Remaking Participation

Changing relations between science and democracy - and controversies over issues such as climate change, energy transitions, genetically modified organisms and smart technologies - have led to a rapid rise in new forms of public participation and citizen engagement. While most existing approaches adopt fixed meanings of 'participation' and are consumed by questions of method or critiquing the possible limits of democratic engagement, this book offers new insights that rethink public engagements with science, innovation and environmental issues as diverse, emergent and in the making. Bringing together leading scholars on science and democracy, working between science and technology studies, political theory, geography, sociology and anthropology, the volume develops relational and co-productionist approaches to studying and intervening in spaces of participation. New empirical insights into the making, construction, circulation and effects of participation across cultures are illustrated through examples ranging from climate change and energy to nanotechnology and mundane technologies, from institutionalised deliberative processes to citizen-led innovation and activism, and from the global north to global south. This new way of seeing participation in science and democracy opens up alternative paths for reconfiguring and remaking participation in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways. This ground-breaking book is essential reading for scholars and students of participation across the critical social sciences and beyond, as well as those seeking to build more transformative participatory practices.

Jason Chilvers is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Research Group in the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK Matthew Kearnes is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Australia

1.Science, democracy and emergent publics Part 1 Rethinking participation 2. Participation in the making: rethinking public engagement in co-productionist terms 3. Engaging in a decentred world: overflows, ambiguities, and the governance of climate change 4. Engaging the Mundane: Complexity and Speculation in Everyday Technoscience 5. Ghosts of the machine: Publics, meanings and social science in a time of expert dogma and denial 2 Making participation 6. State experiments with public participation: French nanotechnology, Congolese deforestation, and the search for national publics 7. Technologies of participation and the making of technologised futures 8. Participation as pleasure: Citizenship and science communication 9. The temporal choreographies of participation: Thinking innovation and society from a time-sensitive perspective Part 3 Remaking Participation 10. An 'experiment with intensities': village hall reconfigurings of the world within a new participatory collective 11. Against blank slate futuring: Noticing obduracy in the city through experiential methods of public engagement 12. Reflexively engaging with technologies of participation: constructive assessment for public participation methods 13. Remaking participation: towards reflexive engagement