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The Entrepreneurial University pp 185–201Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Going Public: Reflections on Predicaments and Possibilities in Public Research and Scholarship

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Abstract

On the afternoon of 14 May 2011, only minutes before a Paris-bound flight departed from Kennedy Airport, officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey boarded the airplane and arrested Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Several hours earlier, Naffisatou Diallo — a hotel housekeeper and asylee1 from Guinea — had reported that Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her when she went to clean the Manhattan hotel room where he had been staying until earlier that day. Almost instantaneously, news media outlets began salivating over the sordid details of the alleged scandal involving such a high-profile figure as ‘DSK’, as he is known (Goldfarb, 2011), the media initially, sympathising with Diallo (Dickey and Solomon, 2011). Before long, however, attention turned to scepticism as private details and uncertainties about Diallo’s character and her past were catapulted into full view as fodder for public consumption. Headlines splashed accounts of seemingly shady connections, questionable financial transactions, and alleged mistruths and misdeeds by the woman who brought charges against DSK (Italiano, 2011). Many of the news stories and exposés replayed what Welch and Schuster (2005) have described as the ‘noisy’ discursive construction of asylum seekers. This account draws on Cohen’s (2002) discussion of moral panic theory.

Keywords

  • International Monetary Fund
  • Public Research
  • Asylum Seeker
  • Public Engagement
  • Public Sociology

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Authors
  1. Deirdre Conlon
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  2. Nick Gill
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  3. Imogen Tyler
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  4. Ceri Oeppen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Week Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University, UK

    Yvette Taylor

Copyright information

© 2014 Deirdre Conlon, Nick Gill, Imogen Tyler and Ceri Oeppen

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Conlon, D., Gill, N., Tyler, I., Oeppen, C. (2014). Going Public: Reflections on Predicaments and Possibilities in Public Research and Scholarship. In: Taylor, Y. (eds) The Entrepreneurial University. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275875_11

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