This paper argues that it is time for public understanding of science to develop a critical inventory of the forms, formats and methods of public participation and their respective implications and ambiguities. It highlights the need for analysing not only the limitations and deficiencies of participatory arrangements but also their constructive dimension, in particular the construction of the subject of participation. Looking into participatory governance arrangements in the issue area of genetic testing in Germany and the UK the paper presents a typology of formats according to the way the respective public is constructed and identifies four major constructions of publics: the general public, the pure public, the affected public and the partisan public. Each of these enables certain speaking positions while foreclosing others. The study shows that the main purposes of participatory arrangements in this issue area are knowledge production and education rather than political deliberation and decision-making.

The article demonstrates that Hannah Arendt's examination of modern temporality strongly intersects with Michel Foucault's diagnosis of modern biopolitics. Both observe three key features of biopolitical modernity: the political zoefication of life, a technocratic understanding of politics, and processual temporality which link the project of modernity to the project of 20th-century totalitarianism. Arendt, however, also offers an alternative, nonbiopolitical understanding of politics, life, and time captured in the concept of natality. Built into the concept of natality is the ‘weakly’ messianic temporal structure of the interval as opposed to processual temporality

Elitist, technical, and positivist models of scientific governance have been subject to much scrutiny and criticism by science and technology studies (STS) for many years. Seminal work in STS has exposed the boundary work through which the distinctions between science and nonscience, science and politics, and experts and lay people are constructed and maintained (to mention only a few: Gieryn 1999; Latour 1993; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001). A more specific tradition in STS has focused on the relations between science, technology, public policy, government and civil society, and has articulated demands for the acknowledgment of uncertainty and a self-critical stance toward scientific truth claims (Wynne 1993; Collins and Evans 2007), for a broader participation of citizens or lay people

The article discusses a recent systemic turn in public participation in science studies. It reviews the main lines of criticism brought forward in science, technology and society towards public participation in science discourse and argues that much of it refers to the field's preoccupation with isolated, stage-managed minipublics. It then discusses a series of efforts in science, technology and society, and other fields to study public participation in a more systemic or holistic perspective. The article advances the argument that there are different ways of conceptualizing such a perspective, not all of which are well equipped to account for contestation, conflict and power. We distinguish between an aggregative approach, deliberative systems theory, an eco-systemic and a decentred governance approach and argue that the latter allows us to study the complexities of public participation without relying on a normative concept of system and account for power relations that may structure the field of public participation.

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