This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of 'the public' or 'public life', and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map various practices. This volume proposes a new metaphor - modalities - to suggest that publics are forever in flux, and much more fluid and dynamic than the static models of systems or spheres would indicate - especially in the digital age, where various publics rapidly evolve and dissipate.

The transnational movement of people and ideas has led scholars throughout the humanities to reconsider many core concepts. Among them is the notion of public memory and how it changes when collective memories are no longer grounded within the confines of the traditional nation-state. An introduction by coeditors Kendall Phillips and Mitchell Reyes provides a context for examining the challenges of remembrance in a globalized world. In their essay they posit the idea of the -global memoryscape, - a sphere in which memories circulate among increasingly complex and diffused networks of...