Just a plug for a newly published collection of essays I helped edit with Nick Mahony and Janet Newman, Rethinking the Public, which explores different dimensions of contemporary processes of public formation, with case studies ranging from contemporary UK policy debates to colonial India, modern Brazil, and current ‘global’ activism. The chapters are written by bright new things, PhD students or recently completed PhD’s, and cover a range of fields in which questions of who or what constitutes a public are at stake – policy studies, media theory, urban studies and human geography, development studies, political theory, sociology.

Details of how to obtain a copy can be found at the Policy Press website: http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?k=9781847424167

The book develops out of an ESRC-funded research project on the theme of Emergent Publics, which has informed ongoing research initiatives amongst a group of scholars more or less loosely affiliated to the OU’s Public Research Programme in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/