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ABSTRACT
This article argues that we need to see the utopian dimension of the early days of the "Solidarność" independent workers' union, created in August 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland, not as a nostalgically recalled event of the distant past, exceptional and therefore petrified as a remnant of past generations, but as a lively political inspiration for our theory and practice for the future. In order to discuss Solidarność as utopia, the article revisits the "proletarian counterpublics" of Kluge and Negt, seeking in their analysis an alternative to the highly elitist analysis of the bourgeois public sphere offered by Jürgen Habermas, which still constitutes the main reference for public articulation of oppositional political will. This article asserts that between the Solidarność counterpublic practice and today there is an intergenerational pact, a weak messianism, to explore: not merely a nostalgic one but with a vision of the future.

This paper engages with the politics of remembering and forgetting that surround the unsettled history of the 1985 Air India bombings. In particular, I use the concepts Nachträglichkeit and "affective recircuitry" to describe the way in which the bombings have been problematically and retroactively framed through a post-9/11 "war on terror" lens in recent, public recollections of this traumatic past. Examples are drawn from the federal Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India 182, as well as from public memorial sites and ceremonies dedicated to those killed in the bombings. The paper also centres on a reading of Eisha Majara's new photomontage series Remember Me Nought to consider how artistic commemorations might contribute to a critical counterpublic in response to the injustices that continue to manifest in the ongoing aftermath of this mass violence. ; https://public.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/public/article/view/32063 ; Postprint version

International audience ; This article discusses the idea of a 'cultural public sphere' together with related notions of 'the' public sphere, 'counterpublics' and 'discourse publics'. It argues that the cultural public sphere emerges from cultural sources (e.g. ethnic identity) rather than political ones and is organized through private pursuits such as music, domestic life and leisure or entertainment venues. The article investigates the formation of a cultural public sphere by using the December 2005 'race riots' on Australian beaches as a case study. It argues that culture interacts with politics as 'new' media interact with mainstream news; and that counterpublic spheres interact with the cultural public sphere as 'internal' communication coexists with 'external'. The role of mainstream media in reporting and commenting on extreme displays is in part to stage conflict so that the general public can think through cultural-political issues via the theatrics.

This article discusses the idea of a 'cultural public sphere' together with related notions of 'the' public sphere, 'counterpublics' and 'discourse publics'. It argues that the cultural public sphere emerges from cultural sources (e.g. ethnic identity) rather than political ones and is organized through private pursuits such as music, domestic life and leisure or entertainment venues. The article investigates the formation of a cultural public sphere by using the December 2005 'race riots' on Australian beaches as a case study. It argues that culture interacts with politics as 'new' media interact with mainstream news; and that counterpublic spheres interact with the cultural public sphere as 'internal' communication coexists with 'external'. The role of mainstream media in reporting and commenting on extreme displays is in part to stage conflict so that the general public can think through cultural-political issues via the theatrics.

International audience This research examines bicyclists' demand for the right to the city through an analysis of Critical Mass (CM) rides in San Francisco, California. The lack of investment allocated to alternative forms of transportation in the United States produces a form of social and spatial injustice because it eliminates freedom of choice not only for already disadvantaged populations but also for those who engage in everyday politics through their lifestyle choices. Ethnographic, historical, and iconographic analyses of CM rides demonstrate how these bicyclists perceive each other as a public built around shared values and lifestyles (that may broadly be defined as environmentally friendly and socially responsible). Bicyclists' shared lifestyle defines their counter position on urban form. CM bicyclists appropriate urban streets and carry their counterdiscourses regarding street use into the public sphere. The rides strengthen bicyclists as a counterpublic, challenge automobiles' cultural hegemony in modern urban life, subvert everyday urban experience, and allow bicyclists to create their counterspaces as they collectively ride.

To explore the connections between Chinese online fiction fandom and feminism, in-depth interviews were conducted with thirty-two Chinese women and nonbinary fans of online fiction. Online fiction fandom is both a counterpublic and an intimate public in which women and nonbinary fans are connected by a common interest, their feminist identities are formed through or emerge through participation in such a public, and their shared values and understanding of feminism create a closer sense of belonging and affective solidarity. Engaging with feminism through online fiction is a form of digital feminism, creating feminist consciousness among online fiction fans through literary and discursive constructs. Women-oriented online fiction has become a space for many young Chinese women and nonbinary people to criticize and challenge patriarchal gender norms and reflect on mainstream gender relations. This space continues to produce educational cultural resources that make feminist learning and practice a work in progress.

