Per Ståhlberg

• Senior Researcher at Södertörn University

An in-depth look at Ukraine's attempts to shape how it is perceived by the rest of the world. During times of crisis, competing narratives are often advanced to define what is happening, and the stakes of information management by nations are high. In this timely book, Göran Bolin and Per Ståhlberg examine the fraught intersection of state politics...

With a focus on Vivek Shanbagh's novel Ghachar Ghochar I have in this essay constructied an ethnographic narrative allowing me to explore Indian book worlds. I have tried to unravel how this novel, written in the South Indian language Kannada, entered the international arena of literature, and how it then continued its circulation in other Indian l...

This article re-evaluates some of the previous assumptions made related to the communication practices and information management in Ukraine since before the Euromaidan revolution in 2013. We highlight two points where previous knowledge about nation branding and nation building must be rethought in light of the latest developments Firstly, nation...

Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transform...

Positioning itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology, and philosophical critiques of “world” and “globe” concepts, this volume investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a...

In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted o...

The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been held in the Indian city of Jaipur for the past ten years. The event has grown spectacularly and has provided an arena for encounters between literary worlds. It has also become a focus of debate and friction within the sphere of Indian writing. This article is based on fieldwork at the JLF 2017.

If nation branding is about constructing and promoting national identity, what kind of ‘identity’ could it possibly be? This article analyses how the branded nation qualitatively differs from earlier forms of imagined communities by focusing on the tension between inward- and outward-directed dimensions of nation branding. A particular focus is pla...

Nation-branding is a dynamic and rapidly developing practice promoting or readjusting images of a nation-state for tourists or investors. New, postcolonial nation-states seem to have a particular need to build new images of themselves in the eyes of the wider world. However, since they have a short history of sovereignty, these states simultaneousl...

In post-liberalised India, the vast population is regarded as an enormous resource to be exploited as labourers, consumers or for their knowledge. A feature of the new media economy is that newspapers, mobile phones and TV shows are not exclusively produced for the better-off among an urban middle class and, furthermore, that the mass media are inc...

This article concerns journalism as an object of anthropological study. It raises questions about how we should study an occupation that is so familiar in most places of the world. For example, how should we conceptualize newspaper journalism both as a globally diffused media form and as localized cultural practice? Furthermore, I discuss the relat...

"This is an interesting collection of mainly ethnographic studies in political anthropology. Most of the contributors focus on interactions between particular groups of people and the state." Research was conducted in localities in Cuba, India, Ethiopia, Taiwan and the Lebanon. "The volume will be of interest to political anthropologists concernec...

Dear List First, thanks to Jay for a stimulating and interesting paper, which I enjoyed very much reading. My appreciation of this paper is, of course, influenced by my own background, so I should start by introducing myself briefly. Just like Jay, I have written a dissertation on journalism, based on participant observation in an editorial office...