The Contentious Public Sphere

Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to organize, influence the public agenda, and demand accountability from the government.

Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China—one the state must now endeavor to control. Lei examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded. Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. She demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere—and its uncertain future—is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people. Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, The Contentious Public Sphere offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations.

Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China—one the state must now endeavor to control. Lei examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded. Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. She demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere—and its uncertain future—is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people. Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, The Contentious Public Sphere offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations.

Qualitative Inquiry in the Public Sphere examines the relationships between public scholarship, the research marketplace, and the politics of higher education. It is written from the perspective that higher education is under attack from multiple sides, both political and economic; that academics reside in a precarious position, one fraught with accountability metrics, funding pressures, and spiralling bureaucracy; and that scientific knowledge itself is increasingly contentious in public. These internal and external pressures have fundamentally transformed the public sphere of higher education from one of rational public discourse by and for the public good to one of private market relations and strategic research decisions. In turn, these transformations have fundamentally altered what it means to be a ‘productive’ scholar within this space—altered what it means to be a public researcher in this space. Leading international voices from the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway collectively present a forceful rebuke to such developments, raising a clarion call to action on topics ranging from scholarly publishing, audit culture, and the privatization of public knowledge to Indigenous, arts-based, and collaborative research methods. Qualitative Inquiry in the Public Sphere is a must-read for faculty and students alike interested in the politics of being a public researcher—of conducting research in and influencing dialogue in the public sphere.

This book seeks to argue that religious actors play a crucial role in the complex processes of entering or re-entering the public spheres of state, political, and civil society. Seeking to ameliorate the analytical lacuna and concentrating on both the meso and micro levels of religious public involvement, the contributors explain how representatives from religious and political institutions act and interact in a variety of ways for various purposes. Analysing empirical examples from both Europe and beyond, and including a variety of religions, including multi-faith platforms, the volume examines selected religious actors’ objectives, means and strategies and effects in order to address the following questions: • What are selected religious actors’ public and/or political activities and objectives? • In what ways and with what results do selected religious actors operate in various public spheres? • What are the consequences of religious actors’ political involvement, and which factors condition the degree to which they are successful? Whilst focusing mainly on Europe, the book also utilizes examples from Egypt, Turkey and the USA to provide a valuable and unique comparative focus. The contributors demonstrate that various religious actors, whether functioning as interest groups or social movements, and almost irrespective of the religious tradition to which they belong and the culture from which they emanate, do not necessarily differ markedly in terms of strategies. This important study will be of great interest to all scholars of International Politics, Religion, and Public Policy.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Why does the mind matter for collective action? In Contentious Minds, Florence Passy and Gian-Andrea Monsch explain how cognitive and relational processes allow activists participate in and sustain their commitment to activism. Based on a wide array of survey and interview data with activists engaged in protest, volunteering and unions, they highlight how a commitment community develop shared values, identities, and meanings through interaction. The interplay of talk and ties enables stories and meanings to be constructed and exchanged, conveys worldviews and intentions that are modified through ongoing conversations, and reinforces and maintains commitment over time. Passy and Monsch's ambitious work brings the mind and culture back into the study of social movements and highlights the crucial role social networks play in constructing the communities and shared values that sustain commitment.

This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere - that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory. Habermas focuses on the liberal notion of the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in Europe in the early modern period. He examines both the writings of political theorists, including Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville, and the specific institutions and social forms in which the public sphere was realized. This brilliant and influential work has been widely recognized for many years as a classic of contemporary social and political thought, of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

The successful Brexit referendum campaign; Donald Trump’s election; and the rise of right-wing nationalist-populist political parties and movements – all of these events have incited renewed interest in public communication and the internetised media, deliberative democracy and public spheres, challenged by an informational abundance that generates a communicative liquefaction of publicness and politics. This book celebrates the 25th anniversary of the journal Javnost – The Public, bringing together internationally renowned scholars from 20 countries to discuss topical issues in contemporary media and communication research. It focuses on challenging issues of the changing nature of publicness and the public sphere in the internet age, issues of democracy and the crisis of public communication and the tasks of media and communication research as a social practice. It critically reflects on the democratisation crisis and the demise of popular and scholarly optimism, which the emerging internet inspired in early 1990s, when Javnost – The Public was founded.