Nick Mahony

Public crises, public futures

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analysing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support.

The work of public engagement

This article explores the ‘the public’ in public engagement with research as a site of negotiation, production and possibility. In a contemporary context where the public cannot be taken for granted and is in a state of flux, it shows how three different perspectives on the public, drawn from the vast literature on this topic, are differently useful. The article reflects on several ways these perspectives were used as part of the process of setting up a new participatory public engagement initiative called Participation Now, at The Open University (UK). The article also begins to illuminate how this process led to a particular set of ways of thinking about the social relevance and the responsibilities of contemporary research. The article therefore contributes to this special issue but also to the literature on the public and public engagement by charting a new process that has recently been developed and used to negotiate and mediate ‘‘the public’’ in public engagement.

MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR

Spectacular forms of politics are proliferating and a reappraisal of political spectacle is underway. This article intervenes in debates about the constitution and value of contemporary spectacles by analysing how three, ostensibly very different, governmental, popular media and social movement participative experiments were set up and enacted. To explore the public value of making democracy spectacular, the article considers some of the fraught (but not always insidious) ways these participative events tested‐out novel forms of democratic practice.