Call for Papers - 'Creating Publics' workshop

The Publics Research Programme at the Open University invites submissions of possible papers contributing to a two day workshop to be held at University of Westminster on 21 and 22 July 2011. Please send abstracts of not more than 400 words to N.Mahony@open.ac.uk by 25 May 2011.

The dominant conception of ‘publics’ imagines them as pre-existing entities or populations. However, alternative conceptions of publics as constituted through practices and constitutive of collectivities have emerged from literary theory, cultural geography and interdisciplinary interventions that trace emergent qualities of a range of different forms of public action. Such works offer a vocabulary of assembling, summoning, enrolling, constituting, mediating, and performing to describe the elusiveness of publics and paradoxes of contemporary publicness. We want to consolidate and extend this work by thinking of these practices in terms of public creation and public creativity.

This workshop aims to create a forum for interdisciplinary conversations about the contemporary objects, ideas, spaces, and activities of public creation and creativity. Focusing on the relationship between creating publics and public creativity, we invite abstracts from politics and public policy scholars, cultural geographers, media studies scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, psychosocial researchers, and interdisciplinary researchers and others who might speak to the following issues:

• Public action takes place inside, outside, and beyond institutions. How is this evident in ‘non-governmental’ politics, whether this means social movements, spheres of online activism or contemporary art practice?
• All publics are mediated, whether this entails summoning, constituting, convening, assembling or reading-back. What would a more detailed picture of the heterogeneity and changing character of these mediation practices including their spatialities, temporalities and affective dimensions look like?
• Questions of power permeate and drive public creation and public creativity. What are the different ways we might theorise power in these dynamic settings of practice?
• Public mediation and engagement are increasingly significant modes of contemporary politics. What are the transformative and reactionary potentials of these practices?

For further details about the workshop, please visit http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/events/creating-publics-workshop.