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Regan Koch (2020)Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(2), pp. 392-405.Abstract. Relations between public and private are implicit within much of everyday life, yet public/private distinctions are often invoked when there is a need to justify or critique a set of social arrangements. This paper attends to such moments, demonstrating how practices of justification can provide insights into the values and reasoning through which different forms of collective life are negotiated and managed. It does so through a theoretically pragmatist approach that responds to recent calls for researchers to engage more closely with ordinary forms of normativity and builds on an emerging geographical interest in everyday talk. The case study in focus is a popular yet illegal food trend in New York City where established and aspiring chefs welcome strangers into their homes for a meal in exchange for payment. Underground restaurants and secret supper clubs, as these events are known, fit within a much broader trend of peer‐to‐peer ‘sharing economy’ business models that open up resources and relations normally considered private to a provisionally public audience. Often celebrated for facilitating cooperation, efficiency and empowerment, they can also be deeply unsettling to existing social and economic orders. Participation in, and governance of, peer‐to‐peer activities demands navigating tensions between freedom and collective obligation, managing risk, establishing trust and delegating responsibility when problems arise. Our capacity as geographers to analyse and weigh in on these issues can be enhanced by attending to the justifications through which public, private and other concepts for organising collective life are being upheld, transgressed or actively transformed.Excerpt. "The  categorical  and  conceptual  manoeuvring  on  the  part  of  these  hosts  does  not  mean  we  should  dismiss  them  as  relativist  schemers.  Rather,  as  the  French  pragmatist  scholars  Luc Boltanski  and  Laurent Thévenot  (2006)  demonstrate, when  people  are faced  with  the  need  to  justify (or challenge) a set of actions or arrangements, it is perfectly common for their reasoning to shift according to the particularities of the situation. Abstract theories and principles cannot  encompass  the  complex  materialities  and  affective  forces  in  a  given  situation.  However,  a consistent  rule  across  all  societies,  they  argue,  is  that  in  moments  of  dispute,  people  are expected  to  appeal  to  higher  principles  beyond  their  own  individual  concerns  for  their  arguments  to  have  social  legitimacy."Link to the reviewLink to the article