Many local online platforms for people to give away or sell items have arisen in recent years. While some research has analysed modes of consumption emerging in such sites, there has been little exploration of the nature of the contact between local residents that these sites occasion and their implications for local sense of community. This article analyses interviews with users of local online platforms for giving and selling items within one town in south-east England, identifying judgments that users make about one another and exploring the connections that are made between online and offline. Imagining other users and projecting social norms onto them emerges as important in making transactions meaningful. Users also often imagine social difference and make judgments that reproduce socio-economic stereotypes. Usage is portrayed as a positive experience enhancing users’ views of local community in a general sense, but shows limited tendencies to overcome existing social divisions.

Dissertation defenses are ambiguous affairs, which mark both the end of a long process of doctoral education and the inauguration of a doctoral candidate into a body of experts. At Maastricht University (and other Dutch universities), the decision to award a doctoral degree is made on the basis of the written dissertation well before the defense, which makes the ambiguous status of the event between examination and celebration especially evident. Nevertheless, participants attach importance to the event because it impacts the reputation of individual researchers, as well as that of research groups and of the host-university itself. Taking a Goffmanian perspective on the event as a performance, it becomes clear that the ambiguity in the definition between celebration and assessment is contained within the script that details how the performance should be conducted. In this script, participants' role is unclear, providing them the means to act in accordance with their own definition of the event. The ambiguous definition of the event is performed at an individual level but also in team performances, in which participants correct each other when someone's behavior appears too celebratory. Amidst this ambiguity between celebration and assessment, the university reinforces its own authority to award doctoral degrees, acting as a gate-keeping institution to the academic world.