Focusing on the Tunisian Femen-activist Amina Tyler/Sboui and the topless 'Free Amina protest' carried out in Tunis, this article investigates the participatory practices and activist imaginary (Marcus, 2006: 6) of the Femen movement. Femen is conceptualized as an assemblage (Delanda, 2006;Latour, 2005) of protesting women and various human and non-human, mediatised (Hepp, 2013;Hjarvard, 2008;Lundby 2009) and localized actors. The article suggests that Femen's protests undergo a dual process of mediatisation that aims to both generate a spreadable imaginary and enable communication between bodies by addressing affective registers. The mediatised 'affective environment' (Massumi, 2009) cues bodies and generates spreadability, yet it also produces disconnections. These disconnections might redistribute the 'economy of recognizability' (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013); however, the Femen headquarters in Kiev and Paris increasingly provide centralized interpretations of the movement and the localized actions causing the perception of Femen's activist imaginary to be unfolded between the unrecognizable and the too recognizable body.

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In the introduction of Conjunction: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation we introduce 1) the aim of the journal, 2) the journal’s conception of transdisciplinarity as an important precondition for understanding contemporary processes and dilemmas of participation, 3) important trajectories in the existing literature on participation that focus on participation as linked to technological changes, to democratic processes of transferring power, and to complex social situations calling for analytical and evaluative frameworks able to grasp multiplicity and competing interests, and 4) the theme and articles of the this special issue: cultural participation and citizenship.

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President of the United States Donald Trump engages in ongoing Twitter-attacks on (perceived) political opponents such as named politicians, celebrities, news channels and named journalists. In June 2015 the New York Times began to compile a list of Trump’s insults on Twitter. By January 2020 the list compiles the “598 People, Places and Things Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter”. In this article, we make use of this list as an archive of condensed affective expressions that allow us to analyse the ways in which Trump uses Twitter to mobilise politically in manners which we will term ‘strategic cyberbullying’. Cyberbullying is often discussed as a phenomenon that arises among children and young people, yet we suggest that borrowing an analytic lens from cyberbullying research allows us to better understand the dynamics of Trump’s use of Twitter for political mobilisation. Through a categorical mapping of the New York Times Archive, we show how political opponents are discredited strategically and a new kind of political territory is established through an intentional circulation of particular interfacial refrains through Twitter. These refrains travel between on- and offline contexts to extend the reach of the campaign through establishing a new form of we-ness that includes and excludes communities. We show how this we-ness in Trump’s affective politics is shaped (also) by the Twitter interface and holds the potential to alter the democratic public and the thresholds for democratic participation.