Renovating democracy: combining conventions with festivals to assemble the public

[Re-post of piece originally published by openDemocracy by Nick Mahony and Derek Tatton, Adminstrator of the Raymond Williams Foundation]

Democratic and political changes could be fomented from a well-designed constitutional convention, but this would be more likely if such a convention was twinned with an exciting national programme of rolling public events and festivals oriented around the pluralisation of democracy and the democratization of everyday life.

We already live in a world where people are actively experimenting with many new ways of democratizing all different spheres of our everyday life, from workplaces, to technological platforms, the fields of arts and culture, the media, energy systems, food production and distribution, the economy and money, design, innovation and more. There are already many experts and organisations involved, as well as public groups and established campaigners.

These projects face many obstacles and difficulties, but the task is now to engage the wider public in these developments, as well as involve them in discussions about how more established democratic processes need to be reformed. To do this something rather more unconventional than a constitutional convention will be required.

It is for this reason that the Raymond Williams Foundation has teamed up with Gladstone’s Library and the Democratic Society to support the development of a new festival of democracy called DemFest, which will take place 13-14 May 2016, in the beautiful surroundings of Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, near Chester – (programme, speaker, ticketing and contact details all available on the DemFest.org website).

The aim of this new event is to encourage differently situated participants, with a shared interest in democratic change, to convene in a single site for a short period of intensive and convivial interaction, exchange and cooperation. We think the festival may provide an event template that could be of real value in the complicated social context in which we all now live.

DemFest is just one small and rather experimental event that’s taking place against this broader backdrop of emerging possibilities for democratization. This event is all about getting together to reflect on our current democracy and to consider new ways of renovating democracy that could help address some of the larger-scale and increasingly urgent problems that we now collectively face.

Raymond Williams is famous for calling for a ‘long revolution’ that has the aim of bringing about a more educated and participatory democracy. The contemporary starting point for such a revolution needs to be people’s everyday concerns and aspirations for a fairer, more open and egalitarian life and greater engagement with some of the myriad of initiatives and contemporary experiments that are already being worked on to democratise various spheres of our everyday life.

Festivals aren’t always progressive and the festival format doesn’t have a simple history, but at their best festivals can offer spaces where people can feel exhilarated by new ideas and experiences, with this opening out possibilities for imaginative and mutually supportive forms of collective action.

We welcome you to join us at DemFest and we will be pleased to receive comments and suggestions, anytime, on ideas you have for future DemFest events.

DemFest, the new festival of democracy, will take place 13-14 May at Gladstone’s Library, in Hawarden, near Chester. For programme details and information about the line-up of speakers go to: demfest.org

The frontiers of participatory public engagement

Just published online in The European Journal of Cultural Studies ‘The frontiers of participatory public engagement’ is a new journal article co-authored by Nick Mahony and Hilde C Stephansen emerging from research undertaken under the auspices of the Creating Publics project. Here’s the abstract:

“Currently missing from critical literature on public engagement with academic research is a public-centric analysis of the wider contemporary context of developments in the field of public engagement and participation. Drawing on three differently useful strands of the existing theoretical literature on the public, this article compares a diverse sample of 100 participatory public engagement initiatives in order to first, analyse a selection of the myriad ways that the public is being constituted and supported across this contemporary field and second, identify what socio-cultural researchers might learn from these developments. Emerging from this research is a preliminary map of the field of public engagement and participation. This map highlights relationships and divergences that exist among diverse forms of practice and brings into clearer view a set of tensions between different contemporary approaches to public engagement and participation. Two ‘frontiers’ of participatory public engagement that socio-cultural researchers should attend are also identified. At the first, scholars need to be critical regarding the particular versions of the public that their preferred approach to engagement and participation supports and concerning how their specific identifications with the public relate to those being addressed across the wider field. At the second frontier, researchers need to consider the possibilities for political intervention that public engagement and participation practice could open out, both in the settings they are already working and also in the much broader, rapidly developing and increasingly complicated contemporary field of public engagement and participation that this article explores.”

How marketing practices shape public action

Clive Barnett and I have a new paper published in Policy and Politics, on their ‘fast track’ page, entitled Marketing practices and the reconfiguration of public action. The paper draws on a project for the NCCPE and ESRC that Clive and I worked on a while back when were both at the OU, on the use of segmentation methods in the public sector, charities, and campaign sectors.

This paper seeks to open up some interpretative space for exploring what is going on when marketing practices get used in non-commercial sectors, without presuming in advance that what is going on is necessarily always something called ‘neoliberalism’.

Here is the abstract of the Policy and Politics piece:

“Market segmentation methodologies are increasingly used in public policy, arts and culture management and third sector campaigning. Rather than presume that this is an index of creeping neoliberalisation, we track the shared and contested understandings of the public benefits of using segmentation methods. Segmentation methods are used to generate stable images of individual and group attitudes and motivations, and these images are used to inform strategies that seek to either change these dispositions or to mobilise them in new directions. Different segments of the population are identified as bearing particular responsibilities for public action on different issues.”

If you can’t access the version published in Policy and Politics, there’s a pre-print version available as a free download here.

‘Designing public-centric engagement’ Open University pamphlet now available for free download

What do we mean by the public in public engagement today? What should the role of the public be in higher education research in the years ahead?

Researchers still face many obstacles to engaging the public, including limited resources and the pressure to publish. But could the current lack of a shared framework for considering what the public in public engagement means be another important barrier to further developing a culture of publicly engaged research?

This question has been central to two research studies recently completed at the Open University and is addressed in the new Open University pamphlet ‘Designing public-centric forms of public engagement with research’, now available for free download, under a Creative Commons licence.

The pamphlet introduces a new framework that aims to capture key ways of making sense of the public in public engagement today. It also highlights questions you can ask at key stages of the engagement process to help you make choices about how you will engage. The public-centric approach is intended to support engaged scholars working across all disciplines.

The pamphlet is pragmatic and relates different pre-existing ways of making sense of the public. It encourages researchers to analyse the characteristics or motivations of ‘target groups’; consider the aspirations of fellow citizens and the societal role of the public; reflect on the relationships publics have with our public institutions and how these are cast and might change; and actively think about the forms of voluntary public self-organisation and innovation that engagement might support. The public is an expansive idea and this pamphlet offers a multi-dimensional approach, informed by developments in theory and practice.

Despite the many obstacles, public engagement with research undoubtedly has the potential to help support and foster public life in many ways. But questioning and being more systematic about what we mean by the public in public engagement can also raise big issues. I am therefore genuinely interested in your views on whether an approach like this could be valuable in your own setting and on whether having a shared framework for thinking about the public could be useful too?

So I look forward to your comments on the pamphlet and also to hearing more about how you see the role of the public in the years ahead in the development of academic research.

The pamphlet Designing public-centric forms of public engagement with research is one outcome of the Open University’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research Catalyst, ‘An open research university‘. Nick was a Co-investigator on this project, leading the work package that explored the publics of engaged-research. This work also emerged from the Open University funded Creating Publics project, which was located in the OU’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance. Dr. Nick Mahony is now an independent researcher and visiting Research Fellow at the Open University (nick.mahony@open.ac.uk).

Participation Now and 21st Century Public Engagement 3/3: Being Public-centric in Practice

When it comes to considering the versions of the public that will (and will not) be supported by a particular engagement initiative, there are choices you will inevitably need to make. To be public-centric these choices need to be negotiated and accounted for. The 3-D approach can support these choices in a variety of ways:

Planning and designing public-centric engagement activities
At the planning and design stage of your engagement activity there are at least three ways you can use the 3-D approach. Firstly, to think about how your initiative will be situated in the settings it will be working in; secondly, to reflect on your existing identifications and project-related commitments to the public; and, thirdly, to support an analysis of how your preferred engagement design compares to alternative designs.

In each case the 3-D approach calls on you to address the following questions:

• How will publics be targeted? How will publics be represented?
• What public roles will an engagement initiative support?
• What forms of public self-organisation will be offered?

By addressing these questions you can move through a process that prompts you to actively and systematically consider three key dimensions of what it means to be publicly engaged.

A long line of work already exists that encourages researchers to reflect on the specificities of their research situation, their social or public commitments and the assumptions that underpin their methodological choices. Used in conjunction with this work the questions above invite you to explore the versions of the public already being supported in your research setting. They can also be used to reflect on your own pre-existing identifications and project related commitments to particular versions of the public.

The 3-D approach can be valuable in one further way when you are planning your engagement initiative. It can help you identify how your ideas about how the public should be engaged may relate to those being supported elsewhere by other engagement initiatives.

In each of these three cases the 3-D approach will assist with the process of negotiating and making choices about the versions of the public that your engagement initiative will support.

To design public-centric forms of engagement these choices will need to be negotiated in critical, reflective and creative ways. Being public-centric also means being as open and transparent as possible about these design decisions and the thinking that underpins them.

Tracking, evaluating and accounting for public engagement in public-centric ways
The 3-D approach can also be useful when tracking and evaluating the public impacts of a given initiative and when it comes to generating a written account of an initiative’s public effects.

In terms of tracking and evaluating engagements public effects, you can use the 3-D approach to assess whether the versions of the public an engagement initiative has been set up to support have been elicited in practice. It can also be used to analyse and account for any unanticipated public effects an engagement activity may have had.

To undertake these public-centric forms of assessment, a similar set of questions will need to be addressed to those already introduced above:

• Is there evidence that the publics originally targeted have been engaged in practice? What forms of public representation have been realised?
• What evidence is there that the public has played the roles that have been offered?
• What forms of public self-organisation arose as a result of the engagement initiative? Are these similar or different from those that were originally planned for and anticipated?

