Multiple Publics Research Articles

The promise of public sociology in India: Looking at Burawoy and beyond

AbstractThe trajectory of the academic discipline of sociology is an attestation to the quest for civility and sociability. We believe that the promise of public sociology will rejuvenate scholars to commit to better engagement with one another and with the public. We situate and draw from the scholarly contributions of Michael Burawoy to reflect on sociology's longstanding critical imagination, hoping that the world could be different. We place ourselves on the continuum of what is and what ought to be for better lived experiences and a sustainable planet. We draw from the work of sociologists in India, which continues to guide us to amplify the voices of the unheard and the issues of public concern. To be inclusive, sustainable, democratic, and humane, we need to move beyond structurally ingrained processes within academia and make bridges that are open to all. The deliberation furthered in this paper will encourage young scholars to be more concerned for engaging multiple publics and, thereby, help the discipline of sociology itself.

DCLK1 is Overexpressed and Associated with Immune Cell Infiltration in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.

Recent research has shown that Doublecortin-like kinase 1 (DCLK1) is overexpressed in different types of cancer. It has recently been described as a cancer stem cells (CSCs) marker, is associated with carcinogenesis, and positively correlates with infiltration of multiple immune cell types in some cancers. However, studies focused on assessing DCLK1 expression in HCC are limited, and the role of DCLK1 in HCC tumor immunity remains to be determined. In this study, we used a modified model of the resistant hepatocyte (MRHM) to evaluate DCLK1 expression in HCC. Furthermore, DCLK1 expression in HCC was analyzed using TIMER 2.0, UALCAN, GEPIA, GEO, and HPA web-based tools. Correlations between DCLK1 expression and clinicopathological factors in patients were analyzed using the UALCAN web-based tool. Finally, correlations between DCLK1 and immune infiltrates were investigated using the TIMER 2.0 and TISIDB web-based tools. The results showed that DCLK1 is significantly overexpressed during progression of the HCC carcinogenic process in the MRHM. DCLK1 is overexpressed in HCC according to multiple publics web-based tools, and its overexpression is associated with cancer stage. Furthermore, DCLK1 expression was correlated with infiltration levels of multiple immune cells, immunomodulatory factors, immunoinhibitors, MHC molecules, chemokines, receptors, and immune cell-specific markers. These results suggest that DCLK1 is a potential prognostic biomarker that determines cancer progression and correlates with immune cell infiltration in HCC.

The Caring Public Sphere: Reframing the Concept in an Era of Care Crises

This article reframes the public sphere concept by bringing it dialogue with feminist theories of care. Care ethics foreground vulnerability and interdependence, suggesting that vulnerability is a shared condition and that we are all dependent on each other in order to survive. This helps to rethink the role of the public sphere within the democratic system, as a space not only for opinion formation, but also for the development of citizens with the necessary skills and dispositions to take care of the issues discussed in public. A focus on care also aids in reconsidering public affairs as issues that are intimately connected with needs and vulnerabilities; listening as an act of care; the processing of emotions as a key function of the deliberative process; and personal testimony as an important type of argumentation. The concept of care further helps in refinining the universal access principle by highlighting the importance of intimate spaces, where participants feel safe to be vulnerable, and of how these multiple publics can be interconnected through mobilising relationships of interdependence. Finally, it allows us to consider “care work” for communication infrastructure, including both media technologies and people’s bodies, as a constitutive part of the public sphere.

Health policy counterpublics: Enacting collective resistances to US molecular HIV surveillance and cluster detection and response programs.

Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize health policy counterpublics: temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism and advocacy. We examine a health policy counterpublic that has arisen in response to new forms of HIV public health surveillance by drawing on public documents and interview data from 2021 with 26 stakeholders who were critical of key policy developments. Since 2018, the national rollout of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs in the United States has produced sustained controversies among HIV stakeholders, including among organized networks of people living with HIV. This article focuses on how a health policy counterpublic formed around MHS/CDR and how constituents problematized the policy agenda set in motion by federal health agencies, including in relation to data ethics, the meaningful involvement of affected communities, informed consent, the digitization of health systems, and HIV criminalization. Although familiar problems in HIV policymaking, concerns about these issues have been reconfigured in response to the new sociotechnical milieu proffered by MHS/CDR, generating new critical positions aiming to remake public health. Critical attention to the scenes within which health policy controversies play out ought to consider how (counter)publics are made, how problems are constituted, and the broader social movement dynamics and activist resources drawn upon to contest and reimagine policymaking in public life.

Screens as Anthropomorphic Interfaces: How AI Changes Shakespearean Theatrical Publics

Abstract: Whom does the screen interface serve, and how do artificial intelligence (AI) tools affect theatrical publics across both the playing space and the playgoing space? Screens are a site where cultural and performative meanings are generated and negotiated. This article draws on interface theories to analyze the roles of screens in regulating publics' access to performance, producing new ambient conditions of theatergoing and changing the publics' relationships to themselves and to performance. Screens in All the World's a Screen , an Irish Sign Language production, served and became co-spectating theatrical publics. The organizers encouraged the theatergoing public to use an AI app on their phones, their anthropomorphized "machine guests," to obtain auto-captioning based on pose analysis of the actor and to receive retail suggestions that the AI deemed relevant. Operating both within and beyond the fabula of the performance, screens as anthropomorphic interfaces create multiple theatrical publics through an imperfect spectatorial proxy.

Roadside Media: Roadside Crash Shrines as Platforms for Communicating Across Time, Space, and Mortality in the Early 2000s United States

ABSTRACT This article argues that since the 1990s, roadside shrines in the United States have become place-bound forms of media that provide multiple publics with platforms for communicating with the dead and for communicating with other platform users about the dead. Evidence that roadside shrines function as media today is accessible even to strangers who witness roadside shrines because people leave visual, material, and spatial traces of these communications at shrine sites themselves. There, you can see that people interact with shrines as if they are platforms for communication – demonstrating elaborately performed ‘continuing bonds’ between mourners and the site, and thus victims, as well as among mourners. Moreover, roadside shrines are today intertwined with the larger convergent media environment, where a shrine site often becomes a material manifestation of other representations of ‘the pervasive dead’ across the media environment. To trace the history of how roadside shrines came to work this way, I relate them to the larger cultural history of media and memorialisation in which they are entangled and then analyse three specific case studies from New Mexico and Texas at the crucial transitional moment in the first two decades of the 2000s when roadside shrines became established as media.

The Contingency Theory of Strategic Conflict Management: Review From Three Decades of Theory Development, Extension, and Application

Contingency theory explains how theory can explain, relate, and capture interactions between an organization and its multiple publics regarding real-world issues. Over the past three decades, it has emerged as an empirically tested perspective, grounded on how intuitive, nuanced, and textured strategic conflict management is practiced. It represents a paradigmatic shift in thinking from normative thought. This essay first consolidates the theoretical development and explication by mapping out the key tenets of the theory, and then discusses the growth of the theory through extension and application. The last section contemplates new directions as the theory develops.

The Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning

There is an ongoing, polarizing debate in the library profession and scholarship regarding the perceived incompatibility between library neutrality (embedded in the profession through the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights), and social justice goals. This article asserts that the growing antipathy on the part of some library practitioners and scholars towards neutrality and intellectual freedom is owed at least in part to the profession and scholarship having never articulated an adequate definition of what is meant by neutrality. As a result, the profession lacks a theoretical framework situating the library and library staff as political actors within a multicultural and largely urban society. We argue that such a framework may be drawn from the literatures of political science and urban planning. By positioning libraries and library workers within the context of liberal-democratic institutions – as is the case for urban planners in their theoretical literature – LIS theory can find more durable foundations for its core values. Stressing planning’s commitments to the participation of multiple publics, to dialogue, mediation and to consensus-building through liberal institutions, we develop a multidimensional understanding of neutrality premised on values, stakeholders, processes and goals which we then apply to these planning modes. Finally, we propose a model of “Communicative Librarianship” as best exemplifying these four dimensions of neutrality and their attendant democratic commitments.

Social movement activists’ conceptions of political action and counter-accounting through a critical dialogic accounting and accountability lens

In the face of growing disaffection with neoliberalism and corporate social and environmental accounting, critical accounting recognizes the potential of counter-accounting to open spaces for democratic contestation and to advance progressive change. Critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA), for example, views counter-accounting as providing social movements with opportunities to challenge neoliberal hegemony, to mobilize multiple publics and to construct new social realities. However, the democratizing potential of counter-accounting is contested within academia, and social movements’ views of counter-accounting as a politicizing practice are not well understood. We extend CDAA theorizing by elaborating on the value of counter-accounting in advancing democratic struggles against neoliberalism and illustrating how an agonistic lens can be useful in framing social movements' actions in these struggles. Social movements' conceptualizations of political action and counter-accounting are empirically investigated through interviews with 25 social movement activists. Based on the interviews and our CDAA lens, we propose possible areas for critical accounting collaborations with social movements as they seek to effect progressive change.

Review: Public in Public History, edited by Joanna Wojdon and Dorota Wiśniewska

Review: <i>Public in Public History</i>, edited by Joanna Wojdon and Dorota Wiśniewska

Spaces of the maybe: fragments as new urban possibilities in Cairo’s extended urbanisation

ABSTRACT Urban “fragments” play a key role in healing megacities and carving new relationships of civic connectivity. At the edge of a gated community in Cairo, AlRehab, the open market or souq serves as an urban fragment, creating different experiences that unsettle the normative assumptions of the separation between the private and public spheres. Using a Lefebvrian analysis to examine the souq of AlRehab, a two-phase longitudinal study was conducted between 2008–2012 and 2018–2022. Within the geopolitical context of the Arab Spring and the New Administrative Capital, the narratives of the souq’s developer, urban planner, residents, activists and shop workers reveal the power of agency and activism in the provision of “multiple publics” as a civic-common space. This allows the creation of transient connections, sites for political expression, as well as a base of operations for expanding job opportunities and social networks. Based on urban design theories and literature on Global South urbanism, this article poses the nuanced possibilities of re-imagining the edge as a “space of the maybe,” given its capacity to create new public spheres and a new urban grammar of entangled livelihoods, able to adapt to an urbanity of movement and growth.

‘Giving the right service to different people’: revisiting police legitimacy in the Covid-19 era

ABSTRACT The suspension of certain civil liberties and the extension of police powers to combat the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked concerns about the longer-term implications of the pandemic on police legitimacy. Drawing upon pathways to police legitimacy identified within the literature, this paper examines police officers’ perceptions of the impacts on, and potential challenges to, police legitimacy arising from the pandemic. Qualitative interviews, video diaries and focus groups were conducted with police officers in one police force area in England, captured over a five month period in winter 2020/21. The experience of policing Covid-19 left many police officers concerned about the possible consequences for the relationship with the public. The paper cautions that any gains in public perceptions of procedural justice through using enforcement measures only as a last resort, may be offset by losses in other pathways to legitimacy. Expectations of enforcement and increased visibility plus prolonged changes to deployment practices have all heightened a focus on the more instrumental aspects of police legitimacy. Concerns were also voiced that the policing of Covid-19 has accentuated divisions in society, exacerbating the sense of multiple publics to police, with different and often competing expectations of – and beliefs about – the police. Enforcement falling more heavily within some groups and locations risks exacerbating long-standing concerns about distributive fairness. As agents of social control with unique powers to exercise force and compulsion, the pandemic will require the police to exercise continued vigilance on the means by which public consent and support are sustained.

What can COVID‐19 pandemic reveal about public purpose of a University? A case study

AbstractThis case study examines institutional communication of purpose to stakeholders through Facebook during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The findings show that the institution attempted to reduce the negative impacts of the pandemic on campus life and student experiences while using the pandemic as an opportunity to re‐iterate the importance of its scientific knowledge production, training of professionals, and service to communities. In doing so, it established relationships with multiple publics at a time of crisis, but has run the risk of further losing public trust in science and university as the COVID‐19 pandemic has persisted.

Public Art in (Local) Communities: Multiple Publics and the Dynamic Between Them

The paper’s goal is to investigate the question of the type of public, which serves as a recipient of a particular work of public art. That is, the paper researches the process of how the public is attracted by a given artwork, how this process influences a local community, and what is the actual nature of these publics. As a result, it is argued that some public artworks are intended to have more than one public or, to put it in stronger terms, their task is to bring into play the inner dynamic between numerous publics. Moreover, the possibility of conceptualizing public art not only as a means responsible for facilitating peace but also as revealing the hidden conflicts among the members of the community, to which it is introduced and by whom it is analyzed.

The publics of public health: learning from COVID-19

ABSTRACT This commentary reflects on what has been learnt from government and public health responses to COVID-19, suggesting a tension between ‘business as usual’ forms of public health in the face of crisis, and the possibilities for a step-change towards a ‘healthy publics’ approach. We set out a range of ways that diverse, multiple publics have been implicated or brought into being during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we argue that these have generally been ignored or erased by agents or agencies of public health, keen to preserve certainty in their messaging and public confidence in their authority. We conclude with five principles for re-organising pandemic responses around a richer, more context-dependent and diverse account of ‘the public’.

No common cause? The spaces of urban collective identity

ABSTRACT Working from Michael Sorkin’s expansive notions of public space, the article considers the ways in which figurations of the “we” emerge from the structures of mutual witnessing and the coordination of heterogeneities that operationalize multiple publics. Focusing on a relay amongst the Tanah Tinggi district of Jakarta and the estates of Hackney and East London, the problematics and volatilities of such a “we” are explored, particularly against the backdrop of pandemic conditions. Instead of regarding such collective identity to be a matter of settlement, the relays considered offer an opportunity to further conceptualize collective life in motion, as something continuously worked out as the very terrain of the public.

Labours of Representation: A Bosnian Workers’ Movement and the Possibilities of Collaborative Graphic Ethnography

Collaborative graphic ethnography can generate new ways of identifying, materializing, and documenting political possibility in what otherwise seems like an overdetermined world, and in doing so, offers a model for practicing anthropology differently. We come to these insights through our work in the embattled Bosnian detergent factory “Dita,” located on the outskirts of the post-industrial city of Tuzla, whose workers scored an unprecedented victory when they managed to preserve their factory and restart production despite the threat of bankruptcy and liquidation. In researching and telling the story of their struggle and victory through this innovative format, we build upon the historical popularity of comics in former Yugoslavia, as well as contemporary experimentation with the form among anti-corruption activists in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We explore ethnographic and political affordances of sequential art and the graphic form for an engaged or activist anthropology, including its capacity to visualize and materialize the immaterial and overlooked aspects of politics, mitigate anthropology’s extractivist tendencies, enlist the imagination and participation of readers in directions both hoped for and unanticipated, and engage and animate multiple local and international publics.

Heritage and the Archaeology of Afro-Peru: Community Engagement in the Valleys of Nasca.

The year 2019 marked the quadricentenary of two communities in the Ingenio Valley of Nasca, Peru, founded as vineyard haciendas by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). For a decade, the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (PAHN) has carried out archaeological and ethnohistorical research in collaboration and consultation with valley communities descended from the haciendas’ enslaved populations. PAHN was envisioned as a project aimed at engaging Peruvian publics at multiple scales. PAHN engages local descendant communities in an exploration of their history through historical archaeology, as well as a broader public—entering national conversations about the visibility of African descendants and their histories in Peru. Through our varied approaches to the archaeology of slavery and hacienda as cultural heritage through in-person engagement and our Web initiatives during the international pandemic of 2020, we consider the importance of maintaining engagement with multiple publics when normal activities are disrupted.

A fight for legitimacy: reflections on child protection reform, the reduction of baby removals, and child protection decision-making in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT The rate of orders used to remove babies into the care of Oranga Tamariki reduced by more than half in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2019–2020 as a result of rapid reform, prompted by a high profile media case known as the ‘Hawkes Bay case’. This case provoked social outrage, leading to media and public approbation, inquiries by state and Māori bodies, and advocacy from multiple organisations. Combined, these challenged the legitimacy of the child protection system and led to ‘legitimacy work’, that is, attempts by Oranga Tamariki to regain legitimacy with multiple publics. Access to the legal orders used to remove babies was immediately constricted. A sharp decline in baby removals followed, both overall and the disparities between Māori and non-Māori. The focus on disparity indicators alone, skewed by a focus on public legitimacy, had several unintended consequences. These included a lag between the constrictions on orders and other reforms aimed at addressing the inequities causing disparities, the diminishment of social worker discretion, and limited attention to other forms of system accountability. In the absence of other outcome indicators, particularly those defined by Māori and system-involved families, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding the efficacy of these changes.

2 - Teacher Education, Common Purpose and the Forging of Multiple Publics in South Africa

In an important scholarly intervention on African publics, Raufu Mustapha argues that the multiplicity of publics is not an obstacle but instead a creative resource that can be used to forge common purpose through public deliberation. However, he does not elaborate how common purpose operates and to what effect. In this article, we examine the dynamics of common purpose among student teachers in South Africa. Teachers inculcate the dispositions and habits of public deliberation in young people. How teachers are trained and where they teach is therefore crucial to understanding the constitution of publics. We analyse data from a cohort of student teachers regarding their reasons for becoming teachers, their future plans and their anxieties about their profession. We find little evidence of race and class differences among student teachers. Instead, the evidence suggests that student teachers shared a common purpose informed by hyper-particularistic notions of the public, which was not only raced and classed, but also limited to a narrow understanding of their own community. In light of this, we seek to explain how policy contributes to the conditions under which common purpose leads to segregated publics, closing off the generative possibilities of multiple publics.