Mediating the Publics of Public Participation Experiments more

From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. Chapter 2 Mediating the publics of public participation experiments Nick Mahony On 19 October 2005, 250 local residents gathered in a sports hall in Harrow, North London, to discuss public policy and how their Council’s municipal budget should be spent. Earlier the same year, the commercial television company ITV broadcast a reality television event that set out to find an ‘ordinary’ member of the UK public to stand for Parliament in the 2005 General Election; at the peak of its popularity, this week-long, week-night serial attracted an audience of over a million people. In May 2006 approximately 20,000 activists gathered for four days and nights in Athens, Greece, for the 4th European Social Forum. For this event participants gathered for a myriad of political workshops, seminars and cultural events and rallied against ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation and worked to cultivate the generation of alternatives. These three large-scale public projects each claimed that pre-existing forms of politics were in crisis. Each stressed the urgency of testing and demonstrating ‘new’ highly-participative forms, forms promoted and organised as political experiments. Practices that work to engage and involve publics as participants in politics are not in themselves novel. However, with the legitimacy and authority of voting, elections and institutional politics on the wane (Mair 2006; Stoker 2006; Hay 2007) it is becoming increasingly important to research new sites and ways of mobilising people as political actors – especially if contemporary transformations in politics and forms of public action are to be understood and engaged with. Public engagement experiments are currently proliferating. State commissioned experiments have included citizens’ juries, citizens’ councils, deliberative polls and consensus conferences. Media experiments have used ‘voting’ and plebiscites in many different kinds of television programmes or entailed the creation of online political ‘games’. Social movement practitioners have experimented with the orchestration of trans-local political events and used internet technologies to help cultivate temporary alliances for bursts of political activism. These and many other apparently novel approaches to public engagement are already being investigated by researchers concerned with either state, media or social movement politics (see for example Goodin, 2008 and Barnes et al, 2007 for 1 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. an exploration of state experiments; for media experiments, see for example, Livingstone, 2005 and Riegert, 2007; for social movement experiments, see for example, Holloway, 2002 and de Sousa Santos, 2007). While rigorous and extensive, this scholarship has not so far compared different kinds of experimentation and therefore explored relationships of similarity and difference between these forms of emerging practice. That is, state, media and social movement practices have not so far been viewed as part of a single extended field of practice, and the emergent properties of this field have not been investigated. As experiments increasingly compete with each other for people’s attention the task of comparing how different experiments across different domains are designed, mediated and participated in becomes more important. And as boundaries between state, media and social movement practices and the publics that they appeal to become less easy to discern, so it also becomes more important to study these dynamics and their effects. The PhD (Mahony, 2008) on which this chapter draws was designed to begin to address this issue by exploring and comparing how publics are brought into being by different kinds of participative events. Drawing on this research, this chapter highlights the ways that the three different contemporary experiments highlighted at the start of this chapter worked to interrupt forms of institutional politics. Pinpointing some of the different forms of public conduct that were privileged during these different experiments I also highlight how the apparently ‘new’ publics of these experiments were actually called up by invoking various pre-existing norms of public action. It is useful to say a bit more about each of the three experiments before continuing any further. Harrow Open Budget was promoted as an experiment that would involve the public directly rather than through the normal representative channels. Convened in Harrow’s municipal leisure centre on a Sunday afternoon, the 250 residents attended and discussed topics including social care, traffic congestion and waste management. Selected participants were arrayed in groups of ten around banqueting tables and provided with refreshments, facilitators and wireless key-pads. After each of the five 30-minute policy discussions participants were invited to use their key-pads to vote on different pre-constituted policy ‘options’ with music and lighting-effects used to signal the beginning and end of 10-second bouts of public polling. Vote for Me was an experiment commissioned by the broadcaster ITV in the run-up to the 2005 UK General Election. The aim of this show, according to one of its press releases, was to renew the UK’s parliamentary democracy by offering the British people a new, more accessible and more relevant way of engaging with politics. Inspired by the popularity of 2 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. shows such as ‘X Factor’ and ‘Pop Idol’ the programme featured a panel of ‘expert’ judges and invited contestants to participate in a sequence of challenges designed to test their capacities as potential MPs. During the ‘live’ finals viewers were offered the opportunity to vote for, and ultimately decide upon, who should be supported to stand in the next general election. Seven finalists were whittled down via a series of viewer polls over the series of four 30 minute programmes, with the winner of this election announced in the final climactic moments of the show’s fifth and final episode. The third participative experiment that was explored for this research was the 4th European Social Forum. This was convened by a multiplicity of European social movement organisations and activists and attracted approximately 20,000 participants. The event took place over four days and nights in a sprawling conference centre facility in the suburbs of Athens, Greece. A festival atmosphere was created on this site with a programme of over 280 themed political seminars and workshops and 100 cultural activities. In common with other Social Forum ventures this event was ambitious in that it was explicitly set up to challenge hierarchical forms of organisation and to challenge various forms of social, economic, political and cultural inequality. The overall aim, according to the publicity material, was to facilitate collective resistance and generate alternatives to ‘neo-liberal’ forms of globalisation. These initiatives are apparently quite distinct. Their publicity materials held out the possibility of interrupting rather different pre-existing forms of institutional politics; they offered prospective participants different ways of conducting themselves as a public; and they set out to challenge different established norms of public action. Two other crucial differences were also evident. Each privileged a different scalar imaginary of politics – ranging from ‘local’ to ‘national’ to ‘trans-local’ or ‘transnational’; and the substance of the political aims that were related to each experiment were also rather different. But my project in this chapter is to draw out potential similarities by exploring the mediating practices that shaped the outcomes of each event. In what follows I draw attention to mediating practices inherent in the publicity materials through which publics were summoned (section 1); the processes of convening and facilitating ‘new’ publics (section 2); and the translation work of participants themselves (section 3). In trying to make sense of these different practices I turned to a range of literatures. The first section draws on the work of literary and public sphere theorist Michael Warner (2002) to illuminate the some of the more contradictory qualities of the publics summoned up through publicity materials. Section two uses the work of sociologists of experimentation to reflect on 3 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. the particular forms these events took and on the practices of facilitation. Scholarship on ‘translation’ is then used in the third and final section to examine how people interacted during the bouts of participation that were opened up during each event. Recognising the publics of participative experiments Rather than presume that the publics of the events discussed in this chapter somehow already existed, my research set out to explore the practices, processes and relations through which their publics were brought into being. The work of Michael Warner (2002) underpinned my approach. For Warner: A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in [the] reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse which gives it existence. (Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 2002:67). As Barnett (2007) notes, Warner’s theory of public action underscores the temporality of public making processes and how such processes depend for their success on establishing and re-establishing ‘relations of anticipation, projection, response and reply’ (2007:9). According to Warner, public making processes should not be understood primarily in technical terms but rather as poetic (2002:114): Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world this way. Then it goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with a greater or lesser success – success being further attempts to cite, circulate and realise the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Put on a show and see who turns up. (Warner, 2002:114) For Warner, two postulates enable all public making projects. The first is that public making projects must be based on some kind of shared social base between prospective participants. Only then can a public initiative locate and address its public as a social entity. A social base may be a shared social space or habitas, a shared topical concern or simply a pre-existing communicative genre or form held in common by a particular group. It is the process of designating some kind of shared social base that enables public confidence in a performance. Public making processes, if they are to work, must also promise to enable forms of selforganisation and participation. This is the second of Warner’s two enabling postulates. 4 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. Whether it is justified or partly ideological, a public can only produce a sense of belonging and activity if it is self-organised […] Belonging to a public seems to require at least minimal participation, even if it is patient and notional, rather than a permanent state of being (2002, 70-71). There are considerable tensions between Warner’s two postulates. Such tensions are, he argues, inherent to public making processes and are actually constitutive of these forms of action. Indeed Warner’s claim is that it is actually the inherent instability of these entities that lends them their generative potential. These instabilities lend public making projects an unpredictability and ambivalence, leading Warner to characterise publics as ‘an engine for (not necessarily progressive) social mutation’ (2002: 113). Warner’s framework was immensely useful for understanding the qualities of the publics summoned in the three public participation experiments I investigated. His theory of public action offered a way of accounting for the apparently contradictory ideas of the public that were found circulating in the publicity materials. On the one hand, each event’s publicity promised that these experiments would allow participants to self-organise and direct politics for themselves. On the other hand, these materials also related and aligned each event to various pre-existing organisations, sets of ongoing public projects, specific