| In the following dissertation, I develop a model for studying how local publics are assembled. Using textual analysis and individual interviews, I explore two Lansing area community initiatives and their advertising and recruitment practices via public documents on their websites. In doing so, I uncover public and private motivations and influences on the crafting of these public documents, which are impacted by conditions of access, chronos, organizational roles, and available topoi in the local public sphere. Because community initiatives constantly engage in making public documents to garner support and to "recruit" various stakeholders, "taking inventory" of such documents and the people and processes from which they are produced is key to understanding how and why these initiatives "go public." Community initiative coordinators produce "local publics" of stakeholders through the production of public documents---and each public document represents an opportunity to alter community initiative representation, garner more stakeholders, and shape the local public sphere. Collectively, these public documents create a fragmented "public" history about each initiative. These public documents, however, do not foreground their own production; alone, community initiatives cannot use them to create sustainable public documents. I argue that keeping an active inventory of public documents, as well as keeping records of stakeholder relationships, community initiatives and researchers can provide a strong base for public document production and subsequent evaluation of impact on their intended audiences. |
