The chapters in this collection demonstrate the multiplicity of ways in which the project of ‘rethinking’ the public is proceeding. It is not our purpose here to summarise them, but to highlight key issues this volume presents for future analysis of the processes of public formation. We do so by returning to the four themes set out in the introduction.

First, we reiterate the paradoxes inherent in contemporary slippages between notions of the public, personal and political. Such slippages slide into the narratives of both decline and proliferation, with the ‘personal’ offering new voicings and practices of publicness, while also opening up the personal to governmental interest and intervention. In the first section below, ‘Personalising publics’, we assess how the contributions to this volume engage with these processes, challenging simple narratives of change by tracing ways in which these paradoxes are experienced, played out and negotiated in different sites. Such paradoxes, several chapters suggest, open up as well as close down the possibilities of agency and it is through such agency that the meaning of politics itself may be rewritten.

Second, the volume offers a contribution to contemporary debates about how publics are given voice, represented and spoken for; the deliberative ideals on which notions of a rational public sphere are based are reconfigured by proliferation of new voices, registers and modes of political engagement arising from emergent publics. Understanding these changes in modes of public address is important in grappling with the seeming paradox that representations of publics are proliferating at the same time as forms of public engagement seem to be more and more individualised and personalised. The contributors trace ways in which such claims-making processes interact with, rather than displace, formal politics and representative practices. But we also challenge dominant approaches to understanding representation, tracing ways in which embodied practices of representation combine both expressive claims of authenticity with authoritative claims of agency, delegation and trusteeship. We discuss this further in the second section below, ‘Representing publics’.