Digesting the Public Sphere

<p>In the routine spectrum of our lives we inhabit the public sphere. Whether in the street the shopping center or on the bus we engage with the empowered the disempowered the omitted and the powerful. Within the public sphere the notion of public involves a complexity of approaches to aspects of everyday practices of power performance and place. Through these approaches that which is public can be visualized experienced and contested in the construction ceremony and design of buildings institutions and daily activities. In a variety of ways the conceptualization and contextualization of the public contributes to identity formations narratives of community and manifestations of the political that materially and discursively transpire within the public sphere in the perceptions of inequality metaphors for knowledge and critiques of consciousness. For this volume focused on interpretive methods and methodologies that address the concept of public we present a lively engagement with methodological insight into the political digestion of the public sphere. We delve into models of and approaches to conducting research the analysis of findings and the reaffirmation of enhanced techniques of related inquiry in public spaces. We seek to explore the following questions: What is the public? How do we visualize/understand/experience the public? What are the ways in which these insights connect to articulations of citizenship and democracy? How is the public implicated in the political? The chapters originally published as a special issue in <em>Space and Polity</em>. </p>