New Book on "The Global Public Sphere"

The Global Public Sphere

Public Communication in the Age of Reflective Interdependence

by Ingrid Volkmer

(Polity Press, 2014)

224 pages


Description

Over the last several years, the debate about publics seems to have newly emerged. This debate critically reflects the Habermasian ideal of a (national) public sphere in a transnational context. However, it seems that the issue of a reconstruction of a global public sphere is more complex. In this brilliant and provocative book, Ingrid Volkmer argues that a reflective approach of globalization is required in order to identify and deconstruct key strata of deliberate public discourse in supra- and subnational societal formations. This construction helps to understand the new processes of legitimacy at the beginning of the 21st century in which the traditional conception of a ‘public’ and its role as a legitimizing force are being challenged and transformed. The book unfolds this key phenomenon of global deliberate interconnectedness as a discursive and negotiated dimension within ‘reflective’ globalization, i.e. continuously constituting, maintaining and refining the ‘life’ of the global public and conceptualizes a global public sphere.

Contents [preview]

Introduction
1. Public Territories and the Imagining of Political Community
2. Post-Territoriality in Spheres of Public Assemblages
3. From Reflexive Modernity to Reflective Globalization
4. Public Interdependence, Interlocutors and the Matrix of Influence
5. From the Public Sphere to Public Horizons

Ingrid Volkmer is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. She is the editor of "The Handbook of Global Media Research" (Wiley-Blackwell,  2012). In this video Ingrid Volkmer talks about her work.

See also her paper on "The European Public" (2011, pdf)