Conclusion: Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics more

ELEVEN Conclusion: emergent publics Nick Mahony, Janet Newman and Clive Barnett The chapters in this collection demonstrate the multiplicity of ways in which the project of ‘rethinking’ the public is proceeding. It is not our purpose here to summarise them, but to highlight key issues this volume presents for future analysis of the processes of public formation. We do so by returning to the four themes set out in the introduction. First, we reiterate the paradoxes inherent in contemporary slippages between notions of the public, personal and political. Such slippages slide into the narratives of both decline and proliferation, with the ‘personal’ o ering new voicings and practices of publicness, while also opening up the personal to governmental interest and intervention. In the rst section below, ‘Personalising publics’, we assess how the contributions to this volume engage with these processes, challenging simple narratives of change by tracing ways in which these paradoxes are experienced, played out and negotiated in di erent sites. Such paradoxes, several chapters suggest, open up as well as close down the possibilities of agency and it is through such agency that the meaning of politics itself may be rewritten. Second, the volume o ers a contribution to contemporary debates about how publics are given voice, represented and spoken for; the deliberative ideals on which notions of a rational public sphere are based are recon gured by proliferation of new voices, registers and modes of political engagement arising from emergent publics. Understanding these changes in modes of public address is important in grappling with the seeming paradox that representations of publics are proliferating at the same time as forms of public engagement seem to be more and more individualised and personalised. The contributors trace ways in which such claims-making processes interact with, rather than displace, formal politics and representative practices. But we also challenge dominant approaches to understanding representation, tracing ways in which embodied practices of representation combine both expressive claims of authenticity with authoritative claims of agency, delegation and trusteeship.We discuss this further in the second section below, ‘Representing publics’. Third, in challenging the narrative of the decline of publics and publicness (in the face of neoliberal and individualising trends) while also being sceptical of narratives of proliferation (which express excitement about the new possibilities opened up by new media, the web, new global and local spaces of agency, environmental politics and other innovations), we have asserted the importance of thinking seriously about the role of practices of mediation in the formation of publics. If 163 Rethinking the public we have emphasised the idea that publics are formed through processes of address, articulation and summoning, this needs to be placed within an understanding that these processes are di erentiated by the modes, materialities, times and spaces through which publics are assembled as more or less eeting or durable, more or less extended or circumscribed, more or less open or selective. We develop this theme further in the third section below, ‘Mediating publics’. Finally, throughout the book we have emphasised the theme of emergence: the emergence of subjects of public action (such as those formed around global mobilisation); objects of public concern (from environmental concerns to community cohesion, national belonging and ‘good’ parenting); and mediums of public communication (including the web and ‘vox pop’ experiments by established media or reality TV shows). In the midst of excitement about the possibilities that new developments may o er, or dismay about how they may fragment and further dilute an already threatened domain of public identity and action, we o er an empirically grounded analysis of these processes.This enables us to trace ways in which the ‘new’ confronts existing institutions and sedimented cultural practices, and to highlight the historical and spatial speci cities that shape public formation and action.We develop this theme of processes of becoming in the fourth section, ‘Emergent publics’. Throughout we want to underline the value of this collection as research led. Our contributors have o ered di erent possible methodologies and analytical frameworks for researching publics and publicness, but we think that a researchled collection o ers something rather more signi cant. As we noted in the Introduction, work on publicness and publics tends to be long on normative claims and short on empirical substance. It is only through the detailed, theoretically informed empirical work of the kind presented in this volume that it becomes possible to properly frame the normative issues at stake in the analysis of public formation, not least by giving due credit to the ways in which di erent public values are enacted in practice. Personalising publics Feminist scholars have long challenged the notion of a clearly bounded public sphere in which the personal and the a ective have no place (see Chapter Six of this volume). The argument that ‘the personal is political’ has been subject to multiple reinterpretations, and chapters in this volume emphasise how, as Richenda Gambles sets out, notions of public, political, personal and private are deeply interwoven and produced and understood through each other.The reworking of these categories has a generative potential, o ering new spaces of mobilisation, for example, in relation to campaigns for government action on miscarriage (Chapter Three) or in neighbourhood organising for and with young people (Chapter Six). The inclusion of issues previously considered personal as proper issues for public dialogue and debate, and the recognition given to forms of expression that enable experiences and desires previously unacknowledged to be voiced, both open 164 Conclusion: emergent publics up the public sphere to marginalised and excluded actors (Young, 1990; Lister, 2003).These reorientations challenge the idealised norms inscribed in democratic institutions in many nation states, especially norms of rational deliberation and norms of representation (Phillips, 1993; Mansbridge, 2003). Such issues have been taken up and their analysis extended in this volume. Richenda Gambles’ (Chapter Three) analysis of the web as a site of public, private, personal and political identities and encounters challenges the notion of the public domain as a sphere of rational deliberation among public actors, while also highlighting the ongoing signi cance of formal, representative politics. In Chapter Six, Eleanor Jupp engages critically with feminist literature on ‘liminality’ in order to theorise the ambiguously public and personal spaces of ‘community’ activism, while in Chapter Two, Nick Mahony engages with the valorisation of lay expertise and knowledge, linked to the turn to more populist forms of discourse as personal voices are elicited by both governmental actors and media organisations. But he also highlights the overlaying of new voices and forms of expression with older formations of the public. In Chapter Four, Scott Rodgers addresses the place of ‘new’ media that apparently blur the distinction between the ‘mass’ and the ‘personal’. Rather than a turn from the deliberative to the a ective, we have shown the importance of engaging with how these are overlaid on and slide into each other in particular sites, and how this shifts the terrains and practices of ‘politics’. The valorisation of ‘the personal’ throws into relief the ambivalent relationship between feminist and identity-based challenges to traditional notions of the public realm and the increasing governmental focus on personal lives and personal responsibility. Feminist claims and social movement activity have undoubtedly opened up new domains and sites of governmental activity concerned with personal lives – that is the objective of a great deal of this sort of public action. This leads to the concern that the institutionalisation of feminist politics as state policy, for example, can slide uneasily into neoliberal rationalities of governance (Fraser, 2009; Newman, 2009; Newman and Tonkens, forthcoming). Many governments have become increasingly focused on the inculcation of responsible citizens and the ‘empowerment’ of communities, taking on tasks previously the province of state agencies.This relies on new pedagogies of personal lives that seek to constitute new forms of citizen-subject (Pykett, forthcoming). But at the same time, Jupp argues, governmental practices – at least in the UK – are becoming saturated with a concern for private and domestic lives. For example, parenting and becoming a parent has become a site of intense government intervention in the UK (Gambles), while government programmes such as Sure Start ‘link community and neighbourhood development to spheres of family life and childcare’ (Jupp, Chapter Six, p 77). Interventions around young people in her study were often based around activities associated with the domestic or private sphere such as cooking, gardening and small-scale arts and crafts – what she terms an ‘extension of family life’ into the wider public realm. However, she also demonstrates the signi cance of the ‘contact zones’ in which personal resources are mobilised for 165 Rethinking the public public projects, and demonstrates the ambiguous ‘public’ potential of the liminal spaces in which public, private and personal are entangled. Chapters Four, Six and Seven all show how new governmentalities of the self are mediated through particular technologies (the web, community governance and schooling). These chapters highlight the ambiguity of new governmental practices that supposedly pursue a public interest – for example, in Chapter Seven, Jessica Pykett asks whether the introduction of personalisation strategies in schools signals a retreat from the notions of schools as public places that have a role in addressing spatially speci c structural inequalities. In Chapter Three, Richenda Gambles shows how web-based mediations bring personal issues into the public/political domain, but also how the anonymity o ered by the web can o er a means of being privately public. The web, she suggests, enables personal disclosure, but at the same time ‘promotes self-responsibility through an emphasis on personal empowerment and the therapeutic’ (p 37) – an approach that can ‘reprivatise’ issues and close o attention to wider socio-economic factors a ecting ‘personal’ experience. We are not, it seems, simply talking about how things previously public are becoming private, or vice versa, but about how the meanings of the terms themselves are being renegotiated. And the reworking of these understandings offers new spaces of mobilisation through governmental programmes of empowerment, training and development. These top-down governmental projects are, of course, shot through with contradictions and ironies. For example, Pykett identi es the paradox produced as the individualising logics inherent in ‘personalisation’ strategies in schooling in the UK coexist with a new focus on citizenship education as a means of producing what may be thought of as ‘public’ selves.These sorts of paradoxes need to be scrutinised in order to unfold the forms of contentious agency of which they are an index and the forms of proactive agency that they, more or less intentionally, help to facilitate. These analyses of personalised registers of public address and engagement generate a rst set of questions that may throw light on the normative evaluation of processes of public emergence: when does this process indicate a steady accommodation of new identities and forms of political practice; and when does the slippage between public, private and personal undermine the collective possibilities enshrined in the vocabularies of publicness? Representing publics One key task of ‘rethinking’ the public that has been widely acknowledged elsewhere is the multiple ways in which claims on behalf of the public or speci c publics are being voiced, that is, the public realm cannot be viewed as a domain in which a single entity is spoken to or spoken for through conventional representative channels. Theoretically, the concept of representation has been recon gured around understandings of contested claims-making (Spivak, 1988; Saward, 2006; Parkinson, 2009). Saward (2006) demonstrates the aesthetic features 166 Conclusion: emergent publics of formal processes of political representation: how elected and non-elected representatives draw on symbolic practices to constitute, rather than re ect, their constituencies.Young (1990) and Phillips (1993) have highlighted the symbolic role of embodied actors whose presence in formal decision-making forums has been limited through exclusionary practices. An understanding representation as a performative process (Barnett, 2003) draws into view the importance of nondiscursive modes of representation in processes of public address and assemblage. Our contributors have highlighted something of this proliferation of claimsmaking practices through which publics emerge. Chapters Two, Five, Nine and Ten have traced representative claims articulated by social and political movements. Chapters Six and Seven show actors such as community workers and teachers speaking on behalf of young people at the same time that young people are encouraged and ‘empowered’ to speak for themselves. Chapters Four and Five show the signi cance of print cultures in projecting urban publics to themselves and beyond, and emphasise the importance of the ways in which textual artefacts are enacted in situated practices. We have shown the signi cance that abstract gures or non-human gures can play in articulating claims of public legitimacy: in Chapter Eight, Liza Gri n traces the slippery role of sh in complex processes of negotiation around access to, and potential depletion of, sheries as a global commons. She shows how notions of the public interest are brought into being through governance arrangements that speak to di erently imagined publics, and how di erent representations of publics are summoned up by di erent stakeholders, from ‘vulnerable shing communities’ to environmental campaigning groups. Some of these speak on behalf of a wider concept of civil society that includes unborn populations, and each mobilises sh themselves as actants. In Chapter Nine, Clive Gabay focuses on how the Millennium Development Goals serve as a kind of ‘immutable mobile’ drawn on by varied governmental and nongovernmental actors in assembling transnational networks of policy and activist action. But he also shows how the naming of publics is itself a political act that can prematurely close down other possible becomings. The chapters also highlight the signi cance of governmental practices of representation, promulgating images of desired public subjects, from good parents (Chapter Three) to good citizens (Chapter Seven) and responsible communities (Chapter Six). But they also demonstrate the ways in which governmental practices shape the possibilities and practices of claims making. Mahony’s analysis of a participative budgeting exercise and Jupp’s ethnography of community practices both demonstrate the increasing signi cance of the local as a site of governance and contention in the UK. Pykett shows how pupils may be able to make claims within the classroom in the context of citizenship classes, but this may be subordinated to other governmental processes that close down the idea of pupils as members of a collective entity. This is the key issue in reframing of the concept of representation (as a process of claims making) as central to process of public formation. Any representation, any claim, cannot guarantee its own ‘felicity conditions’ – it is just as likely to 167 Rethinking the public generate dissent, argument, refusal and counter-representations. So, for example, Gambles shows how Mumsnet claims to represent the interest of mothers to government while also representing exemplary practices of mothering to other mothers. It forms a kind of clearing house for developing, disseminating and re ning representations of mothering, but emerges as a space of contention in which lay voices and personal experiences compete with various professional perspectives in ongoing disputes about what counts as good mothering. In Chapter Ten, Simon Hutta shows how the failures of representative processes to speak for a particular public in Brazil produced claims for autonomy; in the process, an emergent public itself had to engage in the work of alliance building to be able to legitimately engage with more formal political processes. What he calls ‘heterogeneous processes of political world making’ – of rational deliberation, a ective bonding and disruptive confrontation, of dissidence and party organising – are combined in this movement to generate various forms of e ective representation. And in Chapter Five, Gurpreet Bhasin shows how the relationship between colonial authorities and colonial subjects in India was worked through competing representations in the proper place of ‘Indians’ in public space, representations that circulated in both public cultures and in private communications. Colonial authorities made claims about the colonised through a set of representative practices positioning the colonised as potentially disruptive of public order. But she also shows how colonised subjects spoke back in struggles to represent themselves, by generating innovative styles of public communication in urban space, or by projecting representations of pan-Islamic publics through transnational print cultures. The chapters as a whole suggest that processes of representation are dynamic and re exive; those represented may take up the positions o ered to them but may then speak back, seeking to represent themselves through counter-claims to autonomy, authenticity or legitimacy. But they also raise a normative set of questions. How, and in what ways, might claims-making practices ‘ x’ an emergent public by assembling or aligning it with existing institutions and practices, or indeed, in Gabay’s terms, simply by naming it as a collective entity? How might material objects and non-human actants – whether these are discursive gures or material media – gure in representative claims, and with what consequences? Gri n’s analysis suggests that where publics are indeterminate and rarely visible, we should be extra cautious about claims to protect the ‘common good’. It also suggests the need to ask, when issues of the ‘commons’ are at stake, what particular interests are mobilised, who or what is being excluded in accounts of problems and how far ‘publics’ respond to interpellations inscribed in public governance discourse. Such questions point us towards our third theme, the importance of understanding the processes of mediation through which publics are formed. 168 Conclusion: emergent publics Mediating publics The emphasis on emergence and becoming that we have emphasised in this volume is not meant to suggest that publics have no background, no rootedness in given con gurations of social relations, material infrastructures or institutional arrangements. Quite the reverse; the idea that publics emerge around objects and issues of concern implies precisely that cultural sedimentations, governmental practices and institutional legacies shape the possibilities of emergence and de ect, incorporate or suppress new forms of publicness. It is this relationship between the given and the emergent that brings into view the importance of attending to the mediating practices through which some issues, and not others, are made into objects of public action through the agency of particular subjects and in particular registers. One thing the chapters in this volume do is challenge the image in much discussion of the public realm of the media as a mere medium, by placing media practices into the contexts of situated public action. Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five take us beyond a binary conception of ‘new’ and ‘old’ media, challenging any excitement about the potential of new communication technologies to revolutionise public communication and action. And across the volume as a whole, the contributors o er an expansive conception of mediation that goes beyond attention to ‘the media’, old or new. Chapters Three, Six and Seven illustrate how processes of mediation stretch across what is normally understood as a public–personal or public–private boundary. Several chapters suggest the signi cance of institutional and professional practices that mediate emergent forms of publicness. Chapter Four traces the ways in which new media practices and technologies enter into so-called old media organisations, focusing on the work of editors – work that is understood both as a set of rules, routines and shared sense of purpose, and as a set of material arrangements of bodies, object and technologies; Chapter Eight demonstrates how ‘the public interest’ is mediated by governmental institutions in order to maintain the legitimacy they require to govern; and Chapters Nine and Ten emphasise the mediating practices through which movement and campaigning networks extend themselves and seek to exert in uence on governmental and corporate actors. As with the processes of representative claims making discussed earlier, processes of mediation bring into view the di erent forms of power that are at stake in the formation of publics. But while issues of representation give rise to questions about power with reference to issues of authenticity, authority and legitimacy, issues of mediation disclose other modes of power to be at work. They suggest more anonymous modes of power, such as the power of material technologies to con gure particular possibilities of action and lines of sight while occluding others, or the power provided by particular discursive gures or speci c technologies of reaching out across time and space and assembling extensive publics. There is, then, what Mahony terms a ‘politics of mediation’ embedded in the practices by which new and old formations of the public are assembled through institutional, 169 Rethinking the public organisational, discursive, professional, material and technological assemblages. Understanding this type of politics requires shifting attention away from static contrasts of publics and markets towards understanding processes of performing publicity and enacting publicness.The sense of the unanticipated powers exercised through processes of mediation, and of the more-than-intentional e ects of particular assemblages, throws us forward to our nal theme of thinking about the emergence of public forms. Emergent publics A recurring theme running through the book has been a focus on emergent publics – on the processes, practices and events through which publics are made, summoned, sustained and contested.The emphasis on emergence was the focus of a research seminar series funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and directed by the editors that ran through 2008–09, and around which the group of early career scholars who have contributed to this volume was formed. The theme of ‘emergence’ has diverse sources and is going through one of its regular periods of revived interest, informed by Deleuzian-Spinozan readings of ‘emergent causality’ (Connolly, 2008) and picking up on discussions in the life sciences and philosophy of mind (Clayton and Davies, 2006). But our guiding sense of ‘emergent publics’ has slightly more prosaic references, taking its guide from Raymond Williams’ (1977) three-fold distinction between residual, dominant and emergent formations. The attraction of thinking with Williams’ sense of the emergent is that it is associated, in his own work, with a sensitivity to thinking about the newness of new forms as full of contingent potential, without slipping back into romanticism of the past or thoughtless celebration of novelty. It is in this spirit that the collective endeavour of rethinking the public collected together in this volume has been undertaken. This sense of emergence o ers several resources for research on public formations. First, it challenges the simple alternatives of decline or proliferation of publicness.The chapters here do not take as their starting point the idea of a singular public domain or set of institutions in retreat in the face of neoliberal pressures and the corruption of public culture. Nor do they straightforwardly celebrate innovative forms as realising the classic promise of the public sphere. They focus instead on processes of becoming rather than on the decline of sedimented institutions and cultural practices (see Chapter Eight, in particular, on the play between assembling and convening publics, and the di erent acts of representation invoke by each). Chapter Two o ers case studies of three ‘innovative’ sites in which ‘new’ publics – including the supposedly politically disa ected – are mobilised for the purposes of participation. Chapter Three shows how the web can o er new possibilities of becoming a public, albeit that such a public is infected by ambiguous interweaving of public, private, personal and political identi cations and relationships, while Chapter Six highlights ‘community’ as a potential space of becoming. Chapter Five o ers a historical perspective on how print media contributed to the formation of an urban public 170 Conclusion: emergent publics in colonial Delhi, and on the emergence of a transnational Muslim public. Chapter Nine shows how global justice movements o er a means of inculcating ‘a notion of uni cation with distant others’ (p 136) or ‘a sense of global responsibility for issues that a ect most people who live on the planet’ (pp 136-7) and Chapter Ten suggests that a ‘desire for new a ective forms of subjectivity and sociability’ can open up the possibility of ‘a new worlding ... where di erent becomings conjoin’ (p 152). Second, the focus on emergence is meant to reposition the emphasis on multiplicity and plurality in any attempt to ‘rethink’ the public. For at least two decades, a feature of debates around publics – public space, the public sphere, public services – has been a concern with transcending overly unitary, singular understandings of the public that atten out di erence and erase multiplicity (Duggan, 2003; Cooper, 2004). However, incorporating notions of di erence and multiplicity proves di cult, in theory and practice, without seeming to undermine the sense of collective, shared purpose from which the topic of the public derives its normative force in this rst place. The proliferation of publics, in response to a politics of di erence, tends to be presented as a threat to the unity of purpose presumed to be necessary for e ective, legitimate public action; but this unity of purpose is always regarded suspiciously as more than likely based on exclusion, silencing or selectivity. Rather than trying to provide another theoretical solution to this conundrum, the contributors to this volume have focused empirically on the fact that publics are assembled and summoned in multiple ways, and indeed, how multiplicity and plurality is an important resource for the emergence of publicness, rather than a threat to public formations. For example, Hutta examines heterogeneous publics, but also focuses on the plural strategies of representation, advocacy and expression generated by these formations. Likewise, Gabay demonstrates the ways in which a complex transnational network is woven from multiple strands, and in turn uses this constitutive multiplicity as a normative guide for developing a critique of how this particular formation weaves together its di erent strands. The emphasis in this volume, then, has been on bracketing the question of what the place of di erence should be in public life in favour of exploring empirically the di erence that multiplicity and pluralism make in practice to how publics are formed and function. In focusing on processes of emergence, our contributors have been informed by the initial theoretical framing presented in the Introduction – of the entangled emergence of public subjects, the emergent objects of public concern and emergent processes of public mediation. These are not distinct categories, and each chapter has worked across each of these aspects. The focus on emergence calls for theoretical approaches that enable an understanding of processes, practices and performances of publicness. In this enterprise, our contributors have engaged with the work of various writers, including John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Michael Warner, Raymond Williams and Iris