This book rethinks the public - along with public communication and public action - in a globalizing and mediated world. Web-based interactions, community empowerment initiatives, participation experiments, transnational struggles, and new ways of understanding and occupying public space offer a range of promising speculations about the renewal of publics and 'publicness.' The book offers a rich set of methodological resources on which researchers can draw, demonstrating the need to interrogate the boundaries between theory, research, and politics. It develops novel theoretical perspectives for investigating the formation of publics, using four themes as key processes to rethinking how publics are brought into being and how to develop research agendas into their formation.