Public Deliberation Consortium
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Territory, Identity, and Conflict in a Public Meeting: A Natural History Approach
No full textThis paper examines the natural history of a public meeting, recognizing the importance of the unfolding of events as key to understanding the relationships and issues germane to human relating. As a method, the natural history approach is employed through reducing permanent records of interaction to a statistical record in order to examine the relative involvement of participants in a public meeting. The statistical presentation of data points to a particular moment of interaction that stands out in the meeting structure as unique. This moment is analyzed and an approach to understanding a conflict based on identities of place is developed
Mad scientists bend the frame of biobank governance in British Columbia
No full textThe tools and rhetoric of deliberative democracy are increasingly popular with governments, organizations, and researchers working to enhance ‘public engagement with science’. Deliberative fora such as citizen juries have also been heavily critiqued by social and political scientists – for positively and narrowly framing contentious new technologies to secure public support, and for privileging consensus over ‘difference’. This paper takes such critiques seriously. Drawing from ethnographic participant-observation and analysis of a deliberative public consultation on biobanking in British Columbia (BC), Canada, it argues for careful attention to deliberative event design. A multi-disciplinary approach, multiple media, and imagination-focused tasks were used in BC to produce inclusive deliberations in which members of the public were able to directly challenge expert assumptions. Ethnographic attention to narrative during analysis of the deliberation reveals the extent to which participants insistently questioned the framing of the event. Drawing from personal experiences, analogies, news stories and fictional events, the deliberants developed and embellished the figure of a ‘mad scientist’ to challenge certainties promised by scientific, legal, and ethical expertise. This paper argues that such questioning enhanced the accountability of the deliberation and participant trust in the event. It also argues that ethnographic attention to storytelling is a valuable and under-utilized pursuit in the field of deliberative democracy – a pursuit that can enable deliberative events to ‘listen’
The Australian Citizens\u27 Parliament: A World First
No full textThe Australian Citizens\u27 Parliament was held in February 2009, with one participant from each federal electorate. The main meeting was a culmination of a process involving a series of regional meetings and online development of proposals by citizen participants. Within a broad charge of \u27How can Australia\u27s political system be strengthened to serve us better?\u27 participants could develop their own proposals and so craft the agenda. The process yielded a set of recommendations for the structure and operation of government, as well as masses of social scientific data
Grouping Processes in a Public Meeting from an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis Perspective
No full textThis article explicates grouping processes during a public meeting. By applying an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis approach, the analysis focuses on ways of place-making and relating as well as enactments of social and racial identities to make empirically grounded claims about grouping processes during the public meeting in question. For most audience members, living in the neighborhood and local knowledge of crime, desperate youth, poverty, and racial discrimination were defining characteristics of being a community member who shared a collective memory of distrust against the local Chamber of Commerce. Some audience members maintained that only neighborhood residents had the right to talk about the neighborhood at the meeting. Chamber of Commerce and affiliated speakers neither shared the premise of residency and right to talk about the neighborhood, nor did they adequately address the distrust. Instead, they promoted community through economic development and collaboration. The tensions during the meeting can be described as differences in notions about what constitutes community, differences which are indicative and constitutive of the divergent approaches to managing problems in the neighborhood. In addition to illustrating that groups don’t exist a priori but are enacted through communicative practices, the article makes recommendations for how to improve public meetings
Displays of Trust/Mistrust in Public Meetings: “I don’t believe you are going to jack us around!”