pre-constituted political aims and already-familiar forms of public conduct. For example, the publicity material of Harrow Open Budget suggested that this experiment would bring a form of politics into being that would be conducted on the public’s own terms. The material used informal and vernacular forms of rhetoric, promoting an anti-elitist standpoint. It also alluded to the possibility that this experiment would facilitate bottom-up, spontaneous and indeterminate forms of political organisation. ‘It’s your money, it’s your Harrow – have your say’ (italics in original) the text on the website exclaimed. Using statistics to support the idea that electoral politics in Britain was suffering from a crisis of legitimacy, Vote for Me’s publicity cast the viewing public as a sovereign political actor. It promised an experiment that would give them direct access to the political process by offering UK citizens the opportunity to select an ‘ordinary’ person to stand as a prospective Parliamentary candidate. It stressed that volunteers wishing to take part in this political talent contest would ‘only be eligible if they have no affiliation with any political party that qualifies for election broadcasts’. The material invoked the idea that this experiment would somehow be ‘authentic’ and ‘untainted’ because it would outlaw any contestants taking part who had formal party political allegiances. 5 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. The 4th European Social Forum was an experiment that also appealed to a public who were apparently not represented by more established institutions or career politicians. This time, however, rather than being a local or national public, the public that was summoned was translocal, transnational and global. It was a public with a loosely associated set of political ideals and positions – anti-war, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, anti-neo-liberal, feminist, egalitarian, libertarian – who were simply in need of a forum through which to plan and conduct self organised forms of political action. Despite the ways each event’s publicity emphasised the need for public autonomy, each also affiliated and thereby aligned these processes to particular pre-existing organisations, institutions and sets of already established political aims and projects. The Harrow Open Budget experiment was related to the project of making the local Council’s pre-existing public policy framework more effective in practice. Vote for Me was presented as a way of re-invigorating and re-legitimising pre-existing modes of Parliamentary politics. The 4th European Social Forum assembled a particular constellation of already established social movement organisers, and was shaped by pre-existing projects and forms of political agency. My research therefore found that the publicity material for each event held out the possibility of two, contradictory-feeling, forms of public action: one that was self-directed, spontaneous and therefore indeterminate; and one guided by pre-existing organisations and geared towards developing already ongoing public projects and pre-constituted sets of political aims. For the purposes of analysis it was useful to disentangle and distinguish these two forms of public action. In the publicity material itself, however, these ideas were interwoven, articulated with one another and even fused. One of the ways that such interweaving was traceable was in the naming of these initiatives. So, for example, the name ‘Vote for Me’ works to interweave ideas from two different lexicons: one continuous with the practices of representative democracy (‘Vote’), and one summoning up an interruption of these conventions by naming ‘Me’ as the autonomous subject around which representative processes need to be organised. These two ideas of political organisation were also articulated in the forms of practice that were privileged. One theme was that of the importance of adapting pre-existing practices. In publicity for the 4th European Social Forum, for example, social movement actors were encouraged to pursue and extend the preexisting agendas and ideas of these groups. But there was also an emphasis in these same materials on autonomous action and on the need to transcend prior commitments and allegiances through intensive bouts of inter-personal interaction. When it came to summoning up particular roles for participants different understandings of political 6 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. organisation were fused. In the case of Harrow Open Budget, for example, publicity cast prospective participants as independent and capable of self-organisation and as actors mobilised to take forward pre-constituted sets of ideas and established forms of practice. Despite being interwoven, articulated and fused in these and other ways, considerable tensions remained between the ways in which publics were addressed and the ideas of public action promised. However thinking with Warner, the co-existence of these apparently distinct forms of address and action can be recognised as constitutive of the public appeal, make-up and forms of enactment offered by each experiment. What my analysis shows is the presence of Warner’s two ‘enabling postulates’ in each case these experiments. Despite the differences between each event – in the publics summoned, the form of politics espoused and the spatial and temporal dynamics – this has enabled me to highlight commonalities in the mediation work performed by the publicity materials associated with each event. Each set of publicity material interwove, articulated and fused two apparently contradictory ideas of public action while, at the same time, summoning up and appealing to publics with very different sets of characteristics. Convening and facilitating participative experiments The focus on publicity materials in the previous section offered one dimension of my analysis of mediating practices. To investigate how the three events described above were actually convened and facilitated in practice, I then conducted bouts of participant observation research in each setting. This data was analysed