Abstract
Since its early days, the labor movement has considered itself to be surrounded by a hostile bourgeois public and sought to counter this with a party press. As a result of the Cold War, Western social democratic parties abandoned in part their traditional beliefs about demarcation. Nevertheless, with the International Federation of the Socialist and Democratic Press, an organization emerged from 1951 to 1982 that manifested separation from the bourgeois public sphere. Drawing on an analytical framework derived from counterpublic theory, this article analyzes ideas and practices developed by members of the organization linked to the Socialist International. The analysis of archival sources reveals that social democratic journalists and publishers remained wedded to the idea of a socialist press countering a hostile public sphere. However, the ideas and practices were mostly limited to strategies aimed at adapting to the existing media structures and only later included media policy approaches.

Many studies have illustrated how digital media can facilitate political criticisms and protests, but recent scholarship has noted the ability of authoritarian states to control the Internet and undermine its oppositional character. This study focuses on the "hybrid regime" of Hong Kong, where the progovernment forces have tried to counteract the formation of an online counterpublic sphere by setting up numerous online outposts since the mid-2010s. It examines how exposure to progovernment online media content is related to political attitudes. In addition to a direct relationship, drawing on inoculation theory, this article contends that progovernment online media may also consolidate support for the government by neutralizing the influence of online alternative media. Survey data analysis shows that exposure to progovernment online media content indeed related to more conservative views, and the connection between online alternative media use and prodemocracy attitudes was weaker among older citizens regularly exposed to progovernment online media.

This study examines the online communicative dynamics between women and men during the Saudi women's rights campaign to end male guardianship, which unfolded on Twitter. We analysed 2.7 million tweets with the #EndMaleGuardianship hashtag over a 7-month period quantitatively and 150,245 of these qualitatively to examine the extent to which Twitter shapes and facilitates cross-gender communication, and how this helped engender new spaces for expression of dissent. Our study shows that Twitter provided shared online communicative spaces that had several characteristics commonly associated with public sphere(s). There is also evidence that using these alternatives spaces, women transcended to an extent the gender segregation that exists in traditional public discourses and spaces of Saudi society. The anonymity of Twitter offered women a safe place to deliberate their concerns about male guardianship. We suggest that these deliberations created a counterpublic sphere of sorts, which helped Saudi women legitimise the #EndMaleGuardianship campaign.

Debates around climate change are a prominent example of polarized online communication. We examine the German climate hyperlink network and evaluate the degree to which it is shaped by mainstream and skeptical views. By combining the theoretical frameworks of the networked public sphere and counterpublics, we describe the relation between publics and counterpublics and discuss the role of hyperlinks in delineating communities. Our analysis of blogrolls and link lists shows the debate's structures to be polarized along factional lines with political and scientific institutions supporting the mainstream "climate-friendly" position. We find that skeptics form a counterpublic that is only loosely connected to the mainstream as neither skeptics nor the mainstream want to be affiliated with each other. Skeptics, thus, are mostly excluded within the German online climate network. However, skeptics are part of an "alliance of antagonism" with other groups, such as conspiracy theorists, men's right groups, and right-wing sites.

This article examines the opportunities and challenges of using the Internet both to promote collective action and identity in the Singapore gay community and as a medium for health intervention. It presents a case study of a community-empowerment project by civil society group Action for AIDS. Framed within a societal context which is hostile toward gay people, and in a place where mixed-media campaigns targeting men who have sex with other men (MSM) are prohibited, this article explores the viability of the Internet as an alternative channel to mass media in reaching out to MSM in Singapore. Through a series of semi-structured interviews and virtual ethnographic content analyses, this article weighs the democratizing and collaborative affordances of the Internet against the uninhibited nature of online discussions in the formation of a counterpublic of sexuality where gay individuals collectively elaborate on meanings about erotic practices, identity, and relations between each other and with the state.

It may be challenging to see how illegal hunting, a crime that ostensibly proceeds as shoot, shovel and shut up in remote rural communities, at all communicates with the regime. Examining the socio-legal interplay between hunters and state regulation, however, clarifies illegal hunting to be part of a politically motivated pattern of dissent that signals hunters' disenfranchisement from the polity. While few contemporary illegal hunters cut conscientious figures like Robin Hood, their violation of illegitimate law may likewise testify to a profound disjuncture between legality and legitimacy. This is the premise taken in the following research. Here it is observed contemporary Swedish hunters experience the deliberative system pertaining to wildlife and wolf conservation to be systematically stacked against them and unable to serve as a site for critical law-making that provides equal uptake of all voices. One manifestation of their growing disenfranchisement is the establishment of a counterpublic mobilised on the basis of shared semantics for the sorts of deliberative deficits they argue befall them in the present. Within the remit of their counterpublic, hunters undertake and justify illegal hunting along with other forms of disengaging dissent like abstentions, non-compliance, boycotts and conscientious refusals with state agencies. The research captures hunters' dissent in Smith's deliberative disobedience, a deliberative and Habermasian grounded reinterpretation of the more familiar classical theory of civil disobedience. On this perspective, illegal hunting signals a deficit in the deliberative system, which hunters both bypass by taking an alternative conduit for contestation, and draw attention to when they undertake dissent. The dissent in this case study is deconstructed in terms of its grammar—as simultaneously engaging and disengaging with the premises of power—and in terms of its communicative content. Set within the field of Environmental Communication, the dissertation is intended as an empirical and theoretical contribution to a discussion on the boundaries of political dialogue in the context of civic disenfranchisement: it asks whether some of hunters' dissent may be parsed as a call for a more inclusive debate, or as dialogic acts in themselves. Finally, it presents ways toward short-term and longer-term reconciliation of hunters with the deliberative system, drawing on the work of contestatory citizen mini-publics from the third wave of deliberative democracy.

Introduction : Black flight / Candis Watts Smith -- 1. African American, Black ethnic, and Dominican political relations in contemporary New York City / Sharon D. Wright Austin -- 2. Black immigration and ethnic respectability : a tale of two cities, New York and Los Angeles / Cory Charles Gooding -- 3. A sanctuary for whom? Race, immigration, and the Black public sphere / Niambi M. Carter -- 4. The three dimensions of political incorporation : Black politics in a majority-minority city / Andrea Benjamin -- 5. The needles in the haystack : assessing the effects of time, place, and class on Blacks in majority-white suburbs / Ernest B. McGowen III -- 6. Black come-outers and the counterpublic : how suburbanization is diversifying Black attitudes / Reuel R. Rogers -- 7. Moving up, out, and across the country : regional differences in the causes of neighborhood change and its effect on African Americans / Jessica Lynn Stewart -- 8. People were not as friendly as I had hoped : Black residential experiences in two multiracial neighborhoods / Sarah Mayorga-Gallo -- Conclusion : Where do we go from here? / Christina M. Greer.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement / Lee, Ching Kwan -- 2. Prefigurative Politics of the Umbrella Movement: An Ethnography of Its Promise and Predicament / Chow, Alex Yong Kang -- 3. Transgressive Politics in Occupy Mongkok / Yuen, Samson -- 4. The Spectrum of Frames and Disputes in the Umbrella Movement / Law, Wing Sang -- 5. Mediascape and Movement: The Dynamics of Political Communication, Public and Counterpublic / Lee, Francis L. F. -- 6. Where Have All the Workers Gone? Reflections on the Role of Trade Unions during the Umbrella Movement / Chan, Chris K. C. -- 7. How Students Took Leadership of the Umbrella Movement: Marginalization of Prodemocracy Parties / Sing, Ming -- 8. Hong Kong's Hybrid Regime and Its Repertoires / Cheng, Edmund W. -- 9. Protest Art, Hong Kong Style: A Photo Essay / Ho, Oscar -- 10. Taiwan's Sunflower Occupy Movement as a Transformative Resistance to the "China Factor" / Wu, Jieh-min -- Afterword. Hong Kong's Turn toward Greater Authoritarianism / Sing, Ming -- Contributors -- Index

Since the advent of social media at the turn of the 21st century, scholars of communication, cultural studies, and media studies have long been invested in the question of the relationship between social media platforms and the discursive formation of counterpublics for social movement mobilization. In this article, we seek to pose a new question for scholarly inquiry: How do citizens leverage the tools of social media platforms to reconstitute counterpublics in times of crisis? Toward this end, we conduct a comparative case study of the way citizens leverage platforms for counterpublic formation in the Republic of Georgia and the United States. Both cases represent two ends of the Janus-face of the 21st-century Internet: The Internet as a tool for public will-formation that can enrich the flowering of democracy across digital spaces, and the Internet as a tool capable of undermining traditional norms of public will formation predicated on shared understanding across the public sphere(s).