“Public Sphere” and the Constructing of Strong Communities

The Public Sphere

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Being a master of metaphors

Theorists of democracy emphasize the importance of a public sphere, distinct from the apparatus of the state, where citizens can freely associate, deliberate, and engage in collective will formation. Discourse ethicists and deliberative democrats locate the public sphere within civil society and the manifold associations that comprise it. For Seyla Benhabib, the public sphere is constituted by the anonymous “public conversation” of civil society. By contrast, John Rawls has a much more limited conception of the public sphere. For Rawls, public reason, which establishes norms for democratic discourse, applies to a limited domain. I defend Rawls's view against the charge that it depends upon an untenable distinction between the public and nonpublic spheres. I argue that Rawls's more limited “liberal” conception better guarantees the heterogeneity of associational life in civil society. I then argue that Rawls violates his own principles by partially collapsing the public-nonpublic distinction with potentially illiberal consequences.

Prologue: The Work of the Penn National Commission -Judith Rodin Introduction: Incivility and Public Discourse -Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg PART ONE. PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND DEMOCRACY 1. The Thinning of American Political Culture -Thomas Bender 2. Primary Tensions in American Public Life -Robert H. Wiebe 3. Deliberative Democracy and Public Discourse -David M. Ryfe PART TWO. CHALLENGES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE: TALKING ABOUT RACE 4. Affirmative Action and the Culture of Intolerance -Christopher Edley, Jr 5. The North American -Richard Rodriguez 6. Sports and Public Behavior -Richard Lapchick 7. Performance, Debate, or Productive Conversation? Imagining an Exemplary Conversation on Race -Drew Gilpin Faust and Members of the Penn National Commission PART THREE. LEADING THE PUBLIC'S CONVERSATION: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE LEADERSHIP 8. Leadership in a Complex Democratic Society -Michael Schudson 9. Political Leadership in the Great Health Care Debate of 1993-1994 -Derek Bok 10. Part of Our World: Journalism as Civic Leadership -Jay Rosen 11. Modeling Public Discourse in Popular Culture -Neal Gabler PART FOUR: DISCOURSE OF RECONCILIATION: TRUTH, APOLOGY, AND FORGIVENESS 12. Creating a National Discourse: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa -Alex Boraine 13. Political Apologies and Public Discourse -Graham G. Dodds PART FIVE: Thickening Public Discourse: Principles and Practices 14. The Principles of Public Discourse: What Is Good Public Discourse? -David M. Ryfe 15. A Paradox of Public Discourse and Political Democracy -Neil Smelser 16. The Practice of Public Discourse: A Study of Sixteen Discourse Organizations -David M. Ryfe 17. Lessons from the Field: Practitioner Perspectives on Public Discourse Programs -Jay Rosen and Members of the Penn National Commission PART SIX: CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH PUBLIC DISCOURSE 18. Building Community in the Twenty-First Century -Joyce Appleby 19. The Myth of Academic Community -Don M. Randel 20. The University as Discourse Community -Judith Rodin 21. Creating Community in Cyberspace: Criteria for a Discourse Technology Project -Stephen P. Steinberg Epilogue: The Centrality of Public Discourse -Stephen P. Steinberg Notes Contributors Bibliography Index Members of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community Acknowledgments

Community concerns about water availability vary depending on local economic, regulatory, environmental, and ecological considerations. In water-rich basins, water quality is often the focus of community concerns. As such, understanding community priorities in the context of water quality is crucial for informing scientists working in water-rich basins. In this work, we compiled over 6,500 local news articles (public discourse) and 190 scientific abstracts (scientific discourse) related to water-quality issues in the water-rich Illinois River Basin (ILRB) published between 2018 and 2022. We applied a Structural Topic Model (STM) to identify key water-quality topics within both datasets and explore the variability of newspaper topics geographically across the basin. Prevalent topics in both the public (local news articles) and scientific (abstracts) discourses were agriculture, drinking water quality, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and river ecosystem/fish. Topics exclusive to public discourse included water infrastructure, community development, and public water supply, while the scientific discourse focused more heavily on a wider range of agricultural issues. Furthermore, the public discourse varied geographically across the basin. Some topics are correlated with land use or urban/rural divides within the basin, and the frequency of many topics clearly varied across state (political) boundaries. Understanding and quantifying public and scientific discourses related to water-quality are important for scientists and water managers working in the basin to improve communication of critical science to the public.

