeli culture in two contrasting ways: on the one hand, a nostalgic connection echoing traditions from the past, and on the other hand, an attempt to maintain a distance from this very culture. Based on interviews with the café owners and a visual analysis of their logos, this article will show how both the café owners strove to express a personal stance in regard to their identity as Israelis through the typefaces and designs used to represent their businesses.

This article aims to contribute to the growing academic debate on the transnational drivers and patterns of contemporary populism. As populist leaderships expand both politically and geographically, the very nature of the populist phenomenon is changing, as it is increasingly being projected on the international stage. Contemporary populist leaders show a growing willingness to transfer the discursive construction of a struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ to the regional and global levels as a way of obtaining internal and external legitimation. In so doing, they exploit the symbiotic two-level game that links national and international (de-)legitimation dynamics, seeking to gain ‘abroad’ the kind of legitimacy that they cannot obtain ‘at home’. This article suggests three mechanisms that explain the populist ‘way out’ from various legitimation traps based on the traditional distinctions between input, throughput, and output legitimacy. The article’s argument is illustrated with reference to prototypical cases of populism in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The incorporation of the literature on international legitimacy enhances our understanding of the strategic activation of populist attitudes through the transnational articulation of empty signifiers, the global diffusion of this phenomenon, and the possibilities for its contestation and mitigation.

This study examines the relations between memory, social media experience, and testimony in the Eva Stories Instagram project. By conducting a combined visual and multimodal analysis of the stories, as well as a close analysis of the relations between social media experience and testimony, we claim that Eva Stories establishes a new responsive space for remembering the Holocaust. This space enables users to inscribe themselves into mediated Holocaust memory and to become media witnesses through the co-creation of socially mediated experiences. The self-inscription of the user is made possible by three interrelated modes of media witnessing, which continuously evoke user engagement. These new modes, we argue, indicate a new kind of agency in relation to media witnessing: the ability to testify on one’s own present social media engagement with mediated memory, and become a witness to it.

This chapter explores the implications of the selfie-perspective for Holocaust memory in the digital age. We analyse sequences from the Israeli documentary film, #Uploading_Holocaust (2016), which were taken during visits at memorial sites. We argue that such audio-visual self-representations communicate the complex relationship between individual subject positions, a presumably meaningful past, and contemporary modes of commemoration. We also claim that the creators of such videos often aim to inscribe themselves into memory culture, while at the same time struggling with the emotional complexity of their encounters with memorial sites. In doing so, they integrate the memory of past events into their present social media lives. We describe this interplay of mnemonic self-inscription and the integration of memories by means of digital technology, as i-Memory: a term that interlinks the subjective adaptation of digital commemorative practices with interactive modes of engagement with history, through memorial sites.

In recent years, the academic treatment of the bloodiest chapters in Western history has become the subject of a furious debate revolving around the questions of the validity and limitations of comparison. This struggle is mainly played out in Germany. Postcolonial scholars make the case for their genocide research, with its focus on ongoing racial injustices, by studying "white crimes" within wider frame-works, including the Holocaust. On the other side of the fence, this approach raises concerns about the relativization of the industrial mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis. Whether this was the intention or not, a competition over victimhood seems to be the outcome.