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In this article, I offer a phenomenological examination of the communicative nature of architectural features located between the private and public spheres of the city. These include balconies, porches, doors, windows, fire escapes, and entrances, which enable important communicative practices for inhabitants and passers-by. Focusing specifically on their liminality as an elemental condition for communication, I use the umbrella term Urban Liminal Architecture and explore their simultaneous, paradoxical operative modes of connectivity and separation, along with playfulness and freedom. This builds up to the critical examination of communication in relation to architectural liminality, with a specific focus on interactions between stranger inhabitants and passers-by and ethical practices. I argue that liminal architecture contributes to the values of 'the communicative city' and to the understanding of the essence of communication as transmitting and sharing, while it embodies the materiality of communication. I call to view the site of urban liminal architecture as a symbol and a condition of an ethical relationship with the Other.

This article explores journalistic representations of mothers during the horrific 'Remedia Affair', a 2003 tragedy in which dozens of Jewish Israeli babies fell sick and five died after being fed defective infant formula. The affair, a significant event in Israel's collective memory, was narrativized as a 'media scandal' with multiple discourses of guilt, blame and victimhood. Analysis of the linguistic and visual coverage of Jewish Israeli mothers in six newspapers shows how mothers were reconstructed as guilty for the loss of the babies' lives and well-being. In addition, the mothers were called to 'come back' to breastfeeding, an act that could have saved their children. Overall, this coverage reaffirmed the traditional social norms of the 'ideal Jewish mother' who sacrifices herself for her baby and is objectified as 'food', norms that were not commonly practiced by most Jewish Israeli families at the time.

By studying letters written to the dead published in the popular Israeli press between 1997 and 2014, this paper examines the practices that constitute communicative acts toward a deceased person using interpersonal and mass media, in order to embody the recipiency of the dead. Using an analytical framework that draws on media ecology, communication theory, and discourse analysis, the paper demonstrates how the epistolary and mass media rhetoric operate to reconstruct the performance of the dead as an addressee. By exploring this understudied phenomenon and revisiting core notions of communication in light of written technologies, distance, and death, the paper argues that this communicative constellation, as a whole, is a performative act that offers a "communicative resurrection" to the dead.

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