CFS faculty Dorry Noyes and Katherine Borland delivered talks at the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore Conference in Zagreb, Croatia on June 22nd. Their panel, entitled Gesturing toward Utopia: The Politics of Exemplarity, explored how striking acts in a variety of political contexts (United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Hungary, Germany, the United States and Central America) reverberate in mediated and embodied forms. Our international colleagues Yücel Demirer, PhD OSU 2004, and István Povedak, Fulbright visiting scholar to CFS in 2014, joined us to begin to explore the difference between the transformative act and the empty gesture.