Concepts

This interdisciplinary project aims at exploring formal and informal versions of collective voluntary public action, as well as the forms of public sociality that develop in relation to these action in the urban public space in 20th Greece.

'Public sociality' refers to social relationships shaped in the public space on the basis of cultural notions of affinity and oriented towards common action. In the course of this process people participate in various forms of collective action, which they invest with cultural meanings and through which they form collective subjects.

Public sociality allows an extended conceptualisation of the political, which is not identified exclusively with demands addressed to the state, but is historically and culturally constructed through everyday practices, through the meanings with which social relations are invested, and through multiform public interventions. In this context the 'public' and the 'private', the 'social' and the 'political' are considered as fluid and interwoven concepts, the content of which is historically defined.

As a concept public sociality is also appropriate for interdisciplinary approaches. Thanks to its plasticity and comprehensiveness, it is possible to study from different theoretical starting points the processes through which collective subjectivities are created and historically transformed. These collective subjectivities become political through their practices and their relationships with the state, with other institutions or other social subjects, and not necessarily through articulating specific demands.

In other words, public sociality focuses on aspects of everyday life, its connections with the state and the interrelation between private and public as they are imprinted in multiple forms of collective public action. As such, it allows us to highlight as much its cultural diversity and differentiation in specific historical periods and spaces as its political character.