In this article, we start by jointly examining the shortcomings contained in the substantial definitions of publicity commonly applied to the analysis of both public spaces (physical) and public spheres (political). We propose instead to consider publicity as a potential and publicization as a process, observable both in urban spaces and in the media. Building on John Dewey, we argue that when this process reaches its logical end, it determines and brings together a problem, a place, a sphere and a group of people that it makes public. It also leads to mechanisms of political action that constitute the ends of public space. Using the example of New Orleans post Katrina, we illustrate this process by discussing three obstacles that often stall or reverse publicization processes, which we believe deserve further study. Finally, we ground the values on which the process of publicization rests on the shared experience of trouble in potentially public spaces. This pragmatists approach opens the door to the study of publicization processes and public spaces beyond western cultures, and suggests an empirical way to deepen and reassess liberal conceptions of public space.

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For many years now, our work on human cognition, trust, and public experience has been driving us to combine ethnomethodological analysis with a pragmatist perspective (mostly Dewey's one). We thus fully agree with M. Emirbayer and D. Maynard's diagnosis. For us, it is good news: we didn't understand why, up to now, ethnomethodologists were prone to ignore or to discard pragmatism; a possible reason for this neglect is that they (wrongly) confused it with symbolic interactionism.As Emirbayer and Maynard put it, there are such fundamental commonalities between pragmatism and ethnomethodology, that "we can make valuable progress toward realizing the aims they share, each enterprise fortified, perhaps, by the insights and admonitions of the other." Despite the reciprocity of this formulation, they present pragmatism somehow as a comprehensive philosophical justification of EM/CA's program. As a consequence, they suggest that pragmatism has more to learn from EM (particularly from its methodological naturalistic empiricism-which is correct) than EM from pragmatism. And their paper tends to present pragmatism as mere instructions for empirical research. Such a contextualization is not irrelevant, since it can help to avoid the inclination of some current EM/CA developments to slip into mere technical undertakings.The focus on the implications of pragmatism for social sciences is an appropriate strategy for Emirbayer and Maynard's purpose, i.e. claiming that EM remains an original-and even unique-empirical approach for the sociological inquiry. However, this strategy has major consequences. It focuses on specific aspects of pragmatist thought, and thus dramatically reduces the definition of experience, leaving apart some Qual Sociol (2011) 34:271-275

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