Introduction: Rethinking the Public: Innovations In Research, Theory and Politics more

ONE Introduction: rethinking the public Nick Mahony, Janet Newman and Clive Barnett The idea of ‘the public’ as a singular entity, circumscribed by bonds of national solidarity and expressing itself in a uni ed public sphere, has become increasingly problematic. New media and information technologies are undercutting traditional notions of the public sphere, opening up a range of innovative possibilities for public communication. New objects of public concern are emerging: for example, around environmental issues, human rights, trade justice and access to the global ‘commons’ of scarce resources. And many of these issues are in turn summoning up new subjects of public action that articulate local and national scales of activity with transnational scales. At the same time, shifts in the political landscape are intensifying e orts by government and non-governmental actors to summon up gures of the active citizen, the responsible community and the choice-making consumer, all of which potentially challenge models of the public as a privileged scene of collective agency. In many nation states, such summonings seem to displace the classical values of publicness in the name of individual or community responsibility; and they are associated with the rolling out of public policies that are increasingly focused on regulating how personal lives should be lived. In trying to make sense of these shifts, we are confronted with a bewildering set of normative claims. Indeed, both academic and policy writings on publics and the public sphere tend to be long on assertions and injunctions and weak on empirical substance. New media, it is claimed, have already displaced the value and relevance of ‘old’ communication technologies in sustaining democracy (see, for example, www.e-democracy.org; Leadbeater, 2008). New strategies of governance that empower individual persons rather than treating ‘the public’ as an undi erentiated unity are o ering opportunities for independence and selfdevelopment that were unthinkable under the paternalistic welfare state (see, for example, Diamond et al, 2008). New ways of engaging citizens in public dialogue and debate, whether by public or commercial institutions, are o ering an immediacy and sensitivity to di erence that were impossible under old norms of representative democracy). New contentious struggles demonstrate the irrelevance of forms of politics bounded by the nation state (Drache, 2008). These claims are presented here in simpli ed form, but what is striking is that in most cases the depiction of new possibilities is presented as transformations that have already taken place: the normative slides uneasily into the descriptive. The contributions to this volume both complicate such accounts and o er a critical distance from their normative underpinnings. The book is based on the 1 Rethinking the public work of a group of scholars clustered around the Publics Research Programme at The Open University.1 This group was engaged over two years in intensive discussions about how their individual studies might provide a collective intervention into contemporary theorisations of publics and publicness. Their studies draw on theoretical work across a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, human geography, development studies, politics, sociology and social policy, in ected through post-colonial, feminist, social movement and other critical theory perspectives. While much of the literature on these topics draws on normative theories of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989), the main contribution of this volume is its empirical grounding in theoretically informed doctoral and postdoctoral social science research.The grounded cases in this volume examine some of the processes through which new formations of publicness and new forms of public action are emerging. This empirical grounding enables us to show how appeals to ‘new’ publics (in media discourses and by governmental actors and social movements) are crosscut by older institutional, political and cultural practices. We explore some of the paradoxes inherent in contemporary governmental strategies that appeal to communities rather than states, persons rather than citizens. We o er analyses of how print media both constitute local, urban publics and open up transnational formations, including, historically, that of pan-Islamism.We show how challenges to the public/private distinction have produced new terrains of governmental action as well as new spaces of agency.We engage with contemporary struggles – over the sustainability of natural resources, over global justice claims or around the politics of community – showing how formal and informal politics, institutional and cultural practices are entangled. Our contributors trace the complex interleaving of global, national and local formations of publics and representations of the public interest. They also highlight the importance of paying attention to the historical context in which di erent publics are summoned, or di erent issues are raised as public matters. Finally, we draw attention to what we term a politics of mediation, showing how claims about publics and publicness are mediated through discursive, material and institutional practices. But what do