This paper draws on interviews conducted in the days and weeks after the events of September 11th, 2001, analyzing the transition from “September 11th, 2001” to “9‐11.” That is, from the discursive void that immediately followed the acts of terrorism in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania to the apparently self‐evident crisis that the events came to represent in the following days and weeks. First, the paper redresses persistent oversights of discourse‐oriented work by recognizing and investigating both the agency of the US general public and the context that official responses were articulated in. Second, the paper serves to denaturalize the construction of 9‐11 as crisis, questioning the first and pre‐requisite stage of the emerging discourse of the “War on Terror.” Theorizing void, crisis and their relationship enables an understanding of how the War on Terror was possible and opens a critical space for its contestation.

This article analyses Australian media portrayals of former Australian Prime MinisterJulia GillardÕs Ôsexism and misogynyÕ speech to parliament in October 2012. Our analysis reveals that coverage of the speech comprised three principal gendered framings: strategic attack, uncontrolled emotional outpouring, and hypocrisy. We argue that these framings demonstrate the role the media plays as a gendered mediator, perpetuating the double gender bind that constrains women political leaders, as they negotiate the demand to demonstrate masculine leadership attributes without tarnishing the feminine qualities expected of them. In this instance, gendered media framings: limited the saliency of GillardÕs speech; curtailed calls for wider introspection on Australian political culture; and further disassociated women from political leadership.2

This article explores the relationship between foreign policy and political possibility in two parts. First, the relationship between foreign policy and political possibility is theorized around three analytical moments: political possibility is linked to the framing of conceivable, communicable and coercive foreign policy. Second, this framework is developed and demonstrated through a brief analysis of Coalition foreign policy in the War on Terror, considering American, British and Australian foreign policy between 2001 and 2003. This analysis dissects distinct and divergent Coalition foreign policies through a linked three-part conceptualization of political possibility. It enables an understanding of how the War on Terror was rendered possible through the construction of foreign policy in thinkable, resonant and ultimately dominant terms. The article concludes by looking to the wider analytical applicability of this particular theorization of the relationship between foreign policy and political possibility.

Contributing to burgeoning studies of populism, this article conceptualises and contextualises Trump’s language as ‘Jacksonian populism’. We explore how this style of populist discourse influenced political debates before and after Trump’s election. Ours is the first article to analyse opposition and media responses to Trump’s construction of ‘real America’ as that of a Jacksonian, White, and male working class. To do so, the article analyses 1165 texts, from the government, opposition, newspapers, television coverage, and social media. In addition to locating Trump’s reification of a mythologised White working class within a broader Jacksonian tradition, we find that the Democratic opposition and mainstream media initially reproduced this construction, furthering Trump’s cause. Even where discursive challenges were subsequently developed, they often served to reproduce a distinct – and hitherto unspoken for – White (male) working-class America. In short, early resistance actively reinforced Trump’s discursive hegemony, which centred on reclaiming the primacy of working, White America in the national identity.

This article explores video use and the student learning experience in Politics and International Relations (IR). The study brings together and builds on two extant literatures, on deep learning and visual literacy, in order to explore how students make uses of three types of video: lecture summaries, current affairs clips and fictional television. Questionnaire and focus group data generates a nuanced picture, with distinct implications for the learning experience. The article shows how different types of video can be linked to the development of different skills for different students.