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Abstract
This essay revisits the concept of publics. It explores the notion of a public as a political site in which an economy of power plays out. More specifically, a public is conceived as a locus in which material resources and discourses are appropriated and exchanged among participants to effect social and political transformation or to maintain the status quo. Foucault's archaeology and Strauss and Corbin's grounded theory were used to analyze 3 data sets: 136 news articles, 20 United Nations AIDS reports, and 14 in-depth interviews with various organizations related to the HIV/AIDS issue in Thailand. Based on the analysis, 3 historical conditions--resource dependency, discursive connectivity, and legitimacy--were used to frame a typology of four publics: circumscribed, co-opted, critical, and circumventing publics.
