Counterpublics

This section compiles literature on counterpublics, that is, dissident networks of communication excluded by the dominant public sphere and its hegemonic discourse. Their insular status is indicated by their segmentary and/or stratificatory differentiation from the dominant public sphere as well as by their highly separate production structure. In comparative perspective, counterpublics vary by the extent to which reasoned debate and collective choice also operate as a mechanism for their internal organization. Some of the literature reserves the term counterpublics for the upper part of that scale, using different or more general terms (like movement, protest group, etc.) for dissident networks of communication with a low internal capacity for reasoned collective choice. Literature whose focus, beside the internal dynamics, also includes the interaction between counterpublics and the dominant public sphere or outcomes in public policy is also listed in the guide section Non-Established Actors: Civil Society and Social Movement Outcomes.

• Asen, Robert. 2000. “Seeking the «Counter» in Counterpublics.” Communication Theory 10:424-446.
• Asen, Robert, and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds. 2001. Counterpublics and the State. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press.
• Billings, Dwight B. 1990. “Religion as Opposition: A Gramscian Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 96:1-31.
• Brooks, Joanna. 2005. “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic.” The William and Mary Quarterly 62:67-92.
• Calhoun, Craig. 2010. “The Public Sphere in the Field of Power.” Social Science History 34:300-335.
• Couldry, Nick, and James Curran, eds. 2003. Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Dawson, Michael C. 2003. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. On the rise and transformation of a black counterpublic.
• Detweiler, Frederick German. 1922. The Negro Press in the United States. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Downing, John D. H. 2000. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage.
• Eley, Geoff. 1990. “Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-class Public, 1780-1850.” Pp. 12-49 in E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kaye, Harvey J., and Keith McClelland. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Pp. 109-142 in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Calhoun, Craig. Cambridge (MA)/London: MIT Press.
• Hansen, Miriam. 1993. “Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge’s The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years Later.” Public Culture 10:179-212.
• Herbst, Susan. 1994. Politics at the Margin: Historical Studies of Public Expression outside the Mainstream. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Jacobs, Ronald N. 2000. Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King. New York: Cambridge University Press. On the alternative interpretations of public events by black newspapers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
• Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 1993 [1972]. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press.
• Negt, Oskar, and Monika Krause. 2006. “The Production of Counter-Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production: An Interview with Oskar Negt.” European Journal of Social Theory 9:119–129.
• Pajnik, Mojca, and John D. H. Downing, eds. 2008. Alternative Media and the Politics of Resistance: Perspectives and Challenges. Ljubljana: Peace Institute.
• Thompson, Edward P. 1966 [1963]. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.
• Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.