Open AccessBook
Publics and Counterpublics
TLDR
The idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life as mentioned in this paper, and it has powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern lives involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations.Abstract:
Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.read more
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Transparency in Search of a Theory
TL;DR: Transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, government information, and the public as discussed by the authors, which should lead us to question the state's ability to control information.
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Mediation and protest movements
TL;DR: Mediation and protest movements as discussed by the authors explores the nature of the relationship between protest movements, media representation, and communication strategies and tactics, focusing on the processes and practices that contemporary protesters use when acting with (and through) media.
Journal ArticleDOI
Why Katrina's Victims Aren't Refugees: Musings on a" Dirty" Word
TL;DR: The authors explored the significance of the concept of "the refugee" for U.S. citizens, and discussed what the failure to find an appropriate term to describe stranded New Orleanians reveals about the experience of poverty.
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The radicalisation of rural resistance: How hunting counterpublics in the Nordic countries contribute to illegal hunting
Erica von Essen,Hans Peter Hansen,Helena Nordström Källström,M. Nils Peterson,Tarla Rai Peterson +4 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the perceived exclusion of hunters in the public debate on conservation mobilised this subculture toward resistance against regulatory agencies, and that failure to grant recognition to the counterpublic radicalised some individuals beyond counterpublic by engaging in illegal hunting.
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Journal Article
The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society
Jürgen Habermas,Thomas Burgerm +1 more
TL;DR: A preliminary demarcation of a type of Bourgeois public sphere can be found in this article, where the authors remark on the type representative publicness on the genesis of the Bourgois Public Sphere.
Book
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
TL;DR: Althusser's "For Marx" (1965) and "Reading Capital" (1968) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship as mentioned in this paper.
Book
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
TL;DR: Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig shows how code can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms.