The Production of Counter-Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production

The last decades have seen an international revival of interest in public realm theory and it has become the foremost means to understand the changing social conditions for democratic practices. The debate about “public sociology” in the US initiated by Michael Burawoy’s address to the American Sociological Association has underscored the stakes of understanding how publics work: It reminds us that an analysis of the public sphere is not only a task for specialists within the academy, it is a condition of all intellectual practice that aims to be reflexive about the conditions of its own possibility and its effectiveness in the world.