The public multiple
Community organizing and fractal politics in East London
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3313086 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Farhan Samanani (0000-0002-7361-4076, King's College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1003-1022 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9655.14316 |
| OpenAlex | W4414261000 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 52 |
Politics requires collective deliberation, but what happens when people cannot agree on how to deliberate? Anthropologists and other social scientists have urged us to look beyond the hegemonic liberal ideal of public reason, in order to recognize a plurality of publics, each held together by distinctive forms of reason. Yet, the more this plurality comes to the fore, the more we are confronted with questions of how publics might connect and deliberate across their differences. This article draws on work with community organizers in East London, who work with a diverse range of local institutions - from churches to schools to mosques. It traces how organizers respond to the 'constitutive exclusions' that delimit different publics. In dialogue with the work of Hannah Arendt - which enables us to recognize the possibilities and limits of different sorts of publics - it explores how community organizers draw together different, incommensurable publics without collapsing these into one another. Working across different communities and collectives, community organizers weave a wider 'fractal public', by positioning different publics as emerging out of and dependent on one another. In doing so, they offer a different model for how we might address political and intellectual dilemmas that implicate diverse worlds, publics, and forms of reason, but nonetheless require collective answers
Community organizing · Hegemony · Localism · Politics · Publics · Irish and British Studies · Political and Economic history of UK and US
Publics and Politics
The Logic of Care
After Empire
Shoveling Smoke
The Politics of Recognition
Contesting culture
Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality
Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
Publics and the Public Sphere
Being good in Ramadan
The theory of communicative action
Placeless People
Lived Experiences of Multiculture
Multiculturalism
Us and Them
Care in Practice
White Nation
Reassembling the Social
Staying with the Trouble
Diversity vs. Pluralism
Matters of care
The Battle of Britishness
Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era
Conviviality and Multiculture
Populist Publics
Colonial global economy
Recreating Igorot identity in diaspora
An Immigration History of Britain
Contradictions of standard language in Europe
Rediscovering the “everyday” Muslim
Racial Europeanization
Racialized modernity
The Cunning of Recognition
Capitalism and extreme poverty
A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction
Conviviality and its others
Language Ideologies Compared
Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination
Publics and Counterpublics
Power in a minor key
The Anthropology of Populism
Marketing Logics and the Politics of Public Spheres
"This Is Not a Parade, It's a Protest March"
For Whom the Ontology Turns
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |