Imagining Public Spaces
Nirmal Puwar
In a climate when research is increasingly being asked to measure up to definitions of social impact and public engagement, sociologists have the capacity to respond to this politically programmatic demand. We can excavate longstanding traditions within the discipline which have worked with creative critical methods to communicate and share with publics beyond the research community. Not being only limited to building bridges at the stages of collection and dissemination could we also perhaps intervene in both dismantling and producing new publics? The spatial dynamics of re-routing forms of remembering through collaborative productions which do not easily fit into disciplinary forms of measurement but nonetheless re-channel both official and subaltern attempts to invent and ‘hold’ space will be discussed in this paper; namely via the recent projects Noise of the Past and Cinema III [see the
Methods Lab]