we mean when we speak of ‘the public’? Our approach here starts from assumption that a public is not best thought of as a pre-existing collective subject that straightforwardly expresses itself or o ers itself up to be represented. Rather, we are interested in elaborating on how publics, in the plural (Calhoun, 1997), are called into existence, or summoned. On this understanding, ‘[p]ublics are called into existence, convened, which is to say that they are sustained by establishing relations of attention whose geographical con gurations are not given in advance’ (Barnett, 2008, emphasis in original). This emphasises how publics are formed through processes of address (Warner, 2002; Iveson, 2007) and implies that the precise spatial dimensions and socio-cultural composition of a public cannot be determined in advance of the actions and activities through which it makes its presence felt. In short, it implies focusing on the processes through which publics emerge (see also Angus, 2001). We theorise this process of 2 Introduction: rethinking the public public emergence by distinguishing analytically between the objects, mediums and subjects of publicness (Barnett, 2008). Publics emerge around particular objects of concern, that is, around speci c issues (Dewey, 1927; Marres, 2005). They emerge by articulating these issues through particular mediums, and in distinctively public mediums that combine intimate and anonymous registers of address (Barnett, 2003). They gather together and draw on the agency of plural, multiple social subjects variously a ected by issues at hand (Warner, 2002). Our approach to thinking about the emergence of publics, then, leads us to think about the participants in public action in a particular way. Rather than thinking of these as the already constituted citizens of a territorial nation state, or as the idealised deliberators of rational conversation, we focus in this volume on the actors whose ongoing practices shape and sustain the spaces and sites of publicness. Publics are not only summoned, but are also assembled: made up from the uneasy and impermanent alignments of discourses, spaces, institutions, ideas, technologies and objects. The notion of assembly draws attention to the ambiguities and unsettled qualities of any emergent formation of publicness or public action: ‘publics are uid and mobile, being assembled at particular moments for particular projects’ (Newman and Clarke, 2009, p 20). Of course, this thought can be applied to underwrite both highly pessimistic and highly optimistic interpretations of contemporary dynamics of public action (Newman and Clarke, 2009). On the one hand, there is a pessimistic narrative. It is common to hear that public institutions are in decline, and that any sense of a collective public solidarity bounded by the nation state is becoming unsustainable. For example, Marquand (2004) speaks of the ‘decline of the public’ under a process of ‘incessant marketisation’, which has ‘generated a culture of distrust, which is corroding the values of professionalism, citizenship, equity and service like acid in the water supply’ (2004, p 3). Consumerism is often highlighted in such narratives of decline (Needham, 2003; Lawson, 2009). Similar themes, but within a di erent analytical frame, are pursued by Devine and colleagues (2009) in the tellingly titled Feelbad Britain. In public and policy debates across Europe and the US, commentators worry that inward migration and increasing diversity threatens the national solidarities on which public cultures and public institutions are assumed to depend (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004; Clarke, 2007b).Accounts of the roll-out of ‘neoliberal’ logics of rule suggest that public sensibilities and loyalties are progressively undermined by and replaced by market rationalities (cf Newman, 2006; Barnett, 2009). The intensi cation of e orts by governments and non-governmental actors to summon up the gures of the active citizen, the responsible community or the choice-making consumer elicits concern that the collective and unifying dimensions of public solidarity are being displaced by more partial and divisive modes of agency (Barnes et al, 2007; Clarke et al, 2007; Neveu, 2007; Carrel et al, 2009). On the other hand, the sense of publics as exible and mobile also underwrites a more optimistic narrative in which the classical features of nationally bounded public spheres are now seen to be proliferating across di erent scales. So, for example, the emergence of transnational politics mobilised around global issues 3 Rethinking the public has been interpreted as o ering the possibility of a resurgence of progressive public action politics (for example, Dryzek, 2006; Drache, 2008; cf Fraser, 2007). At a di erent scale, a governmental focus on ‘local community’ is presented as opening up new opportunities for public engagement and citizenly action (see, for example, publications of the UK Department for Community and Local Government at www.communities.gov.uk, and Mooney and Neal, 2009, for critique). In these optimistic narratives, attention is focused on the potential of new communications technologies to re-energise public action, transform democracy or reform public services; on the problematisation of new objects of public concern, such as climate change or human rights; and