A New Transformation of the Public Sphere? Questions on Identity, Power, and Affect

For some years I have taught a graduate seminar titled, “The Black Public Sphere.” The course
takes inspiration from one once taught by my doctoral advisor, Catherine Squires, whose theoretical work
outlined multiple public spheres (enclave, satellite, and counterpublic) that might exist within subalternated
collectives (Squires, 2002). Squires’ work extended earlier Black (e.g., Baker, 1994) and feminist (e.g.,
Fraser, 1990) interventions into Jürgen Habermas’s foundational concept and was published concomitantly
with several also influential works on publics and counterpublics by critical and queer theorists (e.g., Asen
& Brouwer, 2001; Warner, 2002). It is one entry in a now decades-long set of theoretical, empirical, and
pedagogical interventions from scholars who, inspired or irked by Habermas’s early formulations, have
complicated and extended theorizations of the public, deliberation, and communication/media systems by
considering the substantiality of social and political hierarchies, histories, and struggle. With these interests
I eagerly read Habermas’s (2023) newest work, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and
Deliberative Politics.