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This article analyzes discursive patterns in a cross-national sample of letters to the editor from the 12 months following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Using the techniques of traditional content analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study examines the degree to which letters published in The New York Times, The Times of London, and The Australian serve to support or challenge state practices in the U.S.-led "war on terror." The analysis reveals marked similarities in the discursive strategies employed in the letters, but significant cross-national differences in the level of state support expressed by the authors.In the months following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, newspapers within the United States and around the world were deluged by letters to the editor (LEs) expressing grief, commiseration, and outrage, attributing blame, and advocating responses to the threat of terrorism. These letters are of interest for two primary reasons. First, because LEs are written largely by ordinary citizens on a voluntary basis rather than by paid experts, officials, or journalists, they serve as at least a rough index of popular sentiments on a given issue (Hill, 1981). However, though media apologists conceive of the LE page as vox populi (Brown, 1976), the reality is more complex. Due to space constraints, editors are seldom able to publish all of the letters they receive; so typically, large circulation broadsheets publish only a small portion of the letters sent in by readers.

This article examines discursive constructions of the global in two rural communities, one in Australia and one in Japan. Based on an analysis of interviews with 195 Australians and Japanese, the article identifies a set of common themes and concerns associated with globalizing social changes in these two local contexts. Economics, immigration, and cultural change feature prominently in respondents' discourses of the global. However, national and local conditions as well as the social locations of participants are shown to shape conceptions of the global in both communities.The scholarly literature on globalization that has developed over the last two decades is vast and diverse. Theorists in fields such as world systems theory, media theory, postmodern theory, cultural studies and international relations now draw on globalization as an explanatory factor; yet, depending on the theoretical perspective, the term is used to refer to the intensifying concentration of global capital, the hegemony of Western (mainly US) cultural products, the transformation of individual and collective identities, the emergence of supra-national political institutions or all of these. A comprehensive review of this literature has been undertaken by others (see especially Waters, 1995) and is, in any case, beyond the scope of this article. However, three broad features of this corpus of scholarly writing are of central concern to this article.

This article examines the relationship between globalization and the construction of gendered national identities in Japanese and Australian television advertisements. The article analyses how `Japaneseness' and `Australianness' are established in a sample of television ads, and asserts that these representations of national identity are gendered. It suggests that these gendered representations are tied to increasing globalization. Specifically, it argues that the gendering of discourses of national identity serves to anchor in traditionalism identities that are destabilized by the pressures of the Japanese programme of `internationalization' and the Australian programme of `multiculturalism'. These findings represent the preliminary results of ongoing research into the relationship between globalization, gender and national identity in contemporary Japan and Australia.