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From public engagement to creating publics

09 March 2012

By Simon Smith

 

This post is mainly to give a plug to what looks like a very exciting research project about public engagement at Open University's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance. It kicks off with a keynote lecture from Lawrence Grossberg on March 26th. What attracts me about it is the willingness to re-think public engagement as a more ambitious participatory experiment. Tellingly, I think, the project's title, Creating Publics, employs the term public as a noun rather than an adjective - and as a plural noun, moreover. What does that imply?

Classical sociological thinkers like Gabriel Tarde and Hannah Arendt conceived of publics as collective bodies that produce value and embody an ethos. As soon as you appreciate that, then public engagement has to mean something more than just communicating a clear message to a defined group of stakeholders, or marketing your research to a particular audience. Instead we’re obliged to think about how to share in the ethos of a particular public or how to create a space where we can work with a public, to co-produce something of value within the reputational economy of that public. This brings the idea of public engagement very close to the increasingly popular concept of social innovation, so that knowledge flows two ways and public engagement is as much about 

"unlocking the forgotten or hidden resources, knowledge and effort we all have" as it is about "designing effective formats and technologies of participation so as to allow segments of the public with different interests and aspirations to be targeted and engaged".

Indeed the slogan 'creating publics' reminds me of the concept of productive publics, explored in a recent book by Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen on the ethical economy. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of results come out of the OU team's participatory experiments.

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  1. Blanka Sengerová19 March 2012 at 10:43 AM

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    Thanks for posting the link, Simon, it looks like an interesting lecture. From the description of it, it looks like the accessibility of published research is one of the things that seems to be a part of the debate.

    This reminds me of a debate I attended at the end of February, entitled "The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing", which has now been posted as a recording online - if you're interested you can access it on Oxford iTunes U: http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/open-science/id509508541

    I had been planning to summarise the debate at some point, but I'll take the easy route out and point you in the direction of the links to articles by people who have done exactly that:

    http://f1000research.com/2012/03/02/open-science-and-the-future-of-publishing-a-round-up-of-this-weeks-debate/

    http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/03/01/evoscidebate-ccess-evolution-of-scholpub-oxford-meeting/

    http://cameronneylon.net/blog/they-just-dont-get-it/

    If any of the above piques your interest, have a look at the organisers' website with further events related to Open Access.

  2. Sandrine Berges26 March 2012 at 01:11 PM

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    Thanks for this - it sounds fascinating and the kind of thing that some of my colleagues working in political philosophy ought to know about!

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