The proposed scientific work represents the main research results concerning the development of a person’s environmental consciousness at adolescence in the context of the studied system of adolescents’ attitudes to the World. Ecological consciousness is considered as a subjective reflection of the personal, social and natural environment, as a single indivisible human World, which manifests itself in ecologically directed (eco-centric) human behaviour. An individual’s attitudes are understood as active, conscious, integral, selective and based on experience relations of the individual with different aspects of reality, which exist in the form of a single system.The World basic elements are revealed through the development of environmental consciousness at the level of the personal, social and natural spheres of a personality and reflect the system of relations, respectively, to oneself, to others and to the nature. Moreover, the World itself is indivisible and united.Environmental consciousness is described as a complex system, having two subsystems: the structural components of ecological consciousness and an individual’s attitudes to the World. The main structural components of environmental consciousness are cognitive, emotive, value-semantic, consumer-motivational and conative. The elements of an adolescent’s single indivisible World are its personal, social and natural spheres. Within the framework of the personal world, environmental consciousness is determined as attitudes towards oneself, social consciousness means attitudes towards others, and natural consciousness means attitudes towards the nature.Adolescents’ personal sphere is determined by their attitudes to Self, to thoughts, emotions, values ​​and needs, formed in their families and internalized into their inner picture of the World. The development of the environmental consciousness components at the level of the personal sphere is based on the development of reflection, critical thinking, as well as a reassessment of values.Adolescents’ social sphere is expressed through a system of relations and interpersonal interactions. The development of the environmental consciousness components at the social level is based on the formation of their sense of maturity and self-affirmation in a group of peers. Adolescents’ natural sphere of the World is determined by the pragmatism of relations to the animate and inanimate nature, and the development of the environmental consciousness components is based on socially significant activities in relation to the nature.The empirical study of adolescents’ attitudes to people, the nature and themselves has revealed the declining hierarchical sequence of adolescents’ attitudes to the World. In particular, the social world — the world of others and interactions with them — is the most significant for adolescents. The least significant for adolescents is the nature. Adolescents’ attitudes to themselves – their personal world – create intermediate link of the significance hierarchy.

A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do occur outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well suited for graduate seminars that focus on rhetorical theory, civic engagement, and the public sphere, or as source material for scholarship that aims to expand on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also bodes well for nascent scholarship that aims to bridge the divide between political science and rhetorical studies, a mutually beneficially relationship that offers many opportunities for advancing theories of contemporary democratic society.

"Emilie Prattico has used the lens of a discourse-theoretic conception of deliberative democracy to engage eight prominent colleagues in stimulating interviews. They critically illuminate the various ways that a sound democratic regime depends upon the deliberative milieu of an inclusive public sphere." - Jürgen Habermas The continued rise of populism and authoritarianism throughout the world has witnessed an alarming attack on basic democratic freedoms and led to a divided political and social world. Few thinkers have done as much as Jürgen Habermas to understand and critique these problems, perhaps most famously through his notions of the public sphere, deliberative democracy, and discourse ethics. In this fascinating book, Emilie Prattico considers the crisis of democracy from a Habermasian standpoint via engaging interviews with an outstanding lineup of leading philosophers and thinkers. The following key topics are unpacked and explored: Can some basic rights and liberties be given up to safeguard democracy? With Hauke Brunkhorst How does actual deliberation confer legitimacy to democratic decisions? With Cristina Lafont Why is "fake news" a crisis of democracy? With Michael Lynch How can we build a public sphere together and share it in a world characterized by divisiveness and tribalism? With Barbara Fultner Can democracy survive without the voice of experts? With Kenneth Baynes How dangerous are the current forms of authoritarianism we are seeing take hold all over the world? With María Pía Lara What does the public sphere look like with new technologies? With Gertrud Koch What duties do we owe descendants of slaves and how do we reckon with our antidemocratic and oppressive past? With Lorenzo Simpson Also including a Foreword by Habermas himself, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the challenges facing democracy and liberalism today. It will be of great interest to those in philosophy, sociology, and politics as well as related fields such as religion and law.

Deliberative democracy is a model of democracy in which decision-making processes are based on public participation, and public debate is prioritised. In this model, citizens make joint decisions through rational discussion and negotiation, and this process forms the basis of democratic legitimacy. As one of the main actors in 21st-century democracy debates, deliberative democracy aims to create more inclusive and fair policies by encouraging broad participation. In the digital age, the concept of deliberative democracy faces new challenges and opportunities. This study examines the intersection between deliberative democracy and digital technologies, focusing on how online platforms influence public discourse and democratic engagement. The core objective is to explore how digital technologies enhance inclusivity, speed, and scalability in deliberative processes while simultaneously raising concerns about misinformation, polarization, and exclusion. Drawing from the theoretical framework of deliberative democracy, which emphasizes rational discourse and public reasoning, the paper investigates the benefits and challenges that arise when deliberation moves online. Through case studies such as Iceland's crowdsourced constitution, global climate change discussions, and the role of social media during the 2020 U.S. election, the paper highlights how digital platforms facilitate rapid, large-scale deliberation but also contribute to political fragmentation and echo chambers. The study employs a qualitative research methodology, analyzing the impact of digital platforms on deliberative processes through literature reviews and case studies. The hypothesis is that while digital platforms offer significant potential for enhancing democratic deliberation by broadening participation, they also present new risks to the integrity of public discourse, particularly due to misinformation and the manipulation of algorithms. Ultimately, the paper argues that deliberative democracy must adapt to the realities of the digital age by integrating online and offline deliberation, fostering digital literacy, and establishing regulatory frameworks for transparency and accountability. The findings offer theoretical contributions to understanding the relationship between digital technology and democracy while also providing practical recommendations for enhancing the quality of digital public discourse.

It is the contention of this chapter that a critical theory of public relations should involve some refl ection on the role that public relations plays within the public sphere. Public relations (PR) has become increasingly infl uential on activity within the public sphere, and hence in the formation of public opinion. In this chapter we shall seek to introduce the public sphere as a critical category – that is, both sociological and theoretical in its scope – and to understand the role of PR, especially within the domain of news media in North American and European democracies. The chapter will focus on the normative dimension of the account of the public sphere forwarded by the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas, which shapes critical theory understandings of the role of PR in the public sphere. The impact of PR on the public sphere will be discussed through the increased infl uence of PR in journalism, coming at the expense of original and independent reporting. Further to this, the competing theories of deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism will be surveyed, and we will see that the basis upon which we think critically about PR greatly diff ers depending upon which position we take up. Central here is the question of whether or not consensus is possible within the public sphere, or if contestation is rather inevitable.

During the 21st century, library and information scholars have set out to theorize the role of public libraries as public spheres. Most of this research is engaging with Habermas’ early work on the structural transformation of the public sphere. Even though Habermas has continued to develop his theories on the public sphere and deliberative democracy throughout his carrier, library and information scholars have to a limited degree engaged with his more recent work. Simply relying on Habermas’s early work when theorizing public libraries as public spheres is limiting, but in addition to getting up to speed on Habermas’ theoretical development, library and information scholars should also familiarize themselves with a broader set of public sphere theories. In this paper, I will give a short presentation of Habermas’ work of relevance for public libraries, I will give a short presentation of some additional theories of public spheres, and I will present key concepts in studies of public libraries as public spheres within library and information science. I will conclude with some thought on how to move forward when theorizing public libraries as public spheres within library and information science.

Deliberation and Civic Studies

Co-sponsored by the Information Policy and Information Ethics special interest groups (SIGs), this proposal is for a pair of 90-minute speaker panels, facilitated by the respective SIG convenors and supporting interlocutors, which will draw on concepts of Habermas's ideal speech and public discourse. We begin with the premise that there are multiple theoretical lenses through which to critique increasingly hostile proposals of law and/or policies that limit bodily sovereignty and speech/intellectual freedom. Such polices can be understood as attempts to organize historically marginalized bodies in both physical and digital realms (e.g., through restrictions on access to knowledge, or production of dis/mal information, etc.). Thus, challenges that limit access to spaces and knowledge (focusing libraries and education) demonstrate a need to counter the breakdown of "ideal speech" within a pluralistic society that is free of coercion (Habermas, 1985) while acknowledging the role of identity, positionality, and embodiment with a post-critical lens. This back-to-back SIG session will be comprised of two panels: first, a panel focusing on Information Ethics, which will explore the notion of what is allowed and is not allowed in public and quasi-public physical and virtual spaces; and second, a panel focusing on Information Policy, which examines how conflicts in ethics are manifest in policies that determine or exert limitations on discourse in public spaces, focusing on libraries and educational spaces. Together, the panels will demonstrate theoretical and practical departure points that can be applied in a wide range of LIS/IS educational contexts. The first co-sponsored panel explores how identity and embodiment are linked, as embodied knowledge can be understood as identity expressions, whether enacted through affordances or limitations to exercise autonomy and that which a society and community construct for it, e.g., gender affirming and reproductive care, expressions of sexuality, and the racialized body. Professional identity, which is the identity transposed into and developed within a profession, can impact understanding of affiliation with a profession and behaviour within it (e.g., Pierson, 2023). This first co-sponsored panel will focus on the guiding question: How do we prepare students to navigate the complex realities of identity, embodiment, and professional ethical imperatives to maintain the library as a commons for ideal speech and public discourse? The second co-sponsored panel pivots attention to laws and policies that limit public speech and discourse. Limitations on expression can be considered an act of symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), designed to subordinate certain bodies, ideas, identities, etc. However, policy-makers are tasked with governing public spaces to balance the rights of individuals with the collective. When (if ever) is it acceptable to create policies that limit speech or peoples’ right to express themselves in public spaces? How might policies be developed, and what do policies look like, that take into account and respect individuals’ rights and create a collective space where all bodies are able to flourish? Both discussions will be supported by co-convenor and interlocutors representing both North American and international voices, prompting organic discussion in the tradition of the commons and public discourse.