If you’d like a take on the relationship between contemporary crises and publics have a look this short piece on ‘Public crises, public futures‘ that’s just been published on OpenDemocracy. It’s co-authored by me and John Clarke, who is co-director of CCIG’s Publics Research Programme, adapted from a short presentation we gave at the Oecumene conference a couple of weeks ago. Feedback welcome as we are now trying to work on a longer version of this. Plus I’m also trying to think about how this relates to the Creating Publics agenda (outlined below).
Creating Publics
public engagement, social science and the politics of public mediation
Oecumene and engaging with research as media
Just back from an exhilarating two-days at the ‘Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship’ conference, hosted by the Oecumene research project, at the Open University. I saw first hand at this event how research can work as a powerful medium for organizing forms of collective sociability. I say organizing here, because this was an occasion where well over 200 people convened face-to-face (from around the world) to address a set of emerging issues related to the study and practice of citizenship. It was a wonderfully choreographed performance in its own right. A packed programme of keynotes, coffee breaks, introductions, corridors, walkways, lunches and receptions were insightfully planned and staged so as to bring this gathering to life in an incredibly free-flowing and lively way. This was also helped along of course by the highly committed group of people who were in attendance.
This experience has encouraged me to further consider the relationship between the process of generating new forms of conceptual apparatus and the process of mediating these conceptual apparatus through forms of (not always public) performance. In this context, I was less led to dwell on how forms of knowledge production are being – or could be – re-distributed (spatially) or in terms of resources. The two-days instead made me start to think more about how different kinds of concept building processes and performances of research work with time.
I had come to view Oecumene as a research project working, first and foremost, in a long-term, even a generational (temporal) register. This may have been partly because, as a project and through the research and individual and collective thinking it supports, Oecumene is – in important ways – up-ending, re-working and renewing understandings of citizenship that have dominated occidental political theory for generations. By witnessing at this conference just some of the sheer quantity and heterogeneity of ways that this very wide ranging project is nourishing forms of ‘live’ research across multiple contexts of contemporary practice, I now begin to see more clearly how this research process is nevertheless also engaging with/in time in a array of other ways – simultaneously. As the conference illuminated, the concept of citizenship is being reworked – directly or less directly – through a dazzling range of projects and processes in a spectrum of contexts of practice, contexts of thinking and contexts of public as well as more academic debate.
The Creating Publics project looks forward to engaging with members of the Oecumene team to discuss these issues in more detail in the months ahead. The Creating Publics project will certainly need to do this if it is to develop a clearer perspective on how social science research might be performed as a time-based media that can support processes of public creation. The Highrise project, showcased at this conference, illustrates – in wonderfully concrete as well as imaginative and suggestive ways – some of the possibilities of online interactive media for social research and public creation. It also presents a robust challenge to instrumental and linear engagement agendas.
However, as Shannon Jackson cautions:
“Our evaluations of work depend not only upon critical histories but also on disciplinary perceptual habits that can make for drastically different understandings of what we are in fact encountering. Perceptions of stasis and durationality, passivity and activity, stillness and action, might well be in the eye (and body) of the beholder. I would wager that the socio-political sense of what we are encountering will differ as well.” (p.4, ‘Social Works: performing art, supporting publics’ (2011) Routledge)
Amongst the many issues in play here therefore, once research begins to be engaged with as a public media, are those of: how ‘researchers’ might be able to tune the perceptual as well as the performative apparatus they use to interact, communicate and publicise; how to craft (and choose between) ways of experimenting publicly in/with time; how ‘new’ concepts and forms of practice emerge in different ways, in different contexts, over and through time through processes of social research; and, how research can mediate relationships between publicity, new ways of thinking and the creation of new publics. There are lots of issues to unpick and talk through here related to the public iterability of social research, many of which I’m hoping the Creating Publics project can continue to work on. Thankfully, besides the work showcased at the Oecumene conference, there’s also lot’s more going on in this area (see for example the forthcoming ‘i-docs’ symposium in Bristol which will be ‘interrogating the field of interactive doumentary’ and Mandy Rose’s excellent Collab Docs blog for more).
Lawrence Grossberg and the politics of collaboration
Here is the title plus a short outline of the topic Lawrence Grossberg will be addressing when he delivers a keynote lecture as part of the launch event for the Creating Publics project on 26 March at the Open University:
Practices of Knowledge in a Complex World: Experiments in collaboration and conversation
While there are many conversations about the university under attack, I want to begin with the uncertainties of knowledge itself—the result in part of attacks from both the left and the right, but more importantly, from the very practices that worked so well for the past century. Cultural studies, as I understand it, begins with a responsibility to its context, a responsibility expressed in its effort to produce the best knowledge possible. But that means transforming the material practices and social relations of intellectual labor, experimenting in new collaborations, imagining new conversations and rearticulating the university as an institution.
Debate about how academic labour needs to be, or is being, redistributed and about how research practices are being, or need to be, reconfigured is certainly very lively at the moment. Yesterday there was a post on the LSE’s Impact blog by the chemist Matthew Todd who – following a slightly earlier intervention by a Cambridge mathematician – publicly announced he is joining a growing list of academics who are boycotting Elsevier journals (there appears to be over 3000 in all, with over 200 being social scientists). The boycott apparently entails not refereeing, not submitting articles and not editing.
This action is part of a broader and fast-developing movement for more publicly accessible or open access research. This movement is provoking a proliferation of contemporary experimentation with the form of academic writing (see, for example, the ‘liquid book’). It is also generating considerable debate about the need for innovation in social science research methods (for a fascinating discussion of this which also draws on the experience of developing and testing-out two new technologically mediated approaches to research practice, see Noortje Maares’s 2011 piece ‘Re-distributing methods: digital research as participatory research‘). See also what looks like a wonderful year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness and open media being run by Coventry University’s School of Art and Design and its Department of Media and Communication.
One of the articles Maares draws on in her 2011 discussion is a 2007 piece called ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ in which Mike Savage and Roger Burrow’s brilliantly set up a particular kind of debate about what the role of ‘the sociologist’ should be in an era of proliferating social data. Savage and Burrow’s 2007 article calls on researchers to renew the sociological project of (re)describing and (re)classifying the social world.
The crisis narrative that Savage and Burrow’s tactically deploy in their piece does feel like it’s been overwhelmed by subsequent ‘crises’. Added to this, hardly a day now goes by without the non-academic media announcing a new ‘mash-up’, ‘re-mix’ or ‘open-source’ practice of some sort or other – a great many of which still seem to be ripe for research. In the intervening period there has also been more academic work that specifically addresses the question of how ‘publics’ emerge in settings of ‘new media’ practice (see, for example, the work of anthropologist Chris Kelty, especially his book ‘Two Bits’ where he develops the idea of ‘recursive publics’ of free software).
Despite these reservations, I find many of the main arguments of Savage’s and Burrow’s (2007) article both stimulating and motivating. I do nevertheless find the call to arms this piece makes around the project of (re)description and (re)classification peculiarly conservative (and even strangely realist). Given all that’s going on, isn’t the project of getting out there, observing, interacting and find ways of intervening in emerging practices of mediation just as important, if not more important? The agenda I find more promising is therefore one built around: experimenting with forms and modes of public collaboration; prototyping and testing-out research processes that redistribute creative and analytical labour; and, one that prioritises the process of patiently mapping, analysing, collectively discussing, probing and interjecting in the politics of the heterogenous forms of public mediation currently emerging across and in-between various contexts of contemporary practice.
This is why I’m so happy that Lawrence Grossberg is visiting on 26th March to delve further into some of these tricky issues and emerging forms of mediated politics. Through the various activities it will be undertaking in the months ahead, this is of course precisely what the Creating Publics project is also aiming to do.
Engagement as splitting
Something else that Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes has provoked me to think more about is the way that certain kinds of participatory experiments can sometimes elicit a sense of affective and cognitive overload. This tactic was employed in many of the participatory experiments staged by Allan Kaprow and others who pioneered ‘happenings’ in the 1960’s. Rodenbeck shows how these artists – by drawing on and creatively recombining emerging vangardist modes of theatre, music and film as well as painterly practices – did this to generate a kind of critique of and pre-figure a kind of alternative to what they saw as being offered by the prevailing cultural, technological and political institutions and practices of the day.
The artistic contribution of ‘happenings’ – as a mode of participatory engagement – lies, at least in part, in the way they playfully (re)animate and immerse their viewers in, what Rodenbeck correctly sees as the fundamentally mediated, contingent and split forms of subjectivity that are produced and, in different ways, inhabited by people in industrialised (and post-industrialised) everyday life.
Another disjunction comes into view here: this time between, on the one hand, the commonplace idea that public engagement is about refining, communicating and thereby rendering accessible a clear and consistent message or designing effective formats and technologies of participation so as to allow segments of the public with different interests and aspirations to be targeted and engaged. And, on the other hand, the idea that public engagement might offer people the possibility of publicly re-enacting the experience of being pushed and pulled in different ways. Experiences that could also provide openings to engage, individually and collectively, with such everyday splitting processes, how they work, their ambiguous effects and what – if anything at all – can be done about them. This might well sound like a less ‘practical’ reading of what public engagement might potentially entail, but given the many difficulties of successfully realizing the more commonplace and rather more instrumental ideal, it is one I’m looking forward to continuing to consider as this project unfolds.
Radical Prototypes
Amongst the many tensions in play in forms of public engagement, there is one that is preoccupying me more than most. There are different formulations, but it can be understood as the tension between the goal of communicating a highly-considered and rigorously researched analytical position, on the one hand, which often entails narrating a story of complexity; and, on the other hand, the aspiration to open-up, collaborate and experiment (with this connoting the inescapability of translation and reiteration and therefore also chance, improvisation, indeterminacy and a loss of control).
This tension can be negotiated in various ways, depending on the setting. The US art historian Judith F. Rodenbeck offers an insight into this in her wonderfully inspiring new book ‘Radical Prototypes’, which presents a fascinating revisionist history of the invention of ‘happenings’ in the American artworld of the 1950’s & 1960’s.
Reflecting on the subject positions offered by different forms of practice emerging at the time, Rodenbeck draws what I think may be a more widely applicable distinction between three types of participatory engagement. I’ll recount them very briefly here. Firstly, participation is sometimes used to describe a kind of immersive physiological engagement where the work is in some sense completed by the experience of the viewer. Secondly, participation can entail viewers being presented with the possibility of navigating through a limited range of options – each with a determinate outcome. Though it may involve active decision-making by the viewer, Rodenbeck observes, that navigation doesn’t change the form of the artwork. Participation, thirdly, can also involve conscious decision-making and action-taking. This can reconfigure the structure of the artwork. Here Rodenbeck says that the artists embrace of chance can extend to the received form of the work itself.
Translating this back into debates about public engagement with social science research seems to help open up a set of questions that practitioners in these different domains can each face: about the parameters of their work, once it begins to be undertaken as a form of public practice; about authorship and control; about the elicitation and channeling of subjectivity; and, about the activation, manipulation and mediation of public behavior.
Radical Prototypes, for Rodenbeck, are works which, amongst other things, are: always ‘in movement’; have their public iterability as a ‘structuring problematic’; and continuously blur boundaries between (art) work and (everyday) life.
There is a disjunction which is pretty stark here between how public engagement is being conceptualized and presented to researchers’ by funders and others and how it can begin to look once it is explored close-up, through art historical or social scientific spectacles.
As someone investigating what is at stake in public engagement, I continue to try to sensitize myself to this topic in different ways. Whether this is by translating recent work on how contemporary publics are constituted and performed, in order to trace how research processes might – intentionally or not – create publics. By reviewing the ‘grey’ and more established academic literature on this topic. Or by reading about the history of participatory art practices, to learn more about how public engagement can open up (and close-down) possibilities for forms of public (collective) creativity.
Creating Publics for Enduring Love
Managed to attend part of the public launch yesterday of a superb new ESRC funded Open University research project called Enduring Love, which will be investigating how couple relationships are sustained in the 21st Century. Enduring Love will also be one of the two ‘live’ CCIG-based research projects I’ll be collaborating with in the months ahead to in order to generate Creating Publics ‘pilots’. The pilots will support the pre-existing public engagement plans and activities of these projects but will also be the platforms upon which some of the ideas that drive the Creating Publics project can be tested-out, debated and developed.
Attending the launch today provoked me to reflect upon how this event went about constituting and launching the Enduring Love project as a public entity. There is an established repertoire that these events tend to follow: the choice of venue (in this case it was The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Conference Rooms, in the old County Hall, opposite Parliament); the guest list (representatives from relevant Third Sector Organisation’s, office’s of Government and academics from other universities); the specially prepared folders and handouts; and, the free refreshments. On this occasion, the programme of formal presentations began with contributions from the team of researchers’ leading this project; a senior official from the Department for Education then followed with a talk about out how the current government is going about supporting couple relationships through its emerging policy agenda; the journalist and author Kate Figes then, concisely and sometimes movingly, recounted some of the key insights from a book she’s recently written on 21st Century British couples; and, concluding this formal part of the programme, were two presentations by university Professors who work on topics relevant to this research.
Each of the speakers enrolled into this launch event could be viewed as being a particular kind of public intermediary. By endorsing this new project these intermediaries connected this research endeavor to different forms of public office or recognized public role and even opened out the possibility of linking this new research activity to the publics that they putatively work to represent. Subtly different modes of public address, vocabulary and public register were on show in the different presentations, with each serving to modulate and translate the project in curious ways. One of the assumptions in play here seems to be that intermediaries of this kind will continue this kind of translation and publicity work in other ways and in other places as a project like this progresses.
In parallel to this event, Enduring Love was also launched online yesterday with a set of project-related podcasts. It even got a mention in The Sun newspaper’s ‘Dear Deidre’ advice column. These forms of mediation serve to publicise this project in slightly less targeted but also, potentially, wider reaching ways. The Enduring Love team are also using these forms of mainstream media and web publicity as a means of recruiting research subjects – with each piece of media being linked to the project questionnaire - one of the tools being used to collect data for this project.
These are a few of the ways that this project is beginning to constitute itself as a public entity. How making use of all these different channels of publicity and communication might help this project create a public or publics is nevertheless not yet clear. But it is early days and I will continue to post about this particular public creation process as I get more involved.
However, since one idea driving this research is that a more informed public debate is needed about our intimate lives, amongst other things, I’m looking forward to contributing to the process of designing how a public debate might be convened around a topic like this. One dimension of this challenge, it seems, will be dealing with how issues of intimacy, anonymity, privacy and publicness can be negotiated, in a combination of on and offline settings.
CFP: Creating Publics; Creating Democracies
In collaboration with Sue Pell of Goldsmiths College’s Centre for Global Media and Democracy and Liza Griffin of University of Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Democracy, John Clarke, Clive Barnett and me (in our role as members of CCIG’s Publics Research Programme) are helping organise a two-day workshop on the theme of ‘Creating Publics; Creating Democracies’, to be held in Central London on June 18-19 2012. The Creating Publics project has emerged in part through the on-going collective work of CCIG’s Publics Research Programme, of which I’m still a member. See here for details of other members, past events, activities and publications generated by this research group. Further details about this workshop and call for papers available here.
2012 Creating Publics Keynote Lecture Series
Looking forward to this: on 26 March 2012 not only will we be publicly launching the Creating Publics project but this event will also feature the first of a series of three keynote lectures by leading social scientists. I am delighted to announce that the first of these lectures will be delivered by Larry Grossberg (University of North Carolina, editor of the journal Cultural Studies) on 26 March; Rachel Pain (University of Durham, Co-director Centre for Social Justice and Community Action) will deliver the second lecture on 16 May; and, the third features John Holmwood (University of Nottingham and Campaign for the Public University) on 28 June. Each of these public events will offer a different perspective on what is at stake in the drive for publicly engaging social science research. As a whole, the series will therefore be an opportunity to reflect collectively on the contemporary and possible future relationship between social science research and public life. More details soon.
