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is a Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Collaboratories and Technology Enhanced Learning Communities (COTELCO) and a doctoral candidate at the School of International Service. His research interests include strategic communication, global governance, non-traditional diplomacy, human-computer interaction, and research methods. His research has been published in several academic journals and books including American Behavioral Scientist and Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. He has delivered numerous presentations and lectures on global public health, public diplomacy, nation / place branding, and strategic communication.ABSTRACT This article presents analysis of a period of public argumentation over the city logo of Ankara, the capital of Turkey. These arguments comprise a 17-year episode of controversy that reveals insights into the politics of meaning behind city ' s brand. Ankara ' s logo functions as a contested ' collective representation ' of the city ' s brand identity, and paved the way to further discussions on its history, cultural identity and politics by various internal stakeholders. The signifi cance of this research is two-fold. First, the Ankara case contributes to existing studies of place branding and semiotics, by examining the contending positions that complicate Ankara ' s historical identity and the range of stakeholders that make up the ' managerial apparatus ' of brand meaning. Drawing on communication studies, ' controversy ' provides an analytical vehicle to consider claims to brand ownership, legitimacy and authority by various stakeholders, as well as to demonstrate the potential of public argumentation to transform and shape the practice of place branding.Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2012) 8, 133 -146.

Public diplomacy connotes a range of international programmes tasked with cultivating influence for nation-states. It is typically justified within the arguments that comprise the concept of 'soft power'. Soft power, however, is a vague concept, arguably, which has been difficult to implicate as pivotal to foreign policy outcomes. Yet, despite its apparent shortcomings, the concept informs a variety of nation-state and international actors in their strategic formulations. States acting on soft power tenets via a diversity of policies suggest further attention is warranted to examine how soft power is adapted to the practice of public diplomacy among different nation-states. This article draws on Stefano Guzzini's 'performative conceptual analysis' to explore how a comparative analysis of public diplomacy can account for differing articulations of soft power, and the kinds of tools that leverage communicative and cultural resources toward expected gains. The goal is to render soft power as grounded in localised, practical understandings of strategic necessity through public diplomacy tools of statecraft. Soft power is presented as an assemblage of practical reasoning that informs linkages between strategic arguments about communication power and the practice of public diplomacy.

In late 2003 through 2004, the Saudi American Exchange conducted an exchange program, the Formula 1 Global Marketing Challenge. This program is presented in this article as an example of applied, grassroots public diplomacy; a program that facilitated intercultural communication between Arab and U.S. graduate and undergraduate students. The Formula 1 Challenge is described as a structured set of activities leveraging both online and in-person collaborative exercises focused explicitly on establishing mutual understanding of culturally grounded communication and media consumption practices. The program is argued to reflect a possible alternative conception for public diplomacy as a state-centric, media-driven set of policies—and reflects a public diplomacy exercise that embodies dialogue-oriented activities called for in normative prescriptions for U.S. public diplomacy.

The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 was hailed by many as a positive development for the image of the United States abroad. Yet the Obama presidency, by itself, does not constitute a public diplomacy strategy. This article addresses the state of U.S. public diplomacy at the start of the Obama administration and references how media reaction to Obama’s election provides insight into the role of the presidency in U.S. public diplomacy and its ability to translate popularity into tangible policy gains. Public diplomacy is considered in this article as both a communication strategy and foreign policy imperative that has been neglected as an institutional means to amplify the global popularity of the president and U.S. foreign policy objectives. The article argues that the confluence of Obama’s personal communication efforts and policy strategy and the global context of ubiquitous social media technologies indicates a productive moment for U.S. public diplomacy planners and policy advocates to capitalize on the president’s popularity through a reinvigorated strategy of engagement.