At a time when funders, activists, policy makers, scholars and others are increasingly calling for forms of publicly engaged social science research, the OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) launches a new research project: Creating Publics. The project, driven by Research Fellow Dr Nick Mahony, will investigate what is at stake in public engagement, reassess how it is being conceptualised and collectively test-out and innovate new approaches to practice. Here, Nick Mahony, explains the project...
The aim of the new Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) research project
Creating Publics is to innovate new and more theoretically and empirically informed ways of conceptualizing and practicing public engagement with social science research.
The starting point of this project is the proposition that, in order to create the publics of social science research in the 21st century, it will be necessary to let go of the idea that publics are pre-existing or autonomous entities and – perhaps more controversially – also the idea that social research and scholarship can ever be an entirely isolated or autonomous forms of practice.
By instead viewing publicness/publics and social research as each being distributed activities that exist in relations of interdependency with one another, the Creating Publics project sets out to systematically analyse, collectively discuss and set up experiments to investigate the forms of public support and infrastructure required in different contexts to facilitate processes of critical and creative interaction and innovation between them.
How, the project asks, might forms of contemporary social science research more effectively summon and support publics and forms of publicness? And how, by extension, can 21st century publics and emerging forms of public infrastructure, better support the innovation of new and emerging forms of social research?
'It is an agenda centred on a set of contemporary questions and debates about how we understand what social science research does in the world'
The Creating Publics project builds on and is working to contribute to two increasingly important research agendas. The first of these is the ‘public engagement’ agenda. Whether it is pressure coming from the 'top down' (from funders or government) or from the 'bottom up' (from activists and scholars), the increasing visibility of debates about 21st century public engagement are also focusing greater attention on the issues of how the publics and the public role of social science research should be enacted, understood and further innovated.
The second research agenda that Creating Publics is working to contribute to is a slightly different but closely connected one. It is an agenda centred on a set of contemporary questions and debates about how we understand what social science research does in the world; the relationship between its methods, approaches and outcomes and forms of social change; and, questions about what ‘the public’ and forms of publicness are in 21st century contexts of practice?
To address this agenda the Creating Publics project is drawing on and extending a strand of research that has been highly active in CCIG over the last few years. This research, in conversation with other parallel developments, has re-visited and re-conceptualised what publics are, how they form in different contexts as well as begun to trace some of the array of resources and forms of support that publics require in practice for their mediation, creation and sustenance.
The Creating Publics project is therefore for all those who are interested in engaging critically and creatively with the work of innovating and developing more theoretically and empirically understandings of public engagement with social research in the 21st century.
'In time the project will also therefore be in a position to generate a set of public resources about public creation, public creativity and creating publics'
Working collaboratively with pre-existing social science research projects in CCIG, the Creating Publics project is already beginning pilot new ways of conceptualizing public engagement with social research and experiment with new forms of practice. It is also beginning to collectively explore, debate and reflect on what is at stake when it comes to engaging and creating publics and forms of publicness in these and other contexts, both now and in the future. In time the project will also therefore be in a position to generate a set of public resources about public creation, public creativity and creating publics.
The launch of Creating Publics in March 2012 at The Open University was an occasion to inaugurate the Creating Publics keynote lecture and event series, another of the key strands of activity this project will be supporting. For this series we’ve scheduled three events that will run between 26 March and 28 June 2012. Each of these events has been set up so as to support forms of substantive and innovative thinking and collective conversation – live and in public (albeit in ways that are inevitably not equally accessible to all). As well as being free to register, each of these events will be webcast, so as to open out possibilities for people to participate in ways than would be possible otherwise.
On May 16 we look forward to welcoming the geographer Professor Rachel Pain from University of Durham who will be giving a Creating Publics keynote address about the politics of public engagement; and then on 28 June we will be fortunate enough to host to the sociologist Professor John Holmwood, from the University of Nottingham.
However, beginning this series of keynote events and helping to launch the Creating Publics project on Monday 26 March was Professor Lawrence Grossberg, one of the world’s pre-eminent cultural studies scholars who whos keynote was entitled ‘Practices of Knowledge in a Complex World: Experiments in collaboration and conversation’. You can watch it here.
Regular updates and ongoing discussion of this project can be accessed via the Creating Publics blog and details about all forthcoming events will be posted on the CCIG website.
Dr Nick Mahony
March 2012
Please contact Sarah Batt (a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk) if you’d like to be added to the project mailing list.
