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Since 2003, avian influenza has recently spread around the world sparking fears of a potential pandemic. As a result of this, a range of explanations and expectations surrounding the phenomenon were generated. Such social representations of disease depict the issue under discussion and frame reactions to the event. This paper explores the social representations surrounding avian influenza in Australia. Methodologically, a textual analysis of media and government documents was conducted in order to uncover the social representations implicit in these accounts. This demonstrated a symbolic framing of avian influenza with reference to the Spanish Influenza pandemic (1918). Analytically, the study draws upon the concepts of social representations from Durkheim and of risk and symbolic risk in the work of Beck. Overall, it is argued that the framing of avian influenza as a risk, mediated through the collective memory of Spanish Influenza, characterised the nature of the social representations surrounding the phenomenon. This resulted in the production of symbolic solutions to the threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinctive dimension of political life, power as the capacity for people to act in concert, was a key in understanding one of the major transformations of the late twentieth century—the democratic aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire in central Europe. In this paper, the way this dimension—the politics of small things—provides alternatives in the United States is analyzed. A new media regime, with significant interactions between virtual and embodied social interactions, has opened up the opportunity for a new democratic politics. The antiwar movement and the Dean campaign are shown to have constituted alternative political possibilities for those critical of hegemonic discourses and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an introduction to the issues that are addressed in the journal "Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies." The authors venture into new territory for the journal, with six papers around the theme of global communication governance. It notes that the convergence of technologies seems to have produced an equally important social and cultural convergence where nongovernmental organizations, governments, business and civil society groups come together to find a satisfactory means of governing the flows of information in an information society.