The frontiers of participatory public engagement

Just published online in The European Journal of Cultural Studies ‘The frontiers of participatory public engagement’ is a new journal article co-authored by Nick Mahony and Hilde C Stephansen emerging from research undertaken under the auspices of the Creating Publics project. Here’s the abstract:

“Currently missing from critical literature on public engagement with academic research is a public-centric analysis of the wider contemporary context of developments in the field of public engagement and participation. Drawing on three differently useful strands of the existing theoretical literature on the public, this article compares a diverse sample of 100 participatory public engagement initiatives in order to first, analyse a selection of the myriad ways that the public is being constituted and supported across this contemporary field and second, identify what socio-cultural researchers might learn from these developments. Emerging from this research is a preliminary map of the field of public engagement and participation. This map highlights relationships and divergences that exist among diverse forms of practice and brings into clearer view a set of tensions between different contemporary approaches to public engagement and participation. Two ‘frontiers’ of participatory public engagement that socio-cultural researchers should attend are also identified. At the first, scholars need to be critical regarding the particular versions of the public that their preferred approach to engagement and participation supports and concerning how their specific identifications with the public relate to those being addressed across the wider field. At the second frontier, researchers need to consider the possibilities for political intervention that public engagement and participation practice could open out, both in the settings they are already working and also in the much broader, rapidly developing and increasingly complicated contemporary field of public engagement and participation that this article explores.”

Public memories, public knowledge? Movements, media and shifting formations of publicness

Thursday 7th November, 12.30-14.00
Room NAB 1.14, New Academic Building, London School of Economics

The Publics then, now and beyond network, which was founded at the Open University in June this year, will be kick-starting its 2013-14 ‘travelling seminar series’ with a seminar at the London School of Economics on Thursday 7th November.

The Publics, then now and beyond network is convened by Dr Nick Mahony and Dr Hilde C. Stephansen. It is supported by CCIG’s Publics programme, the Creating Publics project, and the Making Publics Across Time and Space project. The travelling seminar series is also supported by the Faculty of Social Science at the Open University. This seminar is hosted by Media@LSE in collaboration with The Open University and the Publics then, now and beyond network. It will also be part of the Media@LSE Research Dialogues series.

Chair/discussant: Nick Couldry (LSE)
Speakers:
Pollyanna Ruiz (LSE) ‘Memories, secrets and digital archives’
Hilde C. Stephansen (The Open University) ‘Global communication activism and shifting formations of publicness’

About the seminar

This seminar will explore key questions about the making of publics and publicness through the use of media and communications technologies by social movement activists. Focusing on the practices, infrastructures and forms of mediation through which publics are brought into being, it will examine the shifting formations and imaginaries that result from such processes. Moving beyond the more immediate effects of activists’ communication practices on the mobilisation and organisation of protest action, we will consider the potential of such practices to support publics that can facilitate longer-term processes of identity construction, memory formation and knowledge production, at different scales. Papers will explore the uneven and often contradictory dynamics surrounding activists’ communication practices, raising questions about the relationship between ‘mainstream’ and ‘counter’-publics, openness and secrecy, and politics of knowledge.

Memories, Secrets and Digital Archives

Pollyanna Ruiz

This paper will reflect upon these contradictory dynamics surrounding the use of digital archives and in doing so explore the relationship between the past and the present, the activist and the non-activist, the alternative and the mainstream. The digital archive appears to span the ruptures, continuities and discontinuities of contemporary protest by creating a mechanism through which the past is accumulated in the present in order to shape our experiences of the future. According to this view, open archives constitute a space in which contemporary protest movements can draw upon the experience of previous activists and equip themselves with the necessary skills to engage with the mainstream. However digital archives can also be understood as potentially problematic. Archives remove protest discourses from the secure realm of ‘dusty back numbers’, ‘forgotten publications’ and ‘oral interviews with aged political veterans’ (Downing, 2003, p.252) and places protest discourses within a transparent, open and centrally organised system. Consequently digital archives fix, frame and expose alternative ways of thinking which are fragile, untried and still evolving. Digital archives can therefore also be understood as compromising the very existence of counter publics free from the ‘supervision of dominant groups’ (Fraser, 1990, p. 66).
Global communication activism and shifting formations of publicness

Hilde C. Stephansen

This paper explores shifting formations of publicness and globality in the context of the World Forum of Free Media (WFFM) – a process, connected to the World Social Forum (WSF), which aims to support the formation of a global grassroots movement of communication activists. Through a combination of prefigurative politics, organising and campaigning, activists involved in the WFFM are working to achieve the conditions for more democratic public spheres – at local, national and transnational scales. The paper proposes that an emergent version of a decentred ‘global public’ – constituted through a myriad intersecting publics at different scales – is discernible in the WFFM’s efforts to bring together a diversity of actors and media forms under the umbrella term ‘free media’. Such a version of a ‘global public’ contrasts with more liberal – and increasingly institutionalised – notions of publicness implicit in conceptions of the WSF as ‘open space’ or ‘global civil society’. The paper concludes by proposing an understanding of ‘free media’ as central actors in a broader project concerned with ‘cognitive justice’ (Santos) and as informed by an emergent logic of epistemic plurality.

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.

19 Feb. 2013 ‘Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together?’ re-scheduled Creating Publics Keynote lecture featuring Prof. Rachel Pain, Uni. of Durham.

Outline of lecture:

“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.”

Tuesday, 19 February 2013, 14:00 – 16:00

Michael Young Building, Room 1&2, Ground Floor, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA.

More details of programme and how to register to be announced soon.

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.

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.