This text makes the argument that to understand the communicative skills and other competencies associated with active citizenship in the public sphere, one must analyse cultural circumstances within everyday life. Citizens do not magically emerge, fully formed and ready to participate, at age 18; they - and their civic skills - are shaped by a variety of factors in the private sphere.

/pdf/doing-citizenship-the-cultural-origins-of-civic-agency-in-5b92y6epf4.pdf

Doing citizenship: the cultural origins of civic agency in the public sphere

Building on Mouffe’s critique of cosmopolitanism, this article argues that a cosmopolitan mode of remembering, far from having superseded the antagonistic mode associated with ‘first modernity’ in the European context, has proved unable to prevent the rise of, and is being increasingly challenged by, new antagonistic collective memories constructed by populist neo-nationalist movements. This article outlines the main defining characteristics of a third ‘agonistic’ mode of remembering, which is both reflexive and dialogic, yet also relies upon politicized representations of past conflicts, acknowledging civic and political passions as well as individual and collective agency.

On agonistic memory

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Habermas's account of the transformation of the public sphere in modern society. More specifically, the study aims to demonstrate that, whilst Habermas's approach succeeds in offering useful insights into the structural transformation of the public sphere in the early modern period, it does not provide an adequate theoretical framework for understanding the structural transformation of public spheres in late modern societies. To the extent that the gradual differentiation of social life manifests itself in the proliferation of multiple public spheres, a critical theory of public normativity needs to confront the challenges posed by the material and ideological complexity of late modernity in order to account for the polycentric nature of advanced societies. With the aim of showing this, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section elucidates the sociological meaning of the public/private dichotomy. The second section scrutinizes the key features of Habermas's theory of the public sphere by reflecting on (i) the concept of the public sphere, (ii) the normative specificity of the bourgeois public sphere, and (iii) the structural transformation of the public sphere in modern society. The third section explores the most substantial shortcomings of Habermas's theory of the public sphere, particularly its inability to explain the historical emergence and political function of differentiated public spheres in advanced societies.

https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1101/1/simon susen 'critical notes on habermass theory of the public sphere' sa 5(1) pp 37-62.pdf

Critical Notes on Habermas's Theory of the Public Sphere

This article analyses the Danish ‘cartoon crisis’ as a transnational ‘humour scandal’. While most studies conceptualize this crisis as a controversy about free speech or international relations, this article addresses the question why the crisis was sparked by cartoons. First, the article discusses the culturally specific ‘humour regime’ in which the cartoons were embedded. Second, it analyses the power dynamics of humour.Thirdly, it discusses how the cartoon crisis added a new element to the image of Muslims as completely Other and lacking in modernity: they have no sense of humour. Analysis of this controversy as humor scandal allows us, first, to identify its ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Next, it underscores the emergence of a transnational public sphere. Finally, and most importantly, it highlights the politics of humour — a slippery, often exclusive mode of communication — in national and transnational public spheres.

The politics of humour in the public sphere: Cartoons, power and modernity in the first transnational humour scandal:

Prologue: a hiatus of history 1. Remembering a war of selves and others 2. Culture, politics, civil war 3. Discourses on amnesia and reconstruction: memory in the 1990s 4. Nostalgias 5. Inside violence 6. Sectarian memory cultures 7. Truth telling in the Independence Intifada Conclusion.

/pdf/war-and-memory-in-lebanon-405bbd133h.pdf

Michael E Gardiner

Papers

Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere: