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Based on research into qualitative responses to capital punishment in raid twentieth-century Britain, this article examines how letter writers to the Home Office constructed imagined communities in relation to capital cases. It uncovers a shift in these responses from creating respectable, local communities in the period 1930-45, when most letter writers had a personal connection to the condemned, to the creation of the imagined national community from the late 1940s onwards, when most correspondents in relation to high profile cases were not connected to the condemned. These post-war letters reveal how meanings of Britishness, particularly in relation to the important symbol of 'British justice', were negotiated in relation to capital punishment.

The reception of Benedict Anderson’s ideas was very fruitful in many disciplines, and his work provided key concepts that can now throw a clarifying light in some blurry matters. The expression “imagined community” has known a remarkable proliferation, a situation that led to both the formation of a research direction and to the perpetuation of a cliché. In this respect, my article pointed out some suggestive characteristics of virtual communities, explaining why the imagined community is a valuable subject for the theorists of new media. The impossibility to know in person all the members of a big community is just one factor that determines its imagined face. Moreover, the set of values and inner presuppositions that guide the members are important bricks in the construction of community. In my opinion, the virtual community is imagined as a multi-layered experience (technological, conversational, relational etc.). The dynamic of a virtual community contains the tension amongst these layers and the degree of its imagined side depends on multiple factors. In order to illustrate these aspects, I gave a brief example by analysing a Romanian virtual community, using the triad common language – temporality – high centers. In spite of its limitations, the perspectives offered by this concept are still useful for understanding the nature of online communities. Thus, the imagined community is a valuable set of beliefs and practices that underlie and bolster the effective meaning and functioning of the virtual communities.

Prime ministers often use vernacularisms in their political rhetoric, but we know little about how they deploy these forms of speech and the consequences for politics and policy. This article extends work on the ‘rhetorical PM’ by focusing on how leaders deploy idiomatic expressions in their oratory. The article presents a thematic analysis of four successive Australian prime ministers' use of the country's distinctive ‘fair go’ expression in speeches and media interviews between 1972 and 1996. Australian PMs increasingly invoked the ‘fair go’ expression throughout this period for multiple rhetorical purposes, including to make national identity claims, engage in partisan competition and justify policy reforms with strong neoliberal elements. While prevailing scholarship sees ‘vernacular politics’ as a tool of grassroots actors opposing discourses of globalization and elite-driven reform, this research shows the vernacular is a versatile rhetorical tool mobilized by elites for multiple purposes, including to justify radical policy change.

This article seeks to bring together studies of community from both the New and Old Worlds and examine their various strengths and weaknesses. Whilst applauding many of the recent developments, particularly the emphasis on communities as the outcome of practice and agency, I suggest that there are three specific difficulties present in the current studies of community: an underlying subtext which supports modern political notions of community as a timeless form of sociality; a prominent anthropocentric vision of community as the province purely of human beings; and a failure to folly embrace the role of affect and emotion. By rethinking communities as assemblages, this article seeks to build on the firm foundations constructed in the last 15 years to present new possibilities for taking this important concept forward.

In developing and least developed economies, traditional and spatially bound communities play a critical role in bridging the gap when formal social welfare systems fall short in meeting essential needs. While the role of traditional communities in addressing societal issues is well recognized, research on imagined communities as agents of social welfare is a new and rapidly developing area of study. This study uses the foundational tenets of Ubuntu to examine the ways in which imagined communities—influenced by social media—use their collective agency to address gaps in Kenya’s formal social welfare system. Drawing data from three storytellers’ YouTube channels, we conducted a thematic analysis of 15 personal accounts to determine how storytellers leverage their social media presence, institutional knowledge, and community trust to address gaps in an under-resourced social welfare system. Findings indicate that personal stories shared and amplified through these digital platforms resonate with the imagined community, forming emotional connections that transcend geographic and socioeconomic boundaries. We identify key actors—storytellers, beneficiaries, public institutions, and the globally dispersed imagined community—and explore how their interactions enhance community well-being. This exploration highlights the crucial role that storytelling through social media plays in mobilizing support and fostering social connections.

