Public sphere scholarship has addressed the concept of “diaspora” in recent decades, thereby highlighting the fluidity of public movements and formations. However, in doing so, it often reinforces a false binary between movement and stasis. This article examines how assumptions about fixed territorial borders and mobility constrain more pluralistic understandings of how publics relate to space, time, and community, and asks how public formations emerge at moments of rupture and repair. To advance this conversation, we put forth a typology of public formations along what we consider a continuum of displacement—“moored,” “unmoored,” and “floating” publics—following an aquatic metaphor to capture the fluid, ever-changing conditions of belonging these formations inhabit. By problematizing the terms “diasporic” and “transnational,” we adopt a translocal approach that foregrounds the intersecting socio-spatial scales and temporalities through which actors develop post-national identities, discursive practices, and media objects. Ultimately, we argue that conceptualizing displacement as a continuum enables a more inclusive theory of publics—one that de-centers Western, nation-bound assumptions and better accounts for the unstable, interdependent worlds through which displaced publics enact political and cultural life.
Urrunaga et al. (Mon,) studied this question.