Marion Young. Theoretical resources drawn from feminist, gay and lesbian, post-colonial and queer traditions have been particularly important in providing 171 Rethinking the public ways of working through the challenge of thinking about the emergence of new forms of publicness in non-reductive ways. Such theoretical engagements have opened up analyses of the multiple ways in which publicness is practised or performed; the di erent a ective and normative rationalities within which publics are constituted; the proliferating forms of mediation that shape the conditions of possibility for becoming publics; and the governmental processes that open up and close down spaces of emergence. Conclusion The contributions to this volume have challenged normative claims – optimistic and pessimistic – about how the public has changed, its sensibilities shifted and its modes of performance and thus capacity for political engagement transformed. But at the same time they have been cautious about the political possibilities o ered by new cultural and social formations, new communicative technologies and new spatial imaginaries of public identity and action.The focus has been on identifying tensions, paradoxes and possibilities, and how these are contained, resolved or displaced. Many of our contributors have been inspired to engage in their studies precisely because of political and personal commitments to understanding these issues. Our focus on emergence ows from such starting points on the part of contributors and editors. As such, we have attempted to capture something of the multiplicity of new subjects, objects and mediums of publicness in ways that emphasise potentials without lapsing into naïve celebration of novelty. Tracing the emergence of subjects, objects and media of publicness may not satisfy the demand for clear-cut normative standards by which to judge whether publics are on the wane or are entering a new age of proliferation. There is no doubt that the early 21st century has seen a marked shift to modes of public life shaped by anxiety, fear and insecurity (Berlant, 2008; Barnett, 2009). In response to this emergent, fear-full rationality of publicness, we certainly need analytical tools and conceptual resources to understand the processes that help to form public concern around certain objects, through particular media, and appealing to speci c constituencies and registers of engagement. But these tools need to be rooted in careful study of how public formation happens and why. The politics of publicness coalesces around the combination of practices of representation, material attachment and identi cation that are mobilised in these processes of formation. As we noted earlier, ‘emergence’ is a concept in vogue in the critical social sciences and humanities at the moment – and it is often assumed that ‘emergence’ as such carries normative value, that the appearance of the ‘new’ and the ‘unanticipated’ automatically quali es as politically desirable and publicly valuable.The chapters in this book have departed from the voguish understanding of process that denies the signi cance of stubborn, sticky attachment to things and identities; of performance that ignores the importance of scripting and staging; and of ow that disregards the durability and potentials of territory. They have shown how important existing formations, sedimented identities and inherited 172 Conclusion: emergent publics resources are in enabling the emergence of new formations. The chapters have, therefore, underscored the signi cance of the cultural and material forces that shape the formation of publics and practices of publicness in speci c places at speci c times. This is why the focus on empirical work has been so signi cant for this project – not only do we want to ‘rethink’ the public, to invent wholly novel understandings, but also to demonstrate the value of combining conceptual and empirical analysis in the task of developing new ways of approaching what have often become stale, predictable debates and evaluations. References Barnett, C. (2003) Culture and democracy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University. Barnett, C. (2009) ‘Violence and publicity: constructions of political responsibility after 9/11’, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 12(3), pp 353-75. Berlant, L. (2008) ‘Thinking about feeling historical’, Emotion, Space and Society, 1(1), pp 4-9. Clayton, P. and Davies, P. (eds) (2006) The re-emergence of emergence:The emergentist hypothesis from science to religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connolly,W. (2008) Capitalism and Christianity,American style, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cooper, D. (2004) Challenging diversity: Rethinking equality and the value of di erence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duggan, L. (2003) The twilight of equality: Neoliberalism, cultural politics and the attack on democracy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fraser, N. (2009) ‘Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history’, New Left Review, 56, pp 97-117. Lister, R. (2003) Citizenship: Feminist perspectives, London: Palgrave. Mansbridge, J. (2003) ‘Rethinking representation’, American Political Science Review, 97(4), pp 515-28. Newman, J. (2009) ‘Working the spaces of governance’, Paper presented to Canadian Association of Anthropology conference,Vancouver, July. Newman, J. and Tonkens, E. (forthcoming) Active citizenship and the transformation of social welfare, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Parkinson, J. (2009) ‘Symbolic representation in public space: capital cities, presence and memory’, Representation, 45(1), pp 1-14. Phillips, A. 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