Power, Knowledge, the Academy and Beyond

This article brings to the fore the work of the Public Pedagogies Institute, a not-for-profit organisation, as an enactment of the public realm. This Institute stands within a lineage of education beyond formal sites of learning such as the Raphael Samuel History Centre and, prior to this, Mechanics Institutes. In each of these instances these educational sites either challenge or depart entirely from knowledge generated in authorised or elite institutions. The continuation of instances where education can occur beyond sites of formal education is becoming increasingly critical in a challenge to what and whose knowledge is considered of value. One of the central questions this article attends to is how knowledge that circulates outside of the academy, such as that which occurs within the Public Pedagogies Institute, can be recognised. An analysis of the Institute as a site for knowledge formation is undertaken through the ideas of Hannah Arendt, specifically her concept of the public realm, to critically examine the possibilities for knowledge. For Arendt, her concept of the public realm is a space where the revelation of who we are engenders the possibility of new beginnings. The significance of undertaking such an analysis through the work of Arendt is to foreground how iterations of the public can be recognised as sites of education.