The popular rebellions that swept Arab countries starting with Tunisia in December 2010 spawned an active sphere of dissenting cultural production. Although media harnessed by revolutionaries include public space, graffiti, street art, puppet shows, poetry, songs, cartoons, digital art, and music videos, many analyses have focused on social media as digital platforms. Social media and mobile telephones introduced a new element to political activism, but the focus on technology provides a partial understanding of activist communication. A more comprehensive picture of dissent in the Arab uprisings requires us to understand how revolutionaries have represented themselves and how various media, digital and otherwise, were incorporated in these communicative processes. In other words, we need to focus on the myths, ideologies, and histories that inspired slogans, murals, and poems and made them socially relevant and politically potent—of the creative permutations of symbols, words, images, colors, shapes, and sounds that revolutionaries deployed to contest despots, to outwit each other, to attract attention, and to conjure up new social and political imaginaries. Together, the articles in this Special Issue accomplish just this task. Originally presented at the inaugural biennial symposium of what was then the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication in 2013, the articles you are about to read exemplify one of the fundamental principles undergirding the institutional mission of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication: a robust dialogue between theoretical advances on one hand, and deep linguistic, cultural, historical knowledge of the world region under study, on the other.

中文翻译：

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革命的公共领域：阿拉伯起义的情况

从2010年12月突尼斯开始席卷阿拉伯国家的民众叛乱催生了反对文化生产的活跃领域。尽管革命者利用的媒体包括公共空间，涂鸦，街头艺术，木偶戏，诗歌，歌曲，卡通，数字艺术和音乐视频，但许多分析都将社交媒体作为数字平台。社交媒体和移动电话为政治行动主义引入了新的元素，但对技术的关注使人们对激进主义者的交流有了部分了解。要更全面地了解阿拉伯起义中的持不同政见者，我们需要了解革命者如何表现自己以及如何将各种数字媒体和其他媒体纳入这些传播过程。换句话说，我们需要专注于神话，意识形态，以及激发口号，壁画和诗歌并使其在社会上具有相关性和政治影响力的历史—符号，文字，图像，颜色，形状和声音的创造性排列，这些革命者被派往与专制者竞争，相互竞争，相互吸引注意，并构想出新的社会和政治假想。总之，本期特刊中的文章仅完成了此任务。最初在2013年举行的两年一度的全球通讯高级研究项目的首次座谈会上介绍，您将要阅读的文章举例说明了全球通讯高级研究中心机构使命的基本原则之一：一方面理论上的进步与深厚的语言，文化，