Democratic Mis-haps: The Problem of Democratization in a Time of Biopolitics

Reardon, Jenny

doi:10.1017/s174585520700573x

Cited by 52 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Highlighting the dimension of knowledge generation and subject construction, the article contributes to a more recent constructivist turn providing analysis of the productive, constructive dimension of participatory practices (Irwin, 2001(Irwin, , 2006Irwin and Michael, 2003;Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007;Nowotny et al, 2004;Reardon, 2007). Practices and arrangements of participation are both enabling and restricting at the same time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

2009

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

2009

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“…As scholars have pointed out, participative forms of governance such as public engagement have emerged in recent years in response to both structural shifts in knowledge production and critical events in risk management (Nowotny et al, 2001;Jasanoff, 2003Jasanoff, , 2005Reardon, 2004Reardon, , 2007Stilgoe et al, 2005;Winickoff et al, 2005;Rabinow and Bennett, 2007;Lengwiler, 2008). A chain of 'dislocatory events' (Gottweis, 2008) from Bhopal to Chernobyl to the uncontrolled spread of HIV/AIDS and BSE revealed the substantial limits of an ostensibly objective and purely technical form of scientific expertise (Beck, 1992;Jasanoff, 1994a;Epstein, 1996;Fortun, 2001;Petryna, 2002).…”

Section: Participatory Forms Of Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Vividly engaged in relentlessly revealing, analyzing and documenting the politics of modern scientific expertise and technological governance, activists and academics alike began to request greater accountability in techno-scientific policy-making. Idioms of participation appealed to the democratic passions of these actors and seemed to promise government agencies effective means to generate trust and credibility and increase public support for policy outcomes (Gibbons, 1999;Reardon, 2004Reardon, , 2007Lofstedt, 2005;Hayden, 2007b;Schoch-Spana et al, 2007).…”

Section: Participatory Forms Of Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Jenny Reardon, in the context of intensive biopolitical action 'energies are best spent not on energetic calls for democratization, but on the more subdued task of analyzing how democratization happenswhat logics underlie it, what practices make it up' (Reardon, 2007). Close analytic attention must be paid especially to the ways in which 'publics' are constituted by certain forms of reasoning.…”

Section: Participatory Forms Of Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nor is it my intention to explore if public engagement is able to preempt public concerns and manufacture the trust and credibility that once ostensibly seemed to characterize the social contract between 'science' and 'society', to use Gibbons' (and Nowotny's) terms (Gibbons, 1999;Nowotny et al, 2001). Rather than to ask if public engagement is able to deliver on its promise, my account has drawn attention to some of the contexts in which public engagement occurred in the United States and it thus contributes to recent explorations of the animation and mobilization of publics in regulatory contexts (Strathern, 2002(Strathern, , 2005Hayden, 2003;Miller, 2003;Reardon, 2007;Rothstein, 2007;Gottweis, 2008;Lengwiler, 2008).…”

Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 99%

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Public prophylaxis: Pandemic influenza, pharmaceutical prevention and participatory governance

Caduff

2010

BioSocieties

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In this article, I explore recent discussions among American public health professionals over how to protect the health of the nation in a state of emergency. My focus is specifically on questions of preventative strategy and population management, examining intensive debates around the prioritization of protective vaccine for pandemic influenza. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show how the mode of circulation, distribution and allocation of pandemic vaccine was gradually refashioned in the United States over the past 2 years. When government officials launched public engagement meetings reformulating in ethical terms the crucial question of how to dispense a scarce pharmaceutical resource in a public health emergency, a distinctive set of priorities emerged. My aim, in this article, is to examine this ethical refashioning and to interrogate the curious logics of public-ness that are increasingly embedded in a growing number of approaches of public health professionals. How are populations gathered into the fold of pharmaceutical prevention today?

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Narratives in Public Deliberation: Empowering Gene Editing Debate with Storytelling

Chen¹,

Burgess²

2021

Hastings Center Report

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Gene editing in the environment must consider uncertainty about potential benefits and risks for different populations and under different conditions. There are disagreements about the weight and balance of harms and benefits. Deliberative and community‐led approaches offer the opportunity to engage and empower diverse publics to co‐create responses and solutions to controversial policy choices in a manner that is inclusive of diverse perspectives. Stories, understood as situated accounts that reflect a person's life experiences, can enable the articulation of nuanced perspectives, diversify how perspectives are communicated, encourage wider participation, open dominant perspectives to challenge, and invite participants to assess appropriate empathy and precaution in collective positions. An emphasis on storytelling in deliberations on gene editing of organisms emphasizes carefully designed recruitment and facilitation to support hearing from a range of perspectives, including those that present a different set of assumptions than those that may be held by experts or other stakeholders, among these, consideration of how to understand our relationships to nature.

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Democratic Mis-haps: The Problem of Democratization in a Time of Biopolitics

Cited by 52 publications

References 12 publications

“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

Public prophylaxis: Pandemic influenza, pharmaceutical prevention and participatory governance

Narratives in Public Deliberation: Empowering Gene Editing Debate with Storytelling

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