A critical social science will help inform and shape the wider debate around public engagement

Why does public engagement matter? Why should it matter and how can it be made to matter more? These are the questions Mark Carrigan and Nick Mahony explore in this LSE Impact of Social Sciences blogpost by looking at the context of contemporary higher education where technology, institutional pressure, and an increasing diversity of engagement initiatives are emerging, within academia and beyond.

Public crises, public futures

Co-authored with John Clarke and just published in latest issue of the journal Cultural Studies (Vol. 27, no. 6, 2013) this article begins to map out a novel approach to analysing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support.

If you’re unable to access this journal, there’s also a preprint PDF version available here.

Competing to be public

We know about the proliferating demands faced by higher education researchers to collaborate, co-produce and publicly engage; we also know these demands exist in tension with unprecedented pressures on researchers to compete. We know about the proliferation of engagement techniques and technologies of communication which are becoming ever more publicly accessible; and, we also know that theoretical understandings of ‘the public’ are becoming ever more diverse and divergent. What we perhaps know less about is the myriad of ways that engagers and those being engaged are being positioned in this complicated contemporary environment; and, the different ways engagers and those being engaged are currently working to negotiate positions in response.

More specifically, we still don’t yet know enough about how familiar and relatively established ways of understanding ‘the public’ and ‘public engagement’ are being unsettled and re-made in this context; or about the new forms of publicness that may be emerging as a result.

Public engagement, in this context, should perhaps be seen as being as much about the challenge of engaging collectively with the contradictions of the current moment, as it is a technical process of communication/mediation, in the more established sense. Maybe there is also a need to become less obsessed with generating clear public positions; and, with the associated idea that this might somehow miraculously work to inform or mobilize small or larger-scale public interest or support. The split forms of subjectivity and identification being produced, inhabited and negotiated by engagers and publics during this time of multiplying crises should perhaps be seen as the starting point for public conversations, rather than be seen as an obstacle that needs to be cleared away in advance.

There are reasons we may feel nostalgic about ‘the public’, ‘the public sector’ and even the ‘mass’ public relations techniques of thirty years ago. But there are also reasons why we need to give much wider consideration to other possible imaginaries, ways of being and mediating publics. Such alternatives ways of being public are already competing with more familiar repertoires in the contemporary conjuncture, with this adding to the atmosphere of crisis and contestation over contemporary concerns. We need to better understand how new divisions of public resources, public labour and more plural, less exclusive and more creative ways of being public are already competing with more established formats, formations and repertoires. We also need to know more about the new forms of public infrastructure that will be needed to support these emerging processes of public making and experimentation and how they are being used to prop up or publicly critique their development.

As competition over what it means to be public intensifies (against and in relation to intensifying marketization and proliferating crises), we therefore perhaps need to expect that the contradictions, tensions and forms of splitting that accompany these processes will also endure. I can’t see any sign that being public is going to be getting any easier any time soon.

John Holmwood: ‘Markets, Expertise and the Public University: A crisis in knowledge for democracy?’ 28 June, 14.00-16.00

The 3rd Creating Publics keynote lecture features Professor John Holmwood, Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham; co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University; and, the new President of the British Sociological Association. Here’s an outline of what Professor Holmwood is going to be addressing in his keynote:

“Mass higher education is a product of democracy and, largely, a product of the public university. Yet the expansion of higher education has also extended beyond the boundaries of national political communities to create opportunities for profit and prestige. Multinational knowledge corporations vie for market share with fee-greedy elite universities selling education as a positional good, with public higher education increasingly starved of funding. Prior to the emergence of mass higher education, there was widely regarded to be a crisis of democracy deriving from the complexity of public issues and the necessity of experts to advise governments. This was the context for John Dewey’s articulation of the idea of the ‘public’ and the role of the university in education for democracy. With the return of an aggressive neo-liberal agenda that seeks to replace politics with markets, and universities also subject to neo-liberal reforms that place consumer sovereignty at the heart of education and measure knowledge in terms of its ‘impact’, this lecture poses the question of whether we face a new crisis of democracy.”

The event takes place at the Open University on Thurs 28 June, here’s the programme:

14:00                Welcome and introduction: Jef Huysmans and Nick Mahony (CCIG)

14:10                 Keynote lecture: Professor John Holmwood (University of Nottingham)

15:00                Responses by John Clarke and Vron Ware (CCIG)

15:30                 Q & A and collective discussion

The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

The event will be webcast live (details to follow). Those viewing online will be able to post questions and comments, which will be relayed live to the event via this link.

Further details on the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance website, here.

2nd Creating Publics keynote lecture event: ‘Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together?’

For the 2nd Creating Publics keynote lecture event which takes place on 16 May 2012 we are delighted to welcome Rachel Pain, who is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham and who also co-directs the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action. Professor Pain’s agenda-setting research engages with topics including the theory and practice of participation, action research and the contemporary impact agenda.

Programme:

14:00  Welcome and introduction: Prof. Jef Huysmans and Dr. Nick Mahony, Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.

14.10  Keynote lecture: Professor Rachel Pain (University of Durham) “Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together?”

“The University is just one site where the idea of public good is under threat from marketisation and shallow audit rather than deep accountability. My starting point is alignment between Universities and a range of wider publics and organisations in the context of recession and austerity. Reflecting on different responses to the impact agenda, I suggest that the particular form of impact being measured is reproducing longer-standing power/knowledge hierarchies. I consider some alternative framings and practices of impact (with) publics.”

15.00  Response: Dr. Clive Barnett (CCIG, The Open University)  and Helen Arfvidsson (PhD researcher, CCIG, The Open University)

15.20  Q & A and collective discussion.

16:00  Drinks reception.

If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to join us in person at the Open University in Milton Keynes (to register please contact Sarah Batt – a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk) or get involved via the live webcast. A video recording of the first Creating Publics keynote lecture, featuring Professor Lawrence Grossberg on ‘Practices of knowledge in a complex world: experiments in conversation and collaboration’ is archived here.

For further information, please visit the CCIG website here.

Announcing 2nd Creating Publics keynote lecture – Prof. Rachel Pain on “Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together?”

“The University is just one site where the idea of public good is under threat from marketisation and shallow audit rather than deep accountability. My starting point is alignment between Universities and a range of wider publics and organisations in the context of recession and austerity. Reflecting on different responses to the impact agenda, I suggest that the particular form of impact being measured is reproducing longer-standing power/knowledge hierarchies. I consider some alternative framings and practices of impact (with) publics.”

Rachel Pain is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham and co-directs the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action. Professor Pain’s research engages with topics including the theory and practice of participation, action research and the contemporary impact agenda.

This keynote lecture event will take place on 16 May 2012. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to join us in person at the Open University in Milton Keynes or get involved via the live webcast. To register to attend in person, please email Sarah Batt (a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk). Programme details and web address for webcast to be announced soon.