on the emergence of new subjects of public action, such as the ‘queer’ subjects of gay and lesbian mobilisations or the subjects of the politics of ‘new life’ (Robins, 2005). While there might be something to each of these narratives, there is a tendency in both to let normative evaluation race ahead of descriptive and explanatory analysis. In this volume, by focusing in detail on di erent examples of the emergence of publics in diverse contexts, we seek to underscore the sense that the purpose of emphasising the variable qualities of publics is to keep in view that processes of assembling, convening and summoning publics is always cross-cut by calculations, forces and strategies that are resolutely political: Things, people, and issues get made public by a variety of means, but all of them involve processes of making visible matters of connective concern. Publicness is historically and socially variable – the combinations of things, sites, people, ideas and the rest are not permanently or intrinsically public: their construction as public matters involves political struggles to make them so. They may also be de-publicised, and de-politicised (taken out of recognisable public concern). (Newman and Clarke, 2009, p 2) In the next section, we elaborate on four related dynamics of the emergence of publics that the chapters in this volume, taken together, draw into view as playing important roles in shaping the politics of public action. Framing the analysis: personalising, representing, mediating, becoming The contributions to this volume draw on a range of contemporary theoretical approaches from across the social sciences and each one engages with detailed empirical case analysis. The chapters present work on the ‘new’ media, on spatial con gurations of power and on the transformations of governance as well as research based on queer theory, post-colonial theory and feminist theorisations of the reordering of public, private and personal. Read as a whole, there are four related themes that run across the chapters that, we would suggest, help orient future analysis of the recon gurations of public life around understanding processes 4 Introduction: rethinking the public of emergence: the personalisation of publics; the processes of claims making and representation through which public action is articulated; the practices of mediation through which claims are assembled into publics; and the emphasis on publicness as a dynamic process of becoming. Personalising publics A recurrent theme across the chapters in this volume is that of the personalisation of public life. Most theorisations of the public focus on the distinction between the public and private – its history, validity and various forms (see Squires, 1994; Weintraub and Kumar, 1997; Guess, 2001; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008). We pay particular attention in this volume to a more complex folding together of the public, the private and the personal. The concept of the personal cuts across any stark, binary framing of the public and private as opposed values. One of the contributions of feminist critical theories is to challenge the bracketing of personal issues as private ones, to be kept away from or sequestered from the properly sober, deliberative and rational conventions of the public realm (Young, 1990; Benhabib, 1996; Lister, 2003; Fung, 2004; Krause, 2008).These theoretical challenges, closely associated with the claims of so-called ‘new’ social movements, have brought matters such as sexuality, parenting, care and domestic violence into public view, making them objects of public debate and potentially at least of policy action. Such issues are addressed in this volume in various chapters. For example, in Chapter Ten, Simon Hutta analyses the articulation of rights claims by gay and lesbian activists in Brazil, involving the explicit politicisation of personal identities through various forms of informal and formal public action. Eleanor Jupp’s analysis in Chapter Six focuses on the mobilisation of ‘community’ as a liminal space between public and private, highlighting the tacit and embedded forms of personal knowledge and their activation in engagement with governmental projects. At the same time, the fracturing and proliferation of publics through the politicisation of personalised identities from ‘below’ has generated an increasing concern, an anxiety even, from ‘above’ to regulate and mobilise various personal capacities for the greater public good (see Clarke, 2004). Concern among politicians and policymakers with respecting and responding to the diverse needs of members of ‘the public’ re ects a shift in the rationalities of public policy towards the personal (van Berkel and Valkenburg, 2007; Needham, forthcoming); citizens are viewed less and less as passive pawns to be e ciently provided for and more and more as active queens able to express demands (see Le Grand, 2006). This con uence of bottom-up and top-down personalisation is addressed by Chapters Three and Seven. Chapter Seven examines the transformation of schooling in the UK in the last decade, showing how contrasting projects of personalisation and citizen education work with and against each other. Chapter Three examines how governmental projects seek to tap into personal capacities and everyday resources in seeking to address macro-policy issues of public health and childcare. In short, personalisation emerges from these chapters as a strategy for ‘governing 5 Rethinking the public the social’ (Newman, 2001; Rose, 2004; Clarke, 2007a), in which empowerment, engagement and participation are meant to be attuned and responsive to the diversity of personal capacities and needs of an inherently di erentiated public. The personalisation of publics, as it unfolds through the chapters in this volume, turns out to be a focus of contradiction and paradox. It marks the success of second-wave feminism’s claims that ‘the personal is political’, bringing into view a series of claims to public attention around personalised issues and in personalised registers. But this is matched by an extension of the reach of state-directed public policy initiatives into the regulation of all sorts of facets of personal life. It is a feature of this latter trend that such initiatives are often framed around subject positions, such as the individual, the consumer or the community, that displace wider notions of public solidarity. Calls for concerted public action around, for example, improving ‘school standards’ or enhancing childcare provision are not necessarily made in the name of a singular public, nor straightforwardly meant to sustain a public sensibility. Of course, the personalisation of public action that we have just touched on is not only a matter of a multiplication of the issues that are considered to be properly public objects of concern.This multiplication is related to, even emerges through, shifts in the mediums through which claims for public attention are articulated. Contemporary public spheres are shaped by a diverse range of emotional and a ective registers. While this is not a wholly novel phenomenon, it is a mark of the fracturing (in both theory and practice) of unitary public spheres and the proliferation of multiple, overlapping publics (Young, 1990;Warner, 1991; Phillips, 1993). If publics are spoken of and spoken for in a range of personalised grammars and registers, this challenges the rational/irrational distinction that marks the separation of public and personal. It implies that public life might be becoming recon gured around the image of the expressive subject capable of knowing its own interests and being able to e ectively articulate them too. This brings us to the second theme running through the analysis of emergent publics in the chapters in this book: the processes of claims making through which publics are addressed, summoned and transformed. Representing publics Where a public is thought of as, or can be made to appear to be, a singular, collective entity, then speaking for and about it can seem straightforward, a matter of expressing its voice – the institutions of representative democracy necessarily depend on successfully pulling o this appearance. It is, of course, also the case that activists and campaigners have an interest in pulling o the same trick, of being able to elide the gap between the claims they make to express the interests of certain constituencies and the status of those claims as claims. This observation, by now standard in social and cultural theory, is not, it should be said, best understood as an epistemological conundrum or a disobliging attack on the scandal of speaking for others. Taking seriously the claims-making processes 6 Introduction: rethinking the public through which public action emerges and is sustained not only helps us to understand the irreducibility of representative practices to public formation, but also helps to transform the understanding of the concept of representation itself – understood now as an inherently performative process of fragile and imperfect claims making (Saward, 2006; Moss and O’Loughlin, 2008). This conception of representation as claims making is important for the understanding of emergent publics because it draws attention to the importance in many forms of public action of multiple practices of simultaneously giving voice to others by speaking in one’s own voice – of claims of representativeness that might appeal to a basis in authentically embodying a particular identity, for sure, but might also take the form of giving testimony, or bearing witness, or simply being present in a public place. In short, we are suggesting that one thing that makes a wide diversity of communicative practices stand out as public actions – from mass mobilisations in public protests to individual contributions to ‘vox pop’ media events, new forms of citizen journalism enabled by the web and mobile phone, and the generation of survey data representing public opinion – is their performance as representative. That is, claims seek to embody, a rm, give voice to, bring to light, speak for and make visible particular issues, interests or identities in the hope of eliciting some form of response – whether of recognition and acknowledgement, or of more concerted action. The chapters in this book evidence the range of forms that claims making takes in forming new publics and contesting the dimensions of existing publics. Such claims may take the form of unifying, expressive claims to give voice, hoping to forge relationships and identi cations; they may be mobilising, provoking forms of social action; or they may be more justi catory, sustaining forms of authority for concerted public action (see Chapters Two and Nine of this volume). These claims may be made on behalf of marginalised, previously ‘silenced’ constituencies, as elaborated in Simon Hutta’s analysis of queer activism in Brazil (Chapter Ten); they may be made on behalf of those deemed unable of speaking for themselves, such as future generations, the young (as in Jessica Pykett’s account of educational governance in Chapter Seven), or those su ering unjust imprisonment and torture; and they may be made in the name of non-humans, such as endangered species, or, as in Chapter Eight, via the plural representation of sh in contested governance of natural resources. This latter dimension of claims making – the representation of and through non-human actors (Latour, 2005; Eckersley, 2009) – is important not least because it reminds us that processes of public representation necessarily pass through some medium or other. Mediating publics This brings us to the third theme running through the analysis of emergent publics in the chapters in this book: the importance of practices of mediation in summoning and assembling publics. Publics are put together through various 7 Rethinking the public combinations of devices, procedures, things and mediums (Latour and Weibel, 2005). This helps us put into perspective the much-discussed role of ‘the media’ in shaping and constituting publics. The chapters in this book underscore the importance of understanding the di erence that the materialities of media practices make to public formation. So, for example, Chapter Four discusses how the classical role of the urban metropolitan newspaper as a public medium is being recon gured by new assemblages of production and distribution technologies and the proliferation of new cultural technologies of dissemination – the web, iPods and mobile phones. Chapter Five brings a historical perspective to the same issue, showing how the medium of ‘print’ is embedded in di erent practices and sites of interaction, conjuring di erent publics that stretched from the urban through the colonial-national territory to the transnational. Chapter Two tracks how genre conventions drawn from a particular medium – whether that of a TV show, a participatory governance experiment or a social movement gathering – are translated across contexts with unpredictable consequences for the shapes and dimensions of publics addressed and assembled. The volume as a whole demonstrates the signi cance of a range of mediating practices encompassing, but also stretching beyond, conventionally de ned media. Richenda Gambles’ analysis in Chapter Three of the personalisation of welfare rationalities focuses on the recon guration of state–citizen relationships made possible, in fact and fantasy, by web-based media. Chapter Eight focuses on a complex of institutional, organisation and technological mediation through which con icts over ‘European’ public resources are worked through (cf Barry, 2001) and Chapter Nine unravels the complex relations of authorisation, delegation and naming involved in bringing into view a transnational public mobilised around issues of poverty alleviation.Thinking in terms of mediation broadly understood, rather than ‘the media’ narrowly understood, helps us understand how important media practices are to public formation while avoiding the trap of con ating ‘the public sphere’ with ‘the media’. Becoming public The mediated aspect of publicness is closely related to the importance of processes of representation in constituting publics.The philosopher Jacques Derrida (1992, p 88) argues that ‘the public’ can show no sign of life ‘without a certain medium’. ‘The public’, he argues, does not, cannot and should not be expected to speak in its own voice, in the rst person. Rather, it is only cited, spoken for, ventriloquised. Or, to put it another way, publics are always in the making. Linking the distinctive recon gurations of public representation to the acknowledgement of the importance of mediation in public formation brings us, then, to the nal theme running through this volume: the sense that publics are formed through processes of becoming – that they are always emergent, rather than mere expressions of preexisting interests, issues and identities. It is here that analytical attention might be best focused, and it is this emphasis on becoming and emergence that marks out 8 Introduction: rethinking the public this volume. Rather than using pre-existing models to evaluate the publicness of this or that new formation, or simply championing new formations as reinventing all the potential of the public sphere, the contributors to this volume attend closely to the events, practices and processes through which publics come into view, sustain themselves over time and extend themselves over space. In so doing, they esh out the argument sketched here that publics emerge around the problematisation of combinations of subjects, mediums and objects of action, care and concern. These subjects include new ‘queer’ identities (Chapter Ten) and children (Chapter Seven), distinctively collective identities like ‘community’ (Chapter Six) and complexes of global solidarity (Chapter Nine). Mediums include electronic and print modes of public address (Chapters Three and Four), socially and culturally di erentiated print cultures (Chapter Five) and more or less deliberative forums, meetings and participatory experiments (Chapters Two and Six). Emergent objects of public action analysed here include new practices of care (Chapter Three), non-territorialised resources (Chapter Eight) and global poverty (Chapter Nine). These processes of becoming underpin each of our other themes, forming the integrating spine of the book. Structure of the book The chapters in this book are varied in their focus, but each aims to do three things. First, each o ers a brief sketch of an empirical research study, and in doing so challenges normative conceptions of how publics should be mobilised or public issues addressed.As such, they o er important empirical and analytical resources for other researchers and help reframe the relationship between theory, methods and political engagement. Our contributors show how particular theories and methods help frame the topic concerned, bringing some frames into view but occluding others. They draw on a range of methodologies and theoretical resources, but rather than summarising these in a formal way (as for a PhD or refereed paper), the editors have encouraged them to experiment with writing in ways that draw connections between theory and evidence, using extracts or vignettes from their data to give a avour of the empirical substance of their larger projects. Second, each chapter is concerned with how publics are convened or summoned; how new objects of public action emerge; or how public action is itself mediated, and with what consequences. This concern with subjects, objects and mediums o ers one framing for the book, with these categories cutting across and being themselves reworked in speci c chapters. But it is important to note how these concerns have often owed from the personal and political commitments of our contributors. The question of how to hang on to ‘politics’ while being engaged in research is partly answered by di erent forms of re exivity o ered by di erent contributors. But it is also evident in the theoretical resources on which they have drawn, resources that challenge an image of processes and their e ects as nished projects – that mistake momentary forms as xed formations. Such perspectives, we 9 Rethinking the public think, open up rather than close down the possibilities of continued engagement with the issues raised by their doctoral work. Third, each chapter opens up important questions about the paradoxes at stake in attempts to rethink the politics of the public. Here we engage with dominant notions of both decline and proliferation; that is, we challenge the idea that the possibilities of public life have been erased by neoliberal logics that privilege individual subjects rather than foregrounding publics and publicness. But we also distance ourselves from over-optimistic and premature excitements about the proliferation of emergent publics made possible by web-based technologies and emergent political struggles. We seek to navigate our way through these pessimistic and optimistic narratives because they tend to suppress the political agency involved in emergent publics. In Chapter Two, Nick Mahony begins from the normative proposition – in the Power enquiry of 2006 and elsewhere – that the polity and the public sphere are in crisis and that this crisis needs to be addressed through enhancing opportunities and modes of participation. In each of his three case studies (of a participative budgeting exercise, a TV game show and a social movement gathering), he shows how claims are made about the value of direct forms of participation over a discredited and unresponsive form of institutional politics. In Chapter Three, Richenda Gambles provides an analysis of Mumsnet. She positions her study in claims about the value of web-based technologies to facilitate social interaction and thereby o er new forms of support to parents and parentsto-be, forms of support that reduce parental dependence both on professionals and on other family members. In the face of the presumed disembedding of women from traditional forms of family and community, there is a suggestion that new forms of community might be produced through online, peer-based interactions. In Chapter Four, Scott Rodgers addresses the distinction between old and new media by exploring how new media technologies enter into the settings of supposedly ‘old’ media organisations. In focusing on how Toronto Star editors negotiated new forms of visual display and online technology, he highlights the tenuous practices and material settings that make up sites of public action, and in turn questions sweeping claims about the political potential of, or otherwise the threats posed by, new media. Gurpreet Bhasin continues the theme of mediation in Chapter Five, showing how colonial publics emerged, functioned and were made e ective in late 19thand early 20th-century Delhi through print media.What were then ‘new’ media practices, she argues, served to create important links, networks and circuits of discussion, not only between British and Indian arenas, but also an emerging ‘panIslamic’ movement. Based on archival research, this chapter presents a gripping account of new voicings, silencings and con icts. In Chapter Six, Eleanor Jupp presents an enthnographic study of community activism in the UK, showing how local women and o cials mediated the governmental turn to ‘community’ through their work with teenagers and their families. She situates her analysis in feminist critiques of the public/private 10 Introduction: rethinking the public dichotomy, suggesting how the changing context produces recon gurations of public/private, male/female and state/citizen in the ‘contact zones’ and ‘liminal spaces’ worked by local activists. In Chapter Seven, Jessica Pykett continues the analysis of changing con gurations of UK governance, focusing on schooling as a site in which competing discourses are mediated by local professionals and through spatial practices.The drive towards personalisation re-imagines education as a personal goal rather than a public good. However when considered alongside current policy directives on citizenship education, the rationales, practices and e ects become much less straightforward. Young people, she suggests, are constituted as private persons and as public citizens. In Chapter Eight, Liza Gri n shifts the scale of analysis to the European Union’s (EU) governance of global resources. She traces contestations over de nitions of ‘the public interest’ in sheries management, showing how publics (as subjects and objects) are summoned, convened and mediated. Her chapter draws our attention to the sustainability of part of the ‘global commons’ of natural resources, especially in the face of perceived crises. She shows how di erent stakeholders mobilised di erent claims to represent the public interest and how controversies over such claims tested the limits of the governance institutions of the EU. In Chapter Nine, Clive Gabay takes as his focus global justice struggles and the possibility of progressive politics. His particular focus is on the Global Call to Action against Poverty, which, he suggests, comprises a multiplicity of public actors and objects.The contingent and un xed qualities of any idea of an emerging global public produces problems of naming and categorising: the process of naming, he suggests, produces a premature xity that fails to resolve the messiness of the publics who are summoned. He o ers a stringent critique of the ‘unthinking globality’ that closes down any kind of relational and processual analysis. In Chapter Ten, Simon Hutta explores the possibilities of political world making on the part of marginalised actors, focusing on the emergence of the lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual movement in Brazil. He points to the heterogenous enactments of the ‘ rst wave’ of the gay movement, and to the con icts and confrontations these later produced. He uses his account both to challenge the ‘publics/counterpublics’ distinction in the work of Fraser and Warner and to o er in their place the notion of ‘paradoxical publics’ and their generative potential. The concluding chapter revisits the four themes we have introduced here – those of personalising, representing, mediating and becoming – and assesses what the volume as a whole contributes to the project of ‘rethinking the public’. Together, these chapters highlight innovations in research, theory and politics. The contributions o er an opportunity to rethink the public, public communication and public action in a post-national, globalising, digital and mediatised world, but a world in which new divisions and lines of inequality are becoming increasingly signi cant. Liza Gri n contributes to work on the global commons that cannot be contained within national boundaries or controlled by national governments, and that requires new transnational institutions and regulatory practices. Nick Mahony shows how images of the local, national 11 Rethinking the public and transnational speak to di erent publics, while Gurpreet Bhasin traces how nationalism, colonialism and pan-Islamism o ered contested boundaries of the public sphere in colonial Delhi. Scott Rodgers highlights the importance of understanding the relationship between local milieu and the more widely distributed circulatory space that urban media inhabit. Clive Gabay traces the ways in which actors invoke global discourses and institutions when engaging in national politics. Richenda Gambles, Simon Hutta, Eleanor Jupp and Jessica Pykett demonstrate the importance of situated localised sites of practice as the scenes of mobilisation and national governance. The spatial imaginaries of publicness and public action are, it seems, being recon gured; and as our contributors show, questions of identity and belonging, di erence and diversity, and citizenship and cohesion continue to o er competing images and claims of public legitimacy. Note 1 For further information on this programme, see www.open.ac.uk/ccig/ programmes/publics and www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/emergentpublics. References Alesina, A. and Glaeser, E. (2004) Fighting poverty in the US and Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Angus, I. (2001) Emergent publics: An essay on social movements and democracy, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing. Barnes, M., Newman, J. and Sullivan, H. (2007) Power, participation and political renewal: Case studies in public participation, Bristol: The Policy Press. Barnett, C. (2003) Culture and democracy: Media, space and representation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barnett, C. 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