Theorizing the “Public”—Recognizing Ephemeral and Migrating Publics and the Educative Agent

Arendt and the Public Realm

To understand how Arendt engages with and conceptualizes the public realm, it is necessary to understand the circulation of modes of being Arendt identifies as occurring within society. Arendt’s work in The Human Condition (Arendt, 1958) is a consideration of what constitutes being human. This work, traversing antiquity through to the modern era, has both a political and a philosophical expose. In Arendt’s writing on the “The Public and the Private Realm,” she identifies two elements of the public. First, Arendt notes “. . .everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity” (Arendt, 1958, p. 50). Second, Arendt writes “. . .the term public signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us” (Arendt, 1958, p. 52). Arendt outlines three spheres of being that circulate in society: Labor, Work, and Action. Labor is an activity that is undertaken to preserve ourselves and is biologically driven. Work is the activity that moves human existence outside of the so-called natural world to one where human existence is bounded by that which is not the natural. Action, and for Arendt this is coupled with speech, is an order of being whereby a new beginning occurs. This distinction of action and speech is central to our reading of the public. Later in this article, we elaborate this notion of action and speech, its nature, and its role in the world. Work is the production of objects beyond the labor of biological survival. Both labor and work are necessary for existence. Action and speech, however, constitute the space where freedom can appear. Arendt (1958) writes “Of all the activities necessary and present in human communities, only two were deemed to be political and to constitute what Aristotle called the bio politikos, namely action and speech” (p. 25). The public realm is where the possibility of realizing the third sphere, that of action and speech, can occur. This is important for the realization of a reading of the public which goes beyond a structural analysis. Here, we have insight into the nature of publicness—its distinctive possibilities—its dynamic opportunities for human expression.

Ephemeral Public

Since Arendt wrote there have been significant global changes. These include what we hope is a temporary change in the way life is organized subject to the COVID 19 global pandemic, and then, what may not change is the reorganization of large parts of the world through the rise of entanglements with the virtual (Pinar, 2021). These changes have brought attention to an ephemeral iteration of the public which exceeds the immediate physicality of Arendt’s public realm. This disconnect between an ephemeral public and an assembled physical public is informed by the work of Michael Warner (2002). In “Publics and Counterpublics,” Warner argues that “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (Warner, 2002, p. 413). He asserts that the public can be the social totality of people in general or it can be a concrete audience, or it can be “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (Warner, 2002, p. 413). He sees the public as self-organized through discourse and not through an external framework (Warner, 2002). In his theorization, the public is discursively constructed, and through this he pays particular attention to the addressee. The address of public speech is both personal and impersonal, and it exists only through mere attention. Without attention, it ceases to exist. The entry condition demanded by a public is to come into its range. For Warner, a public is “poetic world making” (Warner, 2002, p. 424). Attention to Warner is particularly relevant in this context as the issue of address is significant when the public is largely absent or at best fleeting. We have observed a particular iteration of public that we are terming the ephemeral public. When we consider the ephemeral public, it is a recognition of a particular structural reading. The formation of an assembly is problematized. In the ephemeral public, the formation of the public does not involve the public being in a physical congregation, or in immediate contact or even in sight of each other. We have encountered the ephemeral public as traces of the physical presence of people in public spaces. During the COVID 19 lockdown in Melbourne, Australia, during 2020 and 2021, the public space of walking paths fell silent. Images and written messages were drawn on the footpath and, as Warner notes above, were addressed to those who were walking by. It was permissible to be on these paths in pairs but not to congregate or gather in front of the artworks on the walking paths. The public realm was formed by moving individuals and pairs who avoided any proximity to each other. At best, when walking we felt the passing presence of a public—a distributed public, a moving public. In this daily permissible two-hour walk, this walking and this moving created our only physical experience of being the public. The need for physical participation in the public was insistent but not allowed under government order in other than a group of two. We went to the walkways wanting participation with the other. However, in that desired experience, we also intentionally resisted proximity to the other staying at a recommended safer distance of two meters. We had a heightened awareness of the other. This desire was met by a sensitivity to the traces of the moving public, the ephemeral public. These traces, consisting of the images and written messages, were encountered by others but not as a congregating public (Charman & Dixon, 2021). The public did not come together, but the walkways were heavy with the fleeting presence of people. In our constant movement on the public walkways, we participated in the constitution and the experience of that ephemeral public. Here was present Arendt’s web of relationships where the space of appearance came into being and where people were together in the manner of speech and action. The togetherness was not actualized in real time as the other walkers may have moved on, but still their presence was felt. In this fragmented way, this public can be said to “act together in concert” (Arendt, 1958, p. 4) and create a public space where freedom could appear.

The term “ephemeral” has been used in diverse disciplines as a way of describing the nature of things and experiences. In film and media studies, the digital media is often described as ephemeral as the media products disappear (Pesce & Noto, 2016). Our deployment of the term ephemeral does link to this disappearance. The term ephemeral linked to the physical has been used in the fields of ecology and water resource management. There, streams which have shorter flow durations and lower predictability than rivers are named ephemeral streams (Datry et al., 2017). Our use of ephemeral has strong links with the way it is put to work by art historians Bauer and Mugari in their research on exhibition spaces. They identified these spaces as ephemeral as they “were, either deliberately or otherwise, short-lived, quickly abandoned, or constantly under construction” (Bauer & Mugari, 2021, p. 7). In our reading of the public, however, we are not referring to the space as ephemeral. The walkways were constant and stable. Nor do we recognize the artworks themselves as ephemeral. Rather, the walking public was both fleeting and physical.

The ephemeral public with its traces, partial and fleeting nature, shares similarities with virtual public engagements. The ephemeral public is constituted, however, by traces of the physical presence of people unlike the virtual. What is shared with the virtual is its distance from the other.

Our current experience of the public has gone beyond the “mediated publicness” asserted by Thompson (1995, p. 236) only twenty years ago. Thompson, in theorizing modern society in general, then identified the main characteristics of the mediated publicness of modern society as de-spatialized in terms of time and space. It is, he claimed, “an opening, a sphere of possibilities” (Thompson, 1995, p. 246). This sphere is also non-dialogical and has wider and diverse audiences. He warns that individuals are not in full control of their self-presentation. Papacharissi (2002) argued that “we transcend physical space and bodily boundaries upon entering cyberspace. This has a fundamental impact on how we carry ourselves online, and is simply different from how we conduct ourselves offline” (p. 21). The rise of entanglements with the virtual world combined with the lockdown of physical public spaces has resulted in extended and repeated virtual engagements for education and work purposes. The public we share in these meetings is not physical. Desai argues that it can be, nonetheless, a public sphere: “We have seen at least in the world of the internet connected, a ‘virtual’ transformation of the public sphere—a transformation as ‘real’ as ‘virtual’ can get” (Desai, 2013, p. 3). During periods of lockdown, this experience often occurs in the privacy of our homes. Like other parts of the world, Zoom and Facetime became a constant source of bringing people into our private spaces. In this situation, this virtual public iteration is experienced in the digital world and located at the border of the physical public and the physical private. We are at the one time in the private space of our homes but in the public space of the virtual world. The boundaries of the public and private begin to collapse. This collapse raises the question of the fabrication of any fixed or stable boundary between the public and the private. Savage (2014) asserted that “public is typically used in mythologized and totalizing ways, operates on a false public/private distinction and fails to account for the disjunctive nature of globalizing publics” (p. 79). As the experience of the public/private collapse changes as the pandemic recedes, the question of this sharp demarcation of the public and private remains.

Migrating Publics

The second iteration of public we term migrating publics. The naming of this iteration as migrating indicates its location at the borders, and in this instance, we recognize this public at the border of the public and of the professional/institutional. In literature which contends with the term public, there is no consistent definition. The term public sphere is associated with Habermas (Habermas et al., 1974). Initially, the public sphere was theorized as a formation of individuals who came together in various social spaces such as clubs and coffee houses or who contributed to newspapers. This public formation was porous to the extent that its constitution was determined by commodity exchange driven by economic markets (Calhoun, 2010). This meant persons with money or, to use Habermas’s descriptive term, the bourgeoisie formed initial configurations of the public sphere. For Habermas, the public sphere is not to be understood as a physical location, but first and foremost as a certain “form” of interaction. Habermas et al., (1074) write,

By “the public sphere” we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. (p. 49)

This definition is not to be confused with the broader term public. Habermas (1974) asserted that the notion of the public is not just a gathering of people, but it refers to an institution and this constitutes what he terms the public sphere. The work of this sphere was to discuss matters of shared concern and in turn to inform state policy. This formation can be understood as an element of democratic society. The public sphere is understood to arise as part of civil society and is constituted by adults who have gained maturity and intellectual autonomy (Calhoun, 2010). However, given the elite nature of its composition, it is in fact only one segment of society. To this end, the constitution of the public sphere as a concept has proved itself to be finite and has given rise to the term and formation of counterpublics (Warner, 2002). Subsequent commentators have noted the exclusion of the working class, women, and non-White people from Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. Critics of Habermas have noted the public sphere was much less open and much less equal (Charles & Fuentes-Rohwer, 2015). However, these critics also acknowledge Habermas’s idea of the public sphere is significant to critical social theory and to democratic political practice as debate is a critical component of democracy (Charles & Fuentes-Rohwer, 2015). Migrating publics have a close association with counterpublics but are differentiated by individual or group movement into a professional context.

Migrating publics have come out of our recent work (Charman & Dixon, 2021) in projects where members of the public were invited to move from their place in the membership of the public into the space of the professionals/the institution. Migrating publics constitute an incursion into these more formal institutions by people who don’t qualify as “professionals.” We use this term migrating public based on the long established historical determinants that mean some public entities maintain institutional power. This is a temporary move, and these migrants must return to the broader public unless they are formally accredited with the qualifications that mark them as professionals. These migrating publics exist in multiple spaces concurrently. They are positioned in both the public and the professional. For migrating publics, their authority is enhanced through their proximity to the institution. To understand the implications of the migrating public, we initially turn to work undertaken by students in a social history museum and then to a research project in a coastal town.

Our first recognition of migrating publics occurred in a university unit of study where students realized their projects in a social history museum. Significantly, these students were not in the process of studying museums with a view to working in one. They were not training to enter this profession. The “professional” endowed with the responsibility of curating can only be one who has undergone the requisite education. Traditionally, the role of the curator in Australia is one where formal curatorial and heritage studies have been undertaken. The studies enable work as a curator in art and social history museums as well as heritage sites. Study in this area is premised on a prior degree in art history or history. This hierarchy of educational attainment gives an indication of who is recognized as having the capacity to work as a curator. The focus of the student work was “stories of immigration.” The location of the project was a regional area where when immigration occurred it was mainly from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This work collapsed the relationship to immigration from one where this phenomenon was viewed as contemporary and urban to something that has been happening in Australia since colonization. For these students in their curatorial work, this meant understanding that they themselves were implicated in a narrative of immigration. In fact, in the instance of the exhibition work in this regional area, the narrative was such that new publics were attracted to attending the museum. We think of this new public and the curatorial work through the term proximity. Students as curators and the public, in this instance, were situated within a given cultural and geographical space where they were familiar with the broad contours of narratives that are being told, such as the locations, relationships or lineage, and how these narratives are represented through objects and associated text or short videos. The specific individual stories might be unfamiliar, but they are not on the whole unknown. They can be positioned and understood in ways which create a proximity of experience. However, this notion of proximity is employed to take account of not just what the new public in the museum space experiences but for what is occurring for the students as curators. The students were given permission by the social history museum curators to curate their stories of immigration in the museum space, open to the public and with the credibility of a museum setting. Later in this article, we argue these students are in fact educative agents as they took the space available to them to speak and act from local knowledge regarding the stories depicted in the curatorial work.

In a further iteration of migrating publics, we turn to our work in the Knowledge Project (Charman et al., 2017, 2019). The Knowledge Project studies how people value, view, perform, and experiment with knowledge and education, and it does this within a specific local area to address the role of place in this community knowledge. This ongoing project aims to focus each iteration of the research on one particular community, and it was determined early in the project formation that the research site would be limited to the geographic boundaries of a suburb. Each iteration involves a prolonged period of research engagement in the suburb or town. This project is based on interviews of the local people in community groups, local industries, and public locations such as public libraries and shopping centers. In one of these projects, we engaged with students at a local secondary school who were also residents of the town we were researching. The students became the researchers, and we use the term Citizen Researcher to describe their work (Charman & Dixon, 2021). The citizen researcher is an act of transgression as students cross the professional line through running the interviews, determining the data sourcing, and participating in the analysis. The process of citizen researcher began with three in-school sessions with the secondary school students on doing social science research and the intent of the project. The students/citizen researchers were then involved in data collection and analysis. Data collection included leading group interviews with local community members. This work also included photographing significant areas of the suburb. The citizen researchers also participated in initial thematic analysis of interview transcripts.

The citizen researchers’ contribution to this project was invaluable. The richness of the knowledge generated through the approach of the citizen researchers has reinforced the strength of what might be understood as inter-community engagement. Specifically, students interviewed much older residents of the coastal town and this inter-generational exchange demonstrated the continuity of knowledge over time. At times, these inter-generational interviews were quite moving as the students discovered historical layers to their town and the older residents were heartened to hear that what they had enjoyed of the town when they were young is still happening today. As in the museum projects, these students were the educative agents sharing knowledge on their own authority.

In each of these examples, students as curators and students as social science researchers, we recognize them as migrating publics. This enhanced authority flows through the address between migrating publics and the broader public. In our reading of the public, we highlight the value of these migrating publics in their augmented authority to shape the address and the responses within institutions. However, a position as part of a migrating public is tenuous and contingent. At the completion of work within these public institutions, those who constitute the migrating public step back into the broader public space and are positioned once again as outside. A flow of authority follows these movements. However, from this temporary position of authority, the new migrant publics are in a knowledge exchange with the public. This opens up the possibility for others in the public to consider their own migration into institutional settings of power. In so doing, there is the possibility of countering the established institutional discourses. Migrating publics cannot enact themselves in the same ways as those coming from a credentialed professional position. As such, they are not determined by prevailing institutional conventions, and within this there is the possibility of different knowledge formations. Migrating publics test the limits of the publicness of these institutional spaces (Biesta, 2012). Gert Biesta, drawing on the work of Ranciere, is interested in this idea of dissensus. This notion of interrupting pertains more to the ideas of publicness. Biesta (2012) writes,

To “stage” dissensus is to introduce an incommensurable element—an event, an experience and an object—that can act both as a test and as a reminder of publicness. It is an element that can act as a “test” of the public quality of particular forms of togetherness and of the extent to which actual spaces and places make such forms of human togetherness possible. (p. 693)

In Biesta’s work, he looks for examples that test publicness. We argue that whenever there is an instance of migrating publics, the limits of its publicness are addressed. In the next section, we examine who both holds and enacts knowledge within the public realm and the sorts of possibilities this engenders.

Educative Agent—The Possibility of the Public

In this section, we address our concept of the educative agent and its relationship with the public. Our understanding of the public has been informed by what occurs in the public’s pedagogical encounter with knowledge. This encounter is brought into being with the interaction of public, pedagogy, knowledge, and authority. We note that here the public is attuned to other voices. From these voices, different iterations of knowledge are recognized. Knowledge and authority flow through and significantly emanate from the public. We put forward the term educative agent to encapsulate who enacts pedagogy, knowledge, and authority in the public realm. Importantly, the educative agent often goes unrecognized as they may not hold an institutional position of power such as the instances above of the students as curators and as researchers. We have developed the concept of educative agent through drawing on the work of Arendt, Foucault, and Luxon.

In Arendt’s philosophical framework, each individual is born unique, and as such their birth constitutes a new beginning. Through speech and action, this uniqueness is revealed. This uniqueness is referred to as who a person is as opposed to what a person is. As Arendt (1958) writes, “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world. . . This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labour, and it is not prompted by utility like work” (pp. 176–177). Arendt writes of two manifestations of action and speech. One is the interest which lies between people and as such binds them together. These in-between words and deeds are about some “. . .worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent” (Arendt, 1958, p. 182). In this instance, the outcomes can be quite tangible. For example, this could be when people come together for any common purpose such as to organize a community event or undertake a working bee. The second manifestation of action and speech, according to Arendt (1958), is not tangible, “. . . as there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify” (p. 183). However, this second manifestation, like the first, reveals “the who through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt” (Arendt, 1958, p. 184). Categories that mark identity as a role such as student, teacher, carpenter, curator, researcher, or cleaner all indicate the what of a person and bring with them the assumptions of particular attributes and qualities. However, in Arendt’s work, something other is revealed through the speaking agent. What this something is can be difficult to define. In fact, Arendt does not definitively state what the characteristics of the who that is revealed could be constituted of as it is impossible to predict. This is because the who that is revealed speaks to the uniqueness of each of us. What Arendt does indicate is that this revelation is the moment of a beginning and makes itself visible in the public realm, “. . . from which everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded” (Arendt, 1958, p. 25). In this public realm, there is the possibility of the appearance of the agent revealed through speech and action. Arendt (1958) writes, “Whenever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever” (p. 199). In this second iteration, there is no capacity to predict or control what might arise through the action and speech of the agent, and as such we can’t attribute the result to the person who set the idea in motion.

This conceptual framing that separates the who and what is significant because it offers relief from the interpolation of the subject into the, often detrimental, forces of categorization. Work, social, cultural, and biological categories constitute the “what” of a person. The who of a person is constituted through their individual movement between and beyond these constituents. There is, within Arendt’s work, a distinct oscillation between people together for a common purpose and those speaking agents who in the process of this action reveal who they are. If we ask the question, where does knowledge reside from which the new can arise, it can be seen through the revelation of the self in speech and action. We extend this understanding of this revelation to the appearance of what we term the educative agent—this is the becoming of the educative agent. However, this conceptualization of the revelation of the self can be further understood through Foucault’s theorization of power and subjectivity—specifically his use of Parrhesia—the truth teller.

Broadly, Foucault’s work offers an interrogation into how discourses constitute fields of knowledge. These fields of knowledge operate to constitute subjects in particular ways. In a series of lectures between 1982 and 1983 to the Collège de France, Foucault notes that particular conditions have existed and become modified over time to regulate the speaking subject. Foucault (2010) writes, “We constitute ourselves as a universal subject when as rational beings we address all other rational beings” (p. 53). This use of rational indicates the importance of our use of reason. However, often we are dissuaded or denied this use of reason through obedience. Foucault uses the term tutelage to describe this state of obedience: “There is tutelage when obedience is confused with non-reasoning, and when, in this confusion of obedience and non-reasoning we suppress what should be the public and universal use of our understanding” (Foucault, 2010, p. 53).

In both the work of Foucault and Arendt, the existence of a proper space is present, by which is meant a public realm in which to exercise the capacity to speak. For our conceptualization of the educative agent, it is important to recognize that a proper space is one that is not determined by institutional constraint or imbued with elements of work. Furthermore, the question of obedience that dissuades our use of reason is central to the circulation both of authority and of knowledge. The educative agent speaks or acts knowledge. The students as curators and as researchers were educative agents who spoke their knowledge. Informed by Foucault, this is a parrhesiastic act or enunciation. Foucault (2010) writes,

Parrhesia is always a sort of formulation of the truth at two levels. A first level is that of the statement of the truth itself (at this point, as in the performative, one says the thing, and that’s that). The second level of the parrhesiastic act, the parrhesiastic enunciation is the affirmation that in fact one genuinely thinks, judges, and considers the truth one is saying to be genuinely true. (p. 64)

Parrhesia is described by Foucault as “. . . a pact of the speaking subject within himself.” Further, Foucault (2010) argues,

Parrhesia only exists when there is freedom in the enunciation of the truth, freedom of the act by which the subject says the truth, and freedom also of the pact by which the subject speaking binds himself to the statement and enunciation of the truth. To that extent, it is not the subject’s social institutional status that we find at the heart of parrhesia; it is his courage. (pp. 65–66)

This is not to say that the parrhesiastic act or enunciation concerns an absolute truth. Truth is an agent of political endeavor and therefore of ideological contestation. ¹ What is important for Foucault in his argument and then for the educative agent is that the speaking subject in this instance is not performative relative to institutional position; the enunciation occurs outside of this.

In both ephemeral and migrating publics, we observed the educative agent. The writing and placement of objects is an incursion by the educative agent into the public walking spaces. This address reveals elements of who this person is through their choice of words and objects. In migrating publics, students as curators and citizen researchers spoke on their own authority. In the instance of the museums, the student curator’s capacity to research and represent through text and object indicates a positioning as an educative agent. In citizen researcher, the educative agent is revealed through the student’s migration from student to an authority where their knowledge was the catalyst for the rich discussion with older members of the community. Our concern is to redress what is silenced by dominant discourses as iterations of power. In her work on authority, Luxon (2013) turns her attention to a Freudian psychoanalytical understanding of re-authorization. Luxon draws on psychoanalysis to understand how the terms of authority can be re-worked and as a consequence shift a reading of subject formation beyond the terms of subjugation. Theories of subject formation often interrogate the ways in which power operates ² . Luxon (2013) writes, “Through the psychoanalytic encounter individuals learn to transmute their reading and assessment of others’ authoritative claims into their own capacity for self-authorship” (p. 52). Her reading explicitly calls up a questioning of the ways that the self has been formed in relationship with others. In so doing, the possibility inherent in psychoanalysis is that through a therapeutic process an individual can understand the capacity for a re-presentation of events and a re-structuring of a capacity for authorship of those events. For Luxon, this re-negotiation of authority can happen through the relational and trust building that is central to the analytic process. In psychoanalysis, this is not straightforward and is instead a contestation between analyst and patient evidenced in psychic resistance. From this therapeutic understanding, Luxon identifies the implications this psychoanalytic model has for a broader authority and the capacity to author cultural narratives. To this end, for Luxon the subject is not formed through subjugation/power and has the capacity to resist being overwritten by cultural narratives.

Luxon brings the relational to the fore. She foregrounds the constitution of our relationship with authority or what we are naming as power and highlights the way through which these relations can be re-thought and ultimately transformed. For the purposes of theorizing the public, the implications of a subject, who has re-cast or re-educated the self, relative to these authorities, are that they are able to enact a mode of being that is self-authorized. We argue that to enact this mode of self-authorization, the public realm must exist and be attuned to this occurrence. As we previously outlined in our discussion of what constitutes the public realm, we noted it as a space that affords the possibility to disclose the who of a person as unique. This brings with it the implication of a growing sense of agency.

Our term educative agent specifically addresses authority. When the public realm is activated, as we have outlined above, there is the possibility of the educative agent. Just as Arendt has outlined, it is through the disclosure of the who in action and speech that there is the possibility of freedom. We argue for a particular conceptualization of the public realm whereby we observe the confluence of educative agent, pedagogy, authority, and knowledge. These elements do not always occur with the same degree of intensity. However, when any of these elements does occur, the emergent possibilities can be dynamic. This sense of the dynamic brings us back to Arendt’s and Foucault’s respective theorizations. We have built our reading of the public through Arendt’s (1958) concept of this realm as a space whereby people come together and the creation of the conditions for the revelation of who a person is. This revelation occurs in the public realm through speech and action, and this is critical for the circulation and recognition of what constitutes authority. For Foucault, one of the central questions is who can speak. To this end, Foucault (2010) notes the differentiation of speaking within the discursive bounds of an institution and speaking outside of this positioning. In an enactment of Parrhesia—truth teller—the subject speaks outside of or beyond regulative institutional determinants. Inhabiting and enacting this speaking position is a risk in part because this is outside of the confines of the affordances of power. This confluence between speech, action, and parrhesia is the crux of our understanding of authority. We argue that creating the conditions for and recognizing this configuration of authority are critical to recognizing agency and thus change. Herein lies the possibilities of the new, of knowledge, and the subject that is speaking is the educative agent.

Conclusion

In the many research projects we have undertaken in this field, including a few we have referred to in this article, we are confronted by the changing spatial and temporal dynamics of what is variously understood as the public. Although pedagogical encounters of the public have been the main attention and the central concern of the research projects, it has been this insistent and changing manifestation of the public which has been most generative. This theorization has as its focus the publics in the making. Our attention has brought to the fore two iterations of the public—ephemeral and migrating publics—which often go unrecognized. The formations of the public advanced in this article and the possibility of the educative agent as part of the public indicate the emergent nature of the public. In coming times, this emergence demands vigilance in our attention to the changing shape of publics.

The most compelling work in this reconsideration of the public is the recognition of the possibility of the public in the educative agent. Here, we see and/or hear the flow of knowledge coming from the one in the public speaking and/or acting on their own authority. This speech and action expresses the possibility of the assertion of authority from within the public. This may be a realization of the self and a realization of the public, which may not be limited to speaking back to the profession or the institution but may be a creation of the new.