Publics

The Publics programme seeks to develop new understandings of public action, public culture, public space, and the public sphere. The remaking of contemporary practices of publicness cuts across questions of citizenship, identities and governance.

Research in the programme is concerned with understanding the registers and mediums through which publics are mobilised, summoned, and performed; with understanding the shifting relationships between publicity and privacy, personal and political, as matters of faith, sexuality, reproduction, care, and personal morality are increasingly framed as issues of public concern; and with the dynamic reshaping of responsibility and risk as boundaries between public goods and market goods are transformed and contested.

Recent activities of the programme include a two-year ESRC Research Seminar Series on Emergent Publics (with the Department of Geography), bringing together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds to understand the development of new practices, sites and definitions of publicness. This project generated an edited collection published by Policy Press (2010), entitled Rethinking the public: innovations in research, theory and politics, edited by Nick Mahony, Janet Newman and Clive Barnett.

A project funded by the ESRC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) explored the institutional dynamics behind the proliferation of audience and market segmentation methods in the public and not-for-profit sector. A report on Segmenting Publics was publised in 2011.

Programme Directors: Prof John Clarke and Dr Clive Barnett