using the work of scholars concerned with the sociology of experimental practice. Lezuan suggests that to construct an event as experiment first requires a gap to be marked out between what its inside and what its outside are. To do this boundaries are put in place that differentiate between the complexity of the world ‘outside’ and what is part of, or ‘internal’ to, the experiment itself (2006:181-2). Through these means what is marked as ‘external’ to the experiment can be lent the status of turbulence, interference or noise. In the case of the political experiments that are the focus of this chapter it is evident that boundaries were put in place to construct each experiment as a self-contained event. For example, demarcation practices rendered each place specific and time limited. They could then be constituted as experimental enclaves for new ways of doing things; enclaves for innovation temporarily bound-off from the norms of conventional politics and the routines of everyday life. 7 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. The Harrow Open Budget experiment was enacted over the course of a Sunday afternoon in the borough’s municipal sports hall, in a location detached both from the local Town Hall and from participants’ own homes. It was designed as a high-tech meeting space, very different from conventional public meetings and similar in some respects to a contemporary ask-theaudience type game show. Vote for Me was fronted by Jonathan Maitland, a presenter with a history in consumer affairs programmes. The line-up of ‘expert judges’ selected for this programme comprised John Sergeant, Kelvin McKenzie and Lorraine Kelly – media figures who have each build their reputation on their capacity to relate to ‘ordinary people’. Contestants were also showcased in a studio that was more ‘Pop Idol’ than ‘Question Time’, with all of these presentational strategies working to constitute this experiment as an extraordinary event: a television experiment different from traditional institutional politics as well as an event that promised to interrupt viewers’ ordinary everyday routines and roles. The 4th European Social Forum took place in a very large conference complex that could assemble approximately 20,000 people drawn from a myriad of activist groups on a single site. This signalled that this experiment was different from institutional politics as practised by political parties and organisations such as the IMF or G8; but also different from singleissue social movement politics. The design of the assembly enabled participants to come together and to pursue many different activities and ways of participating in parallel: from political seminars to music concerts, from networking events to film screenings. The event was set up to showcase the unity and the diversity of those enrolled as participants’. When it came to exploring the sets of organisational practices used to facilitate and mediate bouts of participative activity in each setting, the two distinct and apparently contradictory ideas of public action that were invoked in each event’s publicity were once more in evidence; though again interwoven, articulated and fused in distinct ways in each setting. This finding highlighted further similarities between the processes and practices used to construct each event. Comparing the ways in which each experiment was convened and facilitated enabled me to highlight evidence of a similarly structured and sequenced threephase facilitation process. Phase one comprised naming and framing. In each case naming and framing practices specified some of the basic characteristics of the experiment, including the organisations or groups that would be involved, where participation would take place, how much time would be given for participation, how participation would be managed, the number of participants who would be able to take part, and crucially, the task or topic around which these activities would be oriented. In Harrow Open Budget, for example, naming and framing practices worked to specify that bouts of public policy discussion would last no more than 30 minutes and would take place in the main sports hall of Harrow’s 8 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. municipal leisure centre around banqueting tables in groups of no more than 10 people. Naming and framing practices also specified that there would be five main bouts of discussion and that each of these would be geared to the discussion of particular ‘local’ public policy topics such as ‘waste management’, ‘traffic congestion’ and ‘social care’. A facilitation guide specified that a participant’s role was to ‘listen’, ‘respect’ the opinions of others, to ‘talk honestly’ and to act as if they had been ‘nominated to speak on behalf of the wider community’ (Harrow Open Budget Discussion Guide, 25 October 2005). Similar naming and framing practices were found in each of the other two experiments. The second phase of these facilitative regimes comprised participation work. While they differ considerably, in each experiment multiple public performances were enacted through such work, with different roles and scripts for different performers. In the Vote for Me experiment, for example, participation work entailed either performing as a competitor or as a viewer. During this series of five nightly programmes viewers were asked to assess contestants’ performances, to consider their potential and to elect their preferred candidate via a series of telephone polls. In the process contestants were invited to perform variously as ‘authentic’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘representative’ members of the UK public and as ‘professional’, ‘credible’ and potentially effective Members of Parliament. The third and final phase of these facilitative regimes invited participants to generate results, conclusions and endings. In each setting this entailed participants generating forms of closure that would round-off bouts of participative activity. Again the form this took varied: in the Harrow and Vote for Me this took the form of the declaration of ‘results’; while in the 4th European Social