ESRC Research Seminar Series: Emergent Publics

Organisers

Clive Barnett, Geography and CCIG, Faculty of Social Sciences

Janet Newman, Social Policy and CCIG, Faculty of Social Sciences

Nick Mahony, CCIG, Faculty of Social Sciences

Introduction

This two-year Research Seminar Series, running from the start of 2008 to end 2009, challenges assumptions about the decline of the public sphere in the face of 'neo-liberal' challenges to public institutions, processes of individualization and transformations of collective solidarities. It reorients analysis towards understanding the development of new practices, sites and definitions of publicness.

The Seminar Series is one activity of the Publics Research Programme in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) at the OU. One output of the Series, coordinated by the Public Research Programme, is an edited collection, Rethinking the Public. You can read the end of project report on this Series.

The value of publicness has come to the fore because of a number of processes:

The modernisation of welfare states and changing forms of governance.
The development of new forms of transnational public action provoked by environmental, human rights, and trade justice movements.
New forms of public action enabled by new communication and information technologies.
New problematizations of risk and security.

These new practical and institutional developments have outstripped the conceptual, empirical and normative resources for explaining and evaluating innovative new modes of public action. Evaluations of new publics remain caught between pessimistic discourses of decline and optimistic discourses of originality. The pessimistic perspective discerns consumerism, individualism, marketization, and privatization as leading inevitably to disengagement and withering of public life. The optimistic perspective sees new technologies as panaceas for past injustices and exclusions.

The framing of debate about publics and publicness within these two discourses has produced an impasse that blocks conceptual, empirical and normative analysis. To overcome this impasse, this Research Seminar Series will focus attention on the emergent qualities of publics and new criteria of publicness.

There are three distinct but overlapping dimensions to these processes of emergence:

The emergence of new objects of public action. The concerns over which public debate and decisive action are demanded, and around which communities of affected interest are formed, have multiplied. For example, the proliferation of environmental concerns transforms the most mundane of everyday
The emergence of new subjects of public action. The identities around which collective, participatory agency is mobilised have likewise been transformed. For example, the restructuring of welfare systems generates new forms of rights-based mobilisation by patients groups, while 'living wage' campaigns engage multiple identities around contingent, issue-specific campaigns of limited duration.
The emergence of new mediums of public action. The means through which issues emerge as public concerns, through which demands for attention are addressed, and through which action in response to these concerns is enabled have been reconfigured. For example, new communications technologies restructure the rhythms and norms of public media cultures, while the potential for markets to serve as mediums for public action is being explored by a variety of activist campaigns.

The Research Seminar Series addressed these issues by combining conceptual, empirical and normative inquiry. It brings together researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including public policy, human geography and urban studies, political theory, and cultural studies. And it brings academic researchers together with participants from a range of non-academic sectors, including central and local government, journalism, charities, and social movements.

Timetable

The Series will consist of 4 two-day Seminars. Below is a short summary of the details of each Seminar: