Making Publics across Time and Space

The aim of this project is to construct a new network of connections between researchers in the UK and North America who have been working on similar concerns but whose work has been separated by time and space. The North American group have focused on the making of publics in early modern history; while the UK group has addressed contemporary practices of public making. However, the two groups share some significant questions, analytical approaches and methods. We aim to bring members of the two groups together in conversation to explore these differences and similarities in question, method and analysis. We are interested to assess the significance of historical period; the effects of the social, political and cultural contexts of possibilities and practices of public making; and to consider how the methodological and analytical orientations might be developed further. We have a very strong commitment to seeing this network as a means of developing future scholarship and future scholars, darwing on existing practices in the two groups towards the development of early career researchers.

In the UK, a group of researchers centred on the Open University's Publics programme has been developing new understandings of public action, public culture, public space, and the public sphere. Based in the University's Centre for Citizenship Identities and Governance, the programme has focused on the ways in which the remaking of contemporary practices of publicness cuts across questions of citizenship, identities and governance.

Topics explored in this work have included issues of public participation, the remaking of public services and how publics are identified, addressed and engaged. This work has combined significant empirical studies with methodological innovations and new analytical approaches that have centred on ideas of constructing or making publics. Since 2005, this group has developed based on a combination of individual research, collective discussion (in part through an ESRC seminar series - Emergent Publics), the building of an early career researchers network, and a series of workshops and seminars directed to developing publics as a emerging interdisciplinary focus of future work. The group has produced several publications and contributed to diverse academic, policy and political debates (from the Big Society to public making in the current crisis).

Across a similar period, a group of researchers in North America (the Making Publics project, funded by SSHRC from 2005-2007). Although focused on a different historical period (the early modern) and rather different issues and topics, this group's approach to the making of publics has some profound connections and overlaps with the work of the Open University based group. Their project addressed a strikingly similar range of analytical questions:

How did new groups of people form outside of tradition and hierarchy in early modern Europe?
What might the rise of these new forms of association between diverse men and women, around common interests, say about the rise of our own society?
Can we learn anything from these 'publics'? What can they tell us about the way our modern society works, and how public interests rise and fall?

The current proposal will support exchanges between the two groups over an eighteen month period with a view to establishing the institutional basis of a network and the possibilities of future research collaborations.

We think it is important to distinguish between immediate and potential impacts of this proposal, given that it is a proposal to establish a network with a view to developing future collaborations.

The immediate impacts are likely to be:

1. the enlargement of a space of intellectual inquiry that has high salience in contemporary social and political life: the identification, engagement and mobilization of publics. This concern is a recurrent one, linking a variety of fields of social endeavour: from artistic practice to the governance of public services, or from the impact of academic work to the participation of communities in self-development. This makes this intellectual focus a significant point of interest.

2. the overcoming of some some intellectual and organizational boundaries (of time, space and discipline) that currently inhibit the development of a more coherent and integrated approach to the topic.

3. the development of an international network through which early career reserachers may be supported in the development of this issue.

4. the exchange and development of initiatives that involve forms of making public knowledge and constructing public engagement around the academy.

The longer term impacts are likely to be:

1. the development of research, knowledge and analysis associated with practices of public making that will have policy and practice implications beyond the academy.

2. the enrolment of audiences and collaborators interested in the theory and practice of public making in heterogeneous contexts.

3. the creation of spaces and resources for critical reflections on the conditions, possibilities, media, limitations and failures of public making practices.