Forum event participants were invited to negotiate a series of ‘next steps’ with one another, thus consolidating what had been either agreed (or disagreed) upon during a particular participative session. On other occasions this simply involved participants’ contact details being shared to facilitate further networking and action planning. At each of the three phases described above those who were enrolled or summoned as participants were invited both to self-organise and, at the same time, invited to work towards the realisation of pre-constituted public projects. In common with other forms of public experimentation (Barry, 1998), these processes appealed to participants by offering them sensory, embodied and performative as well as more argumentative forms of interactive practice. All of these processes entailed forms of projection. However, according to Pinch (1993:28), all experiments are preceded by forms of projection: projections not only about how practices are likely to work but also projections about what people’s desires and capacities are. These projections were different in each case. Harrow Open Budget was an experiment that 9 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. tested participants’ desire and capacity to work as a public in collaboration with its Council on the task of thinking through and deciding on local public policy and budgetary priorities. Vote for Me tested the desire and capacity of the viewing public to use a particular reality television format to select a prospective parliamentary candidate from ‘ordinary’ members of the UK population. The 4th European Social Forum, meanwhile, tested participants’ desire and capacity to resist and generate alternatives to ‘neoliberal’ globalisation via a four-day event. ‘Black boxing’ is the name that Pinch (1993) and others (see for example Latour, 1987) have given to practices that freeze certain kinds of projected human action into technologies or other kinds of material practice. In the context of the public experiments being analysed here, blackboxing could be used to describe how a range of different forms of projected participant action were frozen into the facilitative designs that were used to organise and manage these events. This section has brought to the fore some of the ways that organisational practices and facilitative designs were used to manage three public participation experiments. The mediation work performed by these practices is significant for a number of reasons: it marked out certain places and moments for publics to convene for participative events; it interwove, articulated and fused invitations to enact apparently contradictory forms of public action; it foregrounded particular objects of public concern, and privileged certain forms of conduct and public subjectivity. Public interactions As well as investigating the publicity material and the assembly design of each experiment, my research also generated material that allowed participants’ interactions to be analysed. In the case of Harrow Open Budget and Vote for Me I drew on transcripts of verbatim interactions, while In the case of the European Social Forum I relied on my experience as participant observer. When it came to exploring this material it was helpful to draw on literature on translation. In contemporary linguistics, Steiner (1998) has used the idea of translation to describe the creative and interpretative work that is implicit in every act of communication. Communication, for Steiner, is not about the transfer of ideas but is instead an act that is inventive and even transformative. Sociologists Bourdeiu and Wacquant (1992) use the idea of translation to underline how webs of social relations and the authority of different translators impact on communication. Another influential group of scholars within the discipline of science and technology studies use translation to characterise the processes through which actors bring ideas and/or objects into relation to one another. Such practices, according to Callon, inevitably entail ‘mutual definition and inscription‘ (1991:143) 10 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. with mediators therefore being any actors with the capacity to ‘translate’ and ‘redefine’ (Latour, 1993: 81) In the context of my research, the idea that participants acted as translators captures some of the creative ways that they performed and responded to the boundaries that had been set. When faced with situations that summoned them to act in specified ways or to work with pre-defined ideas they were observed translating and negotiating these injunctions in a multiplicity of inventive and sometimes transformative ways. This is not to say that anything was possible or to say that all of the interactions that were observed were always benign or ‘progressive’. During Harrow Open Budget, my transcript showed that participants expressed a wide range of views about the sets of pre-constituted policy options that they were presented with. Analysis of the discussion highlighted some of the ways in which participants elaborated, critiqued and proposed alternatives to these options. For example, they contested many of the underlying assumptions that were inscribed into the preconstituted options, and sought to relate what were presented (for example in discussion of waste management policies) as ‘local’ policy issues to broader national and even global political debates. In these and other ways the framing of the policy ‘options’ that they were invited to discuss were frequently questioned and challenged. Many of those enrolled as participants also went on to propose alternative policy options which were quite different from those they were originally invited to discuss. The transcript of Vote for Me also showed participants contesting the ideas of the public that were privileged in this event’s publicity and design. On several occasions, for example, candidates seeking public support contested the authority of the Vote for Me process either by attacking the impartiality of the judges or by questioning the transparency of its editorial approach. The eventual outcome of this exercise also unsettled some of the assumptions about the public that were mobilised in this event’s publicity. Rodney Hylton-Potts won on a platform of policies including promises to end all UK immigration and to castrate all those convicted of pedophile offences. His election (through a public vote) challenged the idea that those participating in this experiment, either as contestants or viewers, would somehow necessarily be more benign and progressive than either career politicians or mainstream political parties. The 4th European Social Forum, in common with other Social Forum activities, was particularly ambitious in that it was explicitly set up as an experiment that aimed to challenge – through the very enactment of the event itself – political relations of domination and subordination that pertain in the world ‘outside’. One way it tried to do this was by offering 11 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. participants opportunities to organise and convene meetings around campaigns or topics that they were particularly active in or interested in pursuing with others. Simultaneous translation facilities were also on offer so that no one language had a privileged status during Social Forum meetings. Compared to the other experiments, a large amount of time was also set aside for open discussion. On many occasions these meetings were observed to be working well, offering opportunities for robust discussions, the formulation of proposals and agreements for future collaborations between different participants. However, the boundaries of this apparently open and creative space were also challenged as participants tussled over what a principle of participative equality should mean in practice. During one meeting, for example, participants debated the political effectiveness of bouts of open-ended dialogue in the face of conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat of global warming. As a result, some called for a stronger and more institutionally unified form of Social Forum leadership and for a system of collective representation. Responding to such challenges, other participants defended the Social Forum ethos. These were passionate about the value of continuing to use the Forum to attempt to and work with and through differences in a participative and inclusive way. A tension was therefore evident between vanguardist and rather more pluralist tendencies. Such conflicts points to some of the different understandings of public action that were circulating; however they also foreground the active work of translation (of the meaning of equality, of norms of public debate and so on) in this setting. What my research highlights is how those acting as participants in these experiments become mediators and translators during the bouts of interaction that they were engaged in, negotiating forms of action within the parameters of each event. They actively translated and thereby sometimes transformed the ideas and injunctions that they were presented with during these experiments. This indicates that alongside understanding mediation as a form of practice enacted by different kinds of organisations through their publicity materials, facilitation practices and technologies, mediation also needs to be understood as a creative activity on the part of those enrolled as participants. Conclusion The research drawn on in this chapter investigated, close-up and in detail, the practices and processes through which the publics of three contemporary participative experiments were brought into being. Investigating these experiments as events, I have shown the value of paying attention to the mediating role of publicity materials, facilitative practices and participants’ own translation work. This approach opened up the possibility of comparing the 12 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. ideas of public action, the notions of the political and the projections of participants’ desires and capacities in three experiments that were, ostensibly at least, very different. This approach also allowed participants’ interactions to be explored, opening up the possibility of analysing how participants negotiated and translated the apparently contradictory ideas of public action in circulation in each event. Despite their apparent differences – one a governmental initiative, one a media event and one a social movement gathering – I have show how this research brings into view similarities in the processes of summoning, performance and translation enacted in each setting. Each was constituted as an interruption to a particular form of pre-existing institutional or organisational politics. The three experiments were not cast in their publicity materials as supplements to pre-existing political processes, but rather as showcases for entirely new and more publicly responsive ways of conducting politics. However, once we follow Warner and recognise publics as ‘fictional’, publics cannot be assumed to be entities that are simply waiting to be called upon, mobilised and brought to voice. If publics are instead understood as entities which must be summoned into existence and then channelled, the constitution, performance and voice of these entities – what I have termed processes of mediation - becomes a matter of struggle. Mediation processes, in public participation events and elsewhere, are significant because they work to shape the publics and the forms of politics that are (and are not) enacted during these events. The matter of how publics are constituted, how publics perform, what they do and say and what ‘new’ politics actually means is a matter of intense social and political contestation across this field. Each experiment worked hard to bring into being particular forms of public conduct with each doing this in the name of particular versions of the public good. All three made strong normative claims about the value of public participation in the face of an assumed crisis of institutional politics. However, each of the three brought to the fore rather different political agendas. In each case tensions arose as a result of participants being required to enact forms of self-organisation and, at the same time, to have regard for already-ongoing public projects. Other contemporary studies have shown how participative experiments work through, and in relation with, norms and expectation linked to pre-existing milieus (Baiocchi, 2003; Davies, Wetherell and Barnett, 2007; Barnes, Newman and Sullivan, 2007). My contribution here is to further substantiate the idea that publics are not free floating entities. The publics called upon and brought into being by the experiments discussed were presumed to already have thick connections and allegiances to different already-existing webs of social relations, political projects and forms of conduct. At the same time, however, I 13 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. have shown how the public subjects called upon to participate were also presumed to have the desire to self-organise, act autonomously and perform politics in ways that were not predetermined in advance of bouts of public participation. By comparing how these tensions were played out in apparently very different settings, my research raises questions about the divisions of public labour inscribed in different participative experiments. More research will be needed to identify, compare and evaluate mediating practices in a range of other sites; however what I have done here is to begin to map, describe and reflect upon how it is possible to mediate relations of public authority through different kinds of experimental events. What focusing on mediation does is draw attention to the contingency of different kinds of experiments and, especially, the unpredictability of participants’ translation practices. The significance of this research is therefore not simply that it highlights the heterogeneity of the contemporary field of public participation experiments but, rather more importantly, that it shows that such experiments are unlikely to result in a single technical fix to the ‘problem’ of how to involve (plural) publics in public governance and politics more generally. With the legitimacy and authority of established forms of institutional politics apparently on the wane, the forms that participative experiments take are likely to continue to diversify. However this research underscores the idea that the constitution of publics and the constitution of politics are both matters of intense struggle Mediation, in this chapter, has referred to much more than the issue of which media are deployed in these settings. What are conventionally refereed to as ‘the media’ are of course significant (see chapters by Rodgers, Bhasin in this volume). But my use of the term mediation denotes the mediating role of ideas and facilitative practices; the mediating role of those enrolled as participants themselves as they engage in creative processes of translation; and the mediation work that established (or re-establishes) relationships between publics and pre-existing ‘authorities’. As experiments of the kind explored here continue to claim to be able to engender forms of political renewal, so it will become more and more important to be able to recognise and engage with the politics of these forms of public mediation. Looking across this field of practice, this will mean continuing to ask questions such as: who is testing or trying to demonstrate what through these kinds of experiments? Who is learning from these events? How are the boundaries to the events fixed (and transgressed)? How are the ‘results’ of these experiments generated and disseminated? And, what might the repetition of experiments of this kind be working to prefigure? 14 From: ‘Rethinking the Public: innovations in research, theory and politics’ (2010) edited by Mahony, N., Newman, J. & Barnett, C. Policy Press: Bristol. The participative experiments that have been focused on here hint at the possible emergence of novel ways of performing public accountability and political inclusion. If publics are understood as entities that can potentially be summoned up and enacted in an infinite variety of ways, these experiments cannot be dismissed simply on the basis that they do not include some kind of ‘representative’ sample of ‘the public’. There simply is no single way of representing the public. Representations are ‘claimed’ (Saward, 2006), new forms of democracy are ‘enacted’ (Saward, 2003). The question of how a legitimate public needs be constituted (its size, geography, characteristics, capacities, desires, the resources that need to be made available to it if it is to participate effectively) for it to have political authority is one that is currently being tussled over through precisely the kind of experiment I have considered here (see also chapters by Hutta, Gabay - this volume). A further challenge for researchers concerned with these developments will be that of finding ways to distinguish ‘progressive’ from more ‘reactionary’ participative experiments. Or, put another way, to differentiate between benign and malign public summonings and performances. Meeting this challenge will entail continuing to try and develop ways of mapping, comparing and analysing the distinct but interrelated forms of mediation enacted by different kinds of public participation experiments. It will also entail continuing to develop approaches that bring empirical material into relation with debates in contemporary normative theory. It is inevitable that I, as a researcher, am also a mediator in conducting academic work of this kind, and thus take on a public role (Bourdieu 1988; 1990), however small. My personal aim as an aspiring researcher in this field is to help fashion a progressive politics of public mediation. References Baiocchi, G., (2003) Emergent Public Spheres: Talking Politics in Participatory Governance, American Sociological Review, Feb 2003; 68, 1, pp. 52-74. Barnes, H., Newman, J. & Sullivan, H. (2007) Power, Participation and Political Renewal, Bristol: Policy Press. Barnett, C. (2007) Convening Publics: the parasitical spaces of public action, in Cox, K. & Robinson, J (eds.), The Handbook of Political Geography. 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