I propose the need to establish a comparative study of societies, conceived of specificially here as bounded groups beyond a simple, immediate family that have the potential to endure for generations, whose constituent individuals recognize one another as members, and that maintain control over a physical space. This definition, with refinements and ramifications I explore, serves for cross-disciplinary research because it applies not just to nations but to diverse hunter–gatherer and tribal groups with a pedigree that likely traces back to the societies of our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. It also applies to groups among other species for which comparison to humans can be instructive. Notably, it describes societies in terms of shared group identification rather than social interactions. An expansive treatment of the topic is overdue given that the concept of a society (even the use of such synonyms as primate “troop”) has fallen out of favor among biologists, resulting in a semantic mess; whereas sociologists rarely consider societies beyond nations, and social psychologists predominantly focus on ethnicities and other component groups of societies. I examine the relevance of societies across realms of inquiry, discussing the ways member recognition is achieved; how societies compare to other organizational tiers; and their permeability, territoriality (allowing for mobile territories), relation to social networks and kinship, and impermanence. We have diverged from our ancestors in generating numerous affiliations within and between societies while straining the expectation of society memberships by assimilating diverse populations. Nevertheless, if, as I propose, societies were the first, and thereafter the primary, ingroups of prehistory, how we came to register society boundaries may be foundational to all human “groupiness.” A discipline-spanning approach to societies should further our understanding of what keeps societies together and what tears them apart.

Despite the unification of East African states to form the East African Community, the member states also aspire to grow as integrated selves within the unification. This article draws on African philosophy’s Ubuntu and Benedict Anderson’s (2016) ideas of imagined communities to investigate whether the East African Community’s anthem and those of its three member states enmesh the concepts of individual nations’ self-integration and communal aspirations with the community’s insistence on ‘oneness’. A close reading of Uganda’s, Tanzania’s, and Kenya’s anthems reveals that they symbolically represent individual member states as integrated selves and aspire to fortify communal relations with neighbouring states, thereby signalling that individual states will flourish amongst others—the very things addressed in the EAC’s anthem. Anthems’ fictitious worlds metaphorically shed light on the materialisation of a healthy East African Community and the growth of individual member states, grounded in the principles of self- and communal integration. The paper argues that the EAC’s anthems embody the philosophy of unity and, at the same time, convey the idea of unification among the member states.

As the idea of the nation has gained ascendance in modern times, it has also brought us to the brink of a deepening crisis. The nation as an ‘imagined community’ operates through multiple exclusions, not only of those who are outside it, but also of aspects of its members that cannot be readily encompassed by its own descriptions and ambitions of national selfhood. Most nations tolerate sub-identities, for example of tribes, clans or regions, only as long as their overall power is not challenged. Any internal voice likely to be perceived as a threat to the nation generally evokes a brutally suppressive reaction. This writing returns to the thoughts of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, who is an engaged Buddhist practitioner. By delving into the exiled leader’s dream of free Tibet, it recovers many possible and creative meanings of what a nation could be. Standing close to political visionaries—for instance M.K. Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, B.R. Ambedkar amongst others—who have preceded him, the Dalai Lama too imagines the nation through a non-antagonistic vision that embraces otherness and strives for universal oneness. Drawing from Mahayana Buddhism, he provides ethical alternatives to the idea of the nation as an independent, exclusive and self-sufficient entity. In particular, this writing returns to his Nobel Lecture of 1989, in which he dreams of Tibet as a free country where all differences and forms of otherness are embraced and respected. His vision is premised on the belief that a Buddhist deconstructive analysis of ‘self’ would make it possible for self (non-self) and other to co-exist gracefully. Along with Buddhist thought, this article uses psychoanalytic theory and the perspective of the unconscious to think through ideas of the self, other and the nation.

The conditions under which language learners speak or remain silent, when they write, read, or resist, is a passionate interest of mine that began more than two decades ago. Like many other language teachers and researchers, I have been entrusted over the years with the stories of language learners as they have moved from one country to another, from home to school, and from classroom to community. The learners have been of varying ages, and their stories have reflected both dreams and disappointments. As I have sought to make sense of such stories, I have had to grapple with what it means to know and teach a language, and English in particular, in our multilingual, transnational, and frequently inequitable world.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness. Design/methodology/approach Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities. Findings The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding. Research limitations/implications This research identifies the specific visual sub-dimensions of brands that enable transnational communities to be imagined. Practical implications Understanding the visual aesthetic sub-dimensions in this study provides brand managers with practical tools that can help develop referents that foster transnational imagined communities in brand building to achieve competitive advantage and reach a transnational segment. Originality/value Prior studies have primarily focussed on how visual aesthetics help in understanding issues related to national identity. In contrast, this paper examines the use of visual aesthetics in branding from a transnational perspective.