—

The 3-D approach has emerged in response to some of the complications and challenges of the present. It provides a framework you can use to design, evaluate and report on your engagement work in public-centric ways. The approach is contextually responsive, theoretically informed and systematic. The 3-D approach is also pragmatic, as it isn’t obscured by any one pre-existing set of ideas about of what a public is or should be.

In contemporary conditions where meanings and qualities of the public are multiple and in flux the 3-D approach is therefore a resource; a resource you can use to support critical reflection and creative practice and to open out new horizons for public engagement with research.

[This post is an extract from ‘Designing public-centric forms of public engagement with research‘, a new pamphlet by Nick Mahony that will be published by the Open University soon] 

Participation Now and 21st Century public engagement (2/3): how to see contemporary publics in 3-Dimensions

The second of this series of three posts focuses on how to more clearly see contemporary publics. Many of those now involved in the field of public participation and engagement now agree on the need to reinvigorate the contemporary public realm. There is nevertheless rather less agreement about how to understand contemporary publics and what is happening to the public realm at this time – especially perhaps amongst those working across this contemporary field of engagement and participation.

The Creating Publics and Participation Now projects have undertaken research in this area. This research was prompted by an engagement with the rich, varied and highly developed body of pre-existing theoretical literature on the topic of the public. The Participation Now website, also set up as part of this work, provided another vehicle for this research.

Emerging from these activities is a novel approach to contemporary publics*. Designed specifically for those involved in the contemporary field of engagement and participation, this approach relates three pre-existing ways of seeing the public. By doing so, this approach offers a 3-Dimensional way of viewing emerging configurations of contemporary publics.

Dimension 1
The most familiar way of seeing the public is still as a real and pre-existing entity that is already ‘out there’ waiting to be represented and engaged. There are now a great number of engagement and participation initiatives that hold out the promise of fairer processes of public engagement and representation.

Global Voices, Democratising Agricultural Research, Productive Margins and Planning for Real are all examples of contemporary participation initiatives that claim they will more fairly involve and represent hitherto marginalized people, perspectives or histories.

Climate Camp is another example of an initiative that invited people to represent themselves, this time by creating or transforming a pre-existing public space. There are also countless petitioning, voting or crowdsourcing experiments such as Galaxy Zoo or Constitution UK that attempt, in different ways, to more clearly represent the public’s ideas or opinions.

Looking at how ‘real’ publics are represented in different contemporary settings of engagement and participation can helpfully bring into view one dimension of what it means to be a public today. Identifying differences between the ‘representative claims’ (see the work of Michael Saward) being articulated by different contemporary groups connects these developments to important debates about the benefits and limitations of different possible forms of public representation, inclusion and involvement.

This way of viewing publics can also support the analysis of how particular publics are being ‘targeted’ across contemporary settings. Such targeting can, for example, be undertaken through the use of public segmentation techniques; or by convening ‘mini-publics’; or through the deployment of other innovative emerging ways of assembling putatively ‘representative’ sub-sets of local, national or transnational populations.

Dimension 2
A second way of seeing focuses on the roles that publics are offered, in this case in settings of engagement and participation. Reflecting on the multiplicity of initiatives brought together in the Participation Now collection, it is clear that many differences now exist between the kinds of roles that contemporary publics are being offered across diverse settings.

Connected Citizens and Newcastle City Council’s UDecide participatory budgeting programme are, for example, initiatives that offer people the role of ‘engaged citizens’. The engaged-citizen is a figure that is assumed to be pre-disposed to the ideals of liberal democracy and supporting established institutions.

In contrast, other initiatives, such as UK Uncut, offer the public the role of the ‘activist’. These initiatives are set up to appeal to people who oppose or identify as being marginalized from aspects of the status quo and who wish to challenge one or more prevailing public discourse or dominant social group in some way.

Then there are also those that also offer people a ‘creative’ role, including Complaints Choir, which invites people to participate in alternative forms of public action. Such as the creative process of writing and performing a song based on participants’ complaints; or, in the case of PARK(ing) Day, an annual worldwide event that brings together artists and citizens with the aim of transforming metered parking spots into temporary public parks.

By offering people these and other such roles, initiatives operate on the basis of different sets of assumptions about the capacities, identifications and desires of contemporary publics.

These different roles that publics are being offered also relate to the different types of relationships, forms of conduct and infrastructures that people are being invited to test out and develop across this field.

The issue of what role the public could or should have in society, now or in the future, has long been the topic of intense debate in the literature on the public. With thinkers as diverse as Arendt, Dewey, Habermas and Fraser offering distinctive perspectives on this issue in the 20^th Century and these debates being added to more recently by thinkers such as Mouffe and Santos.

Dimