Encounters convening publics: opposing politics and confronting trouble-making

Abstract

In this article, we examine the outbursts of a white passenger on a London tram, antagonizing others through swearing, nationalist, racist and anti-immigrant talk and the responses of carriage members to her confrontational talk. Our analysis uses a video recording of the event made by a passenger that circulated widely on social and news media. We document multiple forms of response, including the video-witnessing itself. We describe how the trouble-making passenger antagonizes other passengers in order to produce opponents. In addition, we track how members of the carriage, in responding, show their right to respond, seek to avoid the terms of the confrontation and, once constituted as political opponents, their opposition to the politics being expressed. In examining the responses to the trouble-making and the politics being contested between the persons involved and, in tracking how public transport is attempted to be transformed into an ad hoc agora, we contribute to Barnett’s work on convening public space, ordinary action, and politics in human geography.