Introduction

In this chapter, we ask how we might open up and maintain the ‘Agora’ or ‘marketplace’ as a public and social space that might allow for more inclusive conversations about the deeply troubled, troubling and troublesome dynamics that are at the heart of our divided and fragmented communities. To achieve this requires necessary translation of the often obfuscating and obscurantist, exclusive academic languages in which such lines of enquiry are ‘researched’ and ‘disseminated’ into a more accessible public language. The Social Sciences in the City™ seminars in the Tart Café in Bristol; London's ‘pub philosophy’ Big Ideas (see: http://www.bigi.org.uk/); and The Station (see: http://www. thestation.uk.com), a forum that, with our colleague Dr Joanne Carlyle, we also offer in London – all are some examples of such attempts at such translation, alongside the very many other café scientifique (see: http://www.cafescientifique.org/) and open space discussions that are increasingly ‘happening’ across the world.

We are aware that in posing our question in these terms, we are also offering a challenge to the power and (self-)perceived elitism of the established order, within which ‘the academy’ is centrally embedded. In this sense, we are seeking to deface its currency and to invite greater outreach from these centres of learning to the general public, who are far too often the objects of study rather than co-producers of knowledge and understanding about themselves. On the other hand, we are also mindful of how the young and/or the disaffected organise themselves in hybrid spaces within emerging social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter and refute academic or journalistic attempts to ‘theorise’ or ‘philosophise’ them. The academy must not merely ‘outreach’; it must invite a renegotiation of its own terms of engagement. In the terms of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1991), it must practise ‘intellectual emancipation’.

Psychosocial dynamics of membership and refusal in public–private spaces

In this chapter, we rehearse and develop our previous writings in order to explore ideas about groupishness (Bion, 1961), membership and participation and to raise questions about how better to understand our social and collective apprehension about those who take up their membership of the world by refusing to join in (Scanlon and Adlam, 2008, 2011a, 2012).