This chapter examines how reading – and sharing and discussing and debating – libels brought early modern people together as publics. Following the conjoined careers of libels and talk about libels, it sketches the interpretive practices that characterized their circulation across manuscript, print, and performance. The chapter begins with a small but representative slice of the scribal archive to illustrate how libels spread and were read. Its sources include Francis Bacon’s government white papers, a poem by King James, and two libels bearing annotations – the first in the hand of Robert Cecil, the second by an anonymous copyist – that have received virtually no attention. The remainder of the chapter turns to a different kind of evidence: fictional representations of reading. It successively considers Leicester’s Commonwealth – an anonymous Catholic prose tract printed in 1584 – and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Both the pamphlet and the play self-reflexively train their audiences in the art of interpreting libels. Taken together, this chapter’s eclectic archive maps the networks of physical and discursive spaces that made up the early modern public sphere.

This chapter begins to answer the book’s second question: how should international practitioners act and adapt. It serves as a bridge between the theoretical discussion in Part I and the empirical analysis in Part II. The chapter identifies a ‘Pragmatic Constructivist’ approach to IR and discusses how it can be operationalized. That approach focuses on problems that are immanent within, and emerge from, actual international practice. A problem occurs when a practice fails to keep pace with material change, when lived experiences suffer and when epistemic doubt emerges. The chapter illustrates this with a discussion of how John Dewey and Jane Addams were influenced by the material transformations of their time and how those processes ‘eclipsed’ the public interest. The chapter draws parallels between the emerging ‘associations’ and ‘publics’ that early Pragmatists wrote about and the ‘communities of practice’ that contemporary constructivists identify as the ‘software’ of global governance. It extends IR research by arguing that Pragmatic Constructivists can assess how well communities of practice learn to ameliorate lived experiences in the face of contemporary global challenges. That assessment is based on two tests: the extent to which communities of practice are characterized by inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgement.

All news is fake news, because all reports are to some extent ‘made up’ by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. ‘Fake’, from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. It is ironic that the standard test for whether news is ‘fake’ is to subject it to ‘fact-checking’. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any ‘fact’ deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. We therefore need to think in terms of ‘receiver responsibility’, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy to the online user who re-tweets a tweet.

Production fulfils the making of a thing by bringing it to public scrutiny. Production is therefore the cutting edge of rhetorical performance in law, politics, media, and all aspects of civic and social life. The appeal to ‘making with’ has been a technique favoured by orators throughout the history of political rhetoric. Donald Trump employed it when he famously said, ‘we have to build a wall, folks’. Perhaps he borrowed the technique from his background in business and sales, for the appeal to ‘making with’ is also pervasive in modern marketing practices. Companies seeking to sell their goods and services become so beholden to the public that the public as co-Producer begins to market its demands to the supplier. When this dynamic operates in a political context, it can be a force for good and a model of democratic, devolved government, or it can amplify errors by forcing a political leader to pipe whatever tune the public pays for. In the case of Donald Trump, perhaps his more extreme and illogical utterances have less do to with his own manifesto than with maintaining the brand that his market demands.

This chapter discusses how Wabeladio inscribed Mandombe into Kongo culture, giving a centrality to the analysis of the ‘Kongo Road’ song (about a trap), which is where he got the names that he gave to the basic geometric elements of his invention – pakundungu and pelekete – and also how he invented all the other names that make Mandombe sound so Kongo, including the word mandombe itself. It helps the reader understand the structures of plausibility of the invention and why it was so quickly adopted by its publics.

Public engagement (PE) is part of the contemporary landscape of health research and innovation and considered a panacea for what is often characterised as a problem of trust in science or scientific research, as well as a way to ward off actual or potential opposition to new developments.  In this chapter we provide a synthesis of current conceptualisations of PE. We then consider what kinds of publics are ‘engaged with’ and what this means for the kinds of information exchanges and dialogues that are undertaken.  Different forms of PE ‘make up’ different kinds of publics:  engagements do not, indeed cannot, start with a clean sheet – neither with a pure public nor through a pure engagement. As Irwin, among others, has noted, PE is a political exercise and this wider context serves to frame what is engaged about.  It is therefore all the more important to reflect on the practice of PE and what it is hoped will be achieved.   We argue that clarity and transparency about the intention, practice and impact of PE are required if PE is to provide an authentic and meaningful tool within health research governance.

A free and open discussion is always limited. It depends on specific linguistic conventions, forms of expression and norms of social engagement that make mutual understanding possible. Together with Chapter 4, this chapter explores the nature and scope of plural and open discussions in everyday Mombasa. They identify the possibilities and limits on how people might engage in public based on the specific characteristics of discussion. This chapter focuses on street parliaments, which are gatherings that form on the ground both in the central business district and in residential neighbourhoods. Together, these chapters make an important contribution to understanding the openness of publics in Mombasa. They not only show how everyday publics existed in Mombasa, but also differentiate between forms of exclusion. They show how some forms of exclusion prevented public discussion from taking place at all, while others constrained its openness but were refutable or contestable, such as gender.

The concluding chapter considers this book’s implications for understanding popular politics in Kenya and the study of publics. It emphasises how potential change through public discussion in urban Kenya is more precarious than ever. Change does not neatly follow from intentional efforts to alter the terms of debate. Features that contradicted normative visions have been crucial to the power of publics to change shared imaginaries, for instance, material insecurity or elite networks. Further, social media has brought its own challenges. The conclusion finally reflects on the implications of this book for engagement with Arendtian scholarship on publics. Everyday publics in Mombasa show deeper and more varied insights into publics are possible when extending Arendt's ideas to take into account the implications of colonialism, anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial contexts. It also argues there is a need for serious engagement with the particularities of digital technology, and how they provide for a disjuncture between experience and control in publics.

The introduction sets out the context and framework for exploring popular politics in Kenya in the 2010s. It begins by juxtaposing a dynamic political communication landscape, with protracted and familiar repertoires through which political differences are understood. From here, it lays out the purpose of the book: to make sense of how, and to what extent, everyday publics explain continuity and change in shared political imaginaries in Kenya. It considers conceptual resources in Africanist scholarship on publics that exist to help understand the power of everyday publics on the continent, and suggests a revision of Hannah Arendt’s ideas of the power of publics as a way expand this scholarship to better account for the power of everyday publics. Finally, it also introduces Mombasa’s people’s parliaments, everyday informal gatherings that are the empirical window through which Kenya’s popular politics are examined.

Chapter 10 shifts analytical attention to the mindset of the participant as a spectator within the people’s parliaments. This chapter’s focus on the individual provides a reminder that underpinning national patterns in politics are the thoughts and decisions of the individual Kenyan. This chapter reveals particular challenges that affected the spectator’s mindset, which in turn contributed to the reproduction of established political repertoires. Challenges emerged around two states of mind: first, spectators’ unwillingness or inability to take into account diverse perspectives, and second, their inability imagine a common experience. The former was evident through the sharpening of pre-established repertoires across all of the people’s parliaments, and the latter was apparent on social media, where participants’ experiences were individualised and they lost a common object of observation.

Chapter 5 explores the relationship between material insecurity and publics in Kenya. It provides empirical insight into the relationship between welfare and publics in a postcolonial context. Material wellbeing was a constant concern for the average resident in Mombasa. More widely in Kenya, and built up through the British colonial state, welfare has been a source of political grievance or advantage, as well as an individual concern. This has resulted in a contradictory and contingent relationship between welfare, and the nature and scope of everyday publics. For men, idleness was an opportunity to participate in political and public discussion. Unemployment and insecurity also become the subject of public concern, attributed to disadvantage in systems of political patronage. Equally, individuals would easily turn away from public discussion when money was at stake.

Chapter 4 compares the street parliaments explored in Chapter 3 with gatherings convened in civil society and on Facebook. It first interrogates a youth parliament that was registered as a civil society organisation, and, second, examines a youth parliament that was convened on Facebook. The Facebook group was formed as a reaction to some participants’ dissatisfaction with the civil society group’s hierarchical structure. With Chapter 3, it argues that, while limited, the conditions for open and plural discussion were evident across diverse gatherings, whether in the streets or on Facebook. This chapter also identifies an important exception to this: an overly fabricated gathering in civil society, which, in using hierarchy and protocol to create a disciplined and non-partisan public discussion, ended up compromising its creativity and dynamism.

Annotations and “translations” of the seemingly cryptic statements of President Donald Trump have been an ongoing feature of media coverage of his candidacy and the first year of his presidency. Efforts in the media to decipher Trump’s enigmatic references have presented Donald Trump and his campaign as communicating in a language unintelligible to mainstream media audiences. As in Keith Basso’s account of a Western Apache speech genre termed “speaking with names” (1996), the coherence and significance of Donald Trump’s use of proper names and a variety of other expressions often become clear only when linked to a context at a remove from their immediate surround, generally one found in the world of conservative and alt-right media. In providing such clarification, mainstream media annotations of Donald Trump’s words render his speeches a moment of something like language contact between two distinct communicative worlds: the “right-wing” and the “mainstream.” The result is the aggravation of divisions between multiple disconnected communicative “silos” or “bubbles.” Trump’s verbal practices thus bring into question the very existence of something that might be called “the American public.”

This section introduction sets the stage for chapters 2, 3, and 4 by surveying some aspects of Trump’s speech acts that have precipitated a breakdown of the body politic. For example, Trump’s use of the determiner the before human kinds (such as “the gays”) pigeonholes and homogenizes the groups in question, rendering them an undifferentiated “other.” The chapter also discusses how Trump threatens Habermas’ notion of “the public sphere,” widely influential in contemporary understandings of the development of Western-style democracy. Trump’s divisive linguistic practices threaten the Enlightenment principles behind a Habermasian public sphere in which rational individuals freely participate with others in discussions of common problems, through a common language. The chapter further discusses how Trump hails and enlists his supporters through interactional routines, including entraining them during his campaign rallies with powerful three-syllable chants (such as “Get them out!”, “Lock her up!”, and “Build that wall!”). Trump also divides the nation by sanctioning insensitivity against his detractors, enacting the role of a stern, even merciless father figure.