Place-based Issue Publics: The Rearrangement of Local Public Spheres in a Digitalized and Globalized World

• Applicant: Dr. Daniela Stoltenberg
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567260138

In the context of digitalization and globalization, local public spheres are undergoing significant changes. Events and issues are now regularly negotiated between resident and non-resident actors in translocal attention networks. These actors do not construct events as merely local, but rather situate events and their places in the context of global issues, such as rising illiberalism or climate change. Hence, public actors regularly designate event locations as ciphers for societal issues. Based on this phenomenon of place-based public attention, the Emmy Noether group will write a theory of the spatiality of digital public spheres. Towards this goal, it connects the concepts of issue publics and place-based struggles into the concept of place-based issue publics. The project is rooted in communication studies, and particularly in public spheres theory, but also has interdisciplinary intersections with social movement studies and the sociology of space. At this intersection, it will address three blind spots in contemporary research on local and digital public spheres: first, it empirically and theoretically addresses the role of different scales of communication (local vs. translocal). Second, through a complementary mixed-methods design, it connects the emergent macro-level structures of digital discourses and the priorities and agency of emplaced actors at the micro-level. Third, it facilitates a spatio-temporal perspective on digital public spheres by investigating the role of places in public communication over the course of issue attention cycles. In a comparative case study design, a total of six cases of place-based issue publics across three countries (Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom) are investigated. The cases are small to medium-sized towns, all of which have become the object of national or even international public attention due to local events being positioned in the context of a controversial societal issue. In each country, one case study is rooted in the context of the issue of illiberalism and backlash against plural societies; the second case concerns the context of industrial transformation and the environment. To address both the discursive macro-level and the perspective of individual actors, the project implements a mixed-methods design with computational and qualitative methods. On the one hand, for each case, we collect local and translocal discourses in mass media and social media. We use computational methods to map spatio-temporal discursive patterns from this data. On the other hand, we use fieldwork and qualitative interviews to understand how local actors perceive translocal public attention and what strategies they develop in response.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups