Decolonizing the public sphere(s)?: A historical trajectory of justice-seeking subaltern public communication in the Middle East

Abstract While the discourse surrounding “decolonizing” risks becoming an abstract notion, the imperative to challenge the monopoly of Eurocentric knowledge systems remains urgent. Committed to the necessity of critical public communication that serves most of the world, the article aims to make a decolonizing intervention into the dominant discussions of critical public communication, which are still largely governed by theories of the public sphere(s). Rather than providing another critique of these theories, I propose an alternative concept: justice-seeking communication. Justice-seeking communication is a historical episteme and practice of the subaltern populations of the Middle East, uniting them as a reasoning, debating, and justice-demanding public in the face of injustices they encountered and defined as rectifiable oppression through their collective agency. Following a brief historical examination of Middle Eastern petitions and coffeehouses, I discuss how the justice-seeking communicative praxis of subaltern populations can inform our future imaginations of pluriversal critical public communication.