Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's ‘Make It Possible’ multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the ‘My Make It Possible Story’ website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.

The Post to Come: an Outline of Post metaphysical Ethics (2005), and her current research turns around the ethico political possibilities and implications of contemporary European philosophy. Her most recent work is published in Philosophy Today and Symposium. Debbie Rodan lectures in the Media & Cultural Studies stream at Edith Cowan University. She has previously published on social and cultural identity formation. Current research projects include: examining the recurring discourses within the letters to the editor and how they underpin and ratify certain notions of being 'Australian'; and an analysis of the ways in which ethnic Hazara refugees from Afghanistan have been (re)presented in two Australian television programmes.

In this paper we examine the digitalised emotional campaigning of one of Australia's peak animal welfare organisations. Animals Australia, focusing on their most effective digital strategies associated with their campaigns against factory farming. Our broader interest lies with sounding out the affective affordances of the technologies informing such activist work; technologies of affect in a very significant sense. This discussion will comprise three parts. First we unpack the context for the problematic faced by animal (and environmental) activisms: neoliberalism, showing how neoliberal assumptions constrain such activisms to emotional appeals and denounce them for such strategizing. Secondly we sound out some of the affordances of digital media technologies for affectively oriented activisms; and finally we delve into some of Animals Australia's digital campaigning with regards to issues of factory farming in order to show the efficacy of such affectively oriented mediated strategizing for facilitating care for factory farmed animals.

In responding to the events of 11 September 2001-the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington-George W. Bush announced to the world that democracy itself was under attack, and that such an attack 1 represented a threat to democracy. Such an interpretation of these events, along with portraying Western democracy as a victim in need of protection and as 'good'-and establishing thereby the moral high ground-also represented one of the main discourses in which the Tampa refugees were discussed in Australia, and has continued to be a prominent discourse in public discussion within Australia about the War on Terror, the Bali Bombings and both refugees and detention centres. Drawing on a detailed analysis of letters to the editor published in The Australian in the aftermath of 9/11, this paper seeks to show not only that discussion of the events of 2001 and 2002 has tended to coalesce around two apparently irreconcilable discourses 2-that of the aforementioned desire to protect democracy or 'our way of life' versus that expressive of a kind of 'globalized humanitarianism'-but that these discourses are indeed not so much irreconcilable but share a common ground along with common stakes and ends. The first parts of this paper thus focus on unpacking these two contrasting discourses as initially foregrounded in letters to the editor published in The Australian in the aftermath of 9/11. The second section will then go on to consider the way in which these discourses are centred around democracy, suggesting that, despite their apparent irreconcilability, each discourse makes very similar assumptions about and deployments of democracy. Finally, we consider these discourses in the light of Chantal Mouffe's and Slavoj Ž ižek's concerns about these assumptions and conclude that, given these discrepancies concerning the nature of democracy, the time has come for a re-evaluation of democracy itself. Context Distributed nationally six days of the week, with almost a full page devoted to letters, The Australian provides a national forum for public expression concerning current events. We followed these letters for a period of twelve weeks (11 September to 3 December 2001), a period encompassing 9/11, the arrival of the Tampa, and the beginning of the War on Terror, and also Australia's federal election of 11 November 2001. We specifically chose to concentrate on this period as it appeared to be these events at the end of 2001 that led to certain positions and attitudes being foregrounded

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