This paper engages with the question how to create an educative time and space within practices that have a political focus, i.e. finding a settlement for an issue. We study a public consultation process about sustainable mobility in a Belgian town. One of the challenges involved is to build new bridges over a river and a railroad that bisect the town and to reorganise the circulation of traffic between the centre and surrounding neighbourhoods, municipalities, industrial areas, and highways. In Marres’ (2005) terms, the situation can be seen as an issue that calls a public into being. We observed participation events where scenarios and decisions about the location of the bridges were discussed. Indeed, these observations show that the more than 400 participants were jointly implicated in a matter of public concern. It also shows that such a public should not be seen as a sociable collective, a convivial get-together of people that share a lifestyle or a commitment. On the opposite, they are antagonistically drawn into the issue through a multiplicity of often irreconcilable ‘attachments’: objects of passion that involve both active commitment and dependence (Marres 2005). Referring to Dewey’s (1927) understanding of the public, Marres (2010) emphasises that this ‘cannot be adequately understood in factual terms only but also refers to the affective states of being touched, implicated, and indeed moved in the sense of being mobilised by public affairs.’ Being affected by an issue can be disruptive. We use a pragmatist didactic theory (Östman et al. 2019, 2024) to deepen our understanding of the educative potential of such disruptive experiences. The theory has been used in empirical studies of learning processes in sustainability transition initiatives (Van Poeck & Östman 2021) and focuses on how encountered disturbances of people’s habitual ways of thinking, feeling, noticing, and acting can trigger an inquiry which may result in a transformation of habits. We combine it with a dramaturgical analytical framework (Van Poeck & Östman 2022) to investigate how the design (‘scripting’ and ‘staging’) of the public consultation settings and the interventions of facilitators (their ‘performance’) affect what becomes (im)possible. We identify crucial conditions for creating an educative time and space in such, primarily political, gatherings of a public and study how the emergence of ‘educative moments’ may enable experiences and actions that provide alternatives for the polarisation and deadlock that all too often characterise political settings.

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