Publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version)

The tyranny of neoliberal public management and the challenge for Aboriginal community organisations

“…However, management must be turned towards those things that the public as a whole values, and the public is more than a mob of individuals corralled into a consumer group. Much could be said about the constitution of the various publics (see Warner 2002), but here we can note that there are local Aboriginal publics with distinct values that can clearly be better represented when public managers are responsive to an authorising environment that includes their representative organisations and their significant spokespeople knowledgeable in lore and culture. This is an authorising environment that includes politicians and their programs, but also informs them both in a two-way process that requires workable trade-offs (Alford & O'Flynn 2009, cited in Benington & Moore 2011.…”

Users’ Encounter With Normative Discourses on Facebook: A Three-Pronged Analysis of User Agency as Power Structure, Nexus, and Reception

“…While there is surely some truth in these observations, this ingrained suspicion in research limits the scope of evidences that can be collected about user agency. Recent thinking on the notion of "public" (Warner, 2002) provides a different understanding of the role of users in the new media environment, and consequently of agency. This approach to agency, in which users of new and social media are predominantly understood as citizens-audiences, underlines the capacity of the audience to organize itself as public around social media texts.…”

“…In the first part of the article, a brief overview of the literature concerning user agency within the "participation paradigm" (Livingstone, 2013) points to gaps which can be filled by adopting an explicit focus on reception analysis and exploring the socio-cultural practices of ordinary audiences in their encounter with media discourses. This focus is then developed with regard to theories of the publics (Warner, 2002) and of the media-audience relationship (Livingstone, 1998), the latter providing the backbones of the methodology.…”

“…In the first part of the article, a brief overview of the literature concerning user agency within the "participation paradigm" (Livingstone, 2013) points to gaps which can be filled by adopting an explicit focus on reception analysis and exploring the socio-cultural practices of ordinary audiences in their encounter with media discourses. This focus is then developed with regard to theories of the publics (Warner, 2002) and of the media-audience relationship (Livingstone, 1998), the latter providing the backbones of the methodology.The article then turns to the empirical part of this study, which consists in a rudimentary-yet-comprehensive discourse analysis of Facebook pages and groups on the topics of health, lifestyle, and consumption. The article suggests looking at the media-audience relationship from the vantage of three perspectives (power structure, nexus, and reception) in an effort to acknowledge the multifaceted complexity of the concept of user agency in its application to social media.…”

Overwriting the City: Graffiti, Communication, and Urban Contestation in Athens.

“…By this I mean not just that it is self-organizing, a kind of entity created by its own discourse, nor even that this space of circulation is taken to be a social entity, but that in order for this to happen all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts 93 to circulate, and it must attempt to realize that world through address.' 95 More recently, Fraser has extended this Habermasian concept further to consider the role of 'subaltern counterpublics' as 'parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests'-a description that seems particularly resonant in the realm of graffiti. 96 The networks that produce graffiti are also forms of solidarity, which, communicated to a wider public, invite a broader participation in the activation of the civic realm.…”