No full textFor public meetings in general, and for the North Omaha Development Project Meeting in particular, a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach asks how participants in public meetings involved in decision-making communicate and display their trust and mistrust of one another. From a CA perspective, while it is important to examine ways to cultivate greater trust in the public arena, research is also warranted that looks closely at people’s observable talk and behavior to better understand how the qualities of trust and mistrust are enacted by participants and how others orient to those displays. Power differences are critical, and whether the organizers are controlling the agenda or whether the attendees are attempting to influence the meeting’s procedural mechanisms, these are behaviors that must in the end be performed as the proceedings unfold. Displays of observable behavior are subject to empirical analysis and are the focus of what a CA approach can contribute to the study of public meetings
Communicating Trust, Community, and Process in Public Meetings: A Reflection on How Close Attention to Communication Can Contribute to the Future of Public Participation
No full textThis concluding essay reflects on how the essays included in this special issue can help address some prevailing issues in public participation scholarship. We see three themes running through the contributions to this special issue that are particularly important for public participation scholars and practitioners to consider. These issues are: citizens’ distrust of public officials, concerns about who counts as a legitimate member of the community, and challenges related to the framing the process and goals of the meeting. In this concluding essay we summarize and reflect on the insights provided by the special issue contributions. We also look ahead to assess how these contributions can inform future public participation research and practice by illuminating the importance of communication practices and public meeting formats
Democratic Deliberation and Moral Awareness
No full textMuch of the debate between theorists of deliberative democracy has centered on forms of discourse and the role that reason should play. But philosophers have been unable to explain the transformative power attributed to deliberation. I argue that we ought to look to recent studies of moral psychology, which illuminate the moralizing mechanisms brought into play by deliberation. In deliberations by small groups empathic cues, as well as direct and semantically mediated associations between the social situations of oneself and others, produce moral cognition, and broaden awareness of morally salient features of the policies and issues under discussion. Narrations in diverse groups can enhance moral perception, cue empathic reactions, and provide powerful tools for organizing moral knowledge, in contrast to more confrontational forms of discourse, such as direct argumentation. The moral psychology at work in diverse and small groups of deliberators suggests that the institutionalization of deliberative forums could produce a more representative government and achieve morally better politics and policies
Meetings that Evolve Interactively: Viewing a Town Hall Discussion with an LSI Perspective
No full textThis paper applies conversation analysis methods to a large public meeting. Examination of various pivotal speech acts and actions as performed by the presenters as well as the attendees suggested the enactment and sequencing of these different modes of interaction did not evolve randomly. As in any system, all elements within a group are interdependent and reciprocally influential; therefore, in this meeting, as the communication modes, communication goals, topic initiation, and agenda management roles shifted, individual parties and the group as a whole subtly coordinated to accommodate those shifts. One particular participant performed several implicit and explicit functions in the ongoing communication system of this meeting. Comparing his apparently spontaneous behaviors to the planned procedures of the program presenters revealed possible insights into how better to serve the diverse goals of presenters who want an orderly intake of information and attitudes and attendees who want a sense of involvement and empowerment
What are We Going to “Talk About” in this Public Meeting?: An Examination of Talk about Communication in the North Omaha Development Project
No full textThe goal of this essay is to illustrate how the investigation of one communicative phenomenon, metacommunication or talk about communication, can be a resource for understanding and evaluating public meetings and public participation. Such talk about communication is ubiquitous in public discourse (Craig, 2005). Participants in public meetings sometimes talk at great length about what can be said, how it can be said and by whom. In the analysis of the North Omaha Development Project (NODP) public meeting, we chose to focus on two categories of metacommunication: linguistic action verbs or LAVs (Dirven, et al., 1982) and terms for talk (Carbaugh, 1989). In examining LAVs, we focus specifically on participant uses of the verbs “talk,” “tell,” and “say.” The term for talk we examine is participant uses of the term “meeting”. We believe that the examination of these two categories of metacommunication prove to be insightful about this particular public meeting and, taken together, provide a rich (if incomplete) picture of the ways in which the participants themselves framed, textured and judged the NODP public meeting
The Practice of Public Meetings: Introduction to the Special Issue
No full textThis special issue of IJP2 attempts to build linkages between public participation scholarship and communication research that emphasizes close attention to naturally-occurring interaction. The essays all investigate different aspects of the communication that occurs during one public meeting: a public forum that focused on issues of economic development in Omaha, Nebraska. Through their investigation of this common case, the essays in this issue provide detailed description of some communication processes common to public meetings such as nonverbal communication, question and answer behavior, storytelling, the use of the term “community,” and the terms people use to talk about their own communication. These studies highlight how such interactive practices function in important ways to build or challenge notions of community, frame the purpose and outcome of the meeting, display power differences among participants, and clarify key community values. This collection of essays highlights how close attention to what happens during public meetings can have important implications for both the theory and practice of public participation. A full video of the meeting is available online