Paper short abstract:

All publics, liberal or not, have limits. This paper illustrates how community organisers in East London respond to this challenge by staging three incommensurable visions of the public in a fractal relation. It then unpack the implications of this fractal public for political and social theory.

Paper long abstract:

Our understanding of the public is caught within a dilemma. On the one hand, all publics require common grounds for understanding, deliberation and action. On the other hand, all attempts to define such common ground remain marked by what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as constitutive exclusions. Anthropologists have long challenged the limits of liberal publics, but this challenge marks non-liberal publics as well.

This paper traces how community organizers in East London respond to this challenge by placing three incomensurable visions of public life in a fractal relation, where each constitutes and responds to the limits of the others. Community organisers strive to win collective change, develop leaders, and strengthen organizations. I show how each of these goals envisions and enacts a particular vision of public life, resonant with liberal and post-liberal, feminist and post-humanist, and discursive and post-discursive theories of the public, respectively. I illustrate how each vision of the public is both necessary to the practice of organizing while nonetheless presenting crucial limits — and I show how community organisers and leaders strive to address these limits by positioning different visions of the public recursively.

This argument is set out in more detail in my contribution to the 2025 JRAI special issue, linked to this panel. In this paper, I will briefly rehearse this argument, before building on it to further explore the implications of this fractal conception of the public for how we understand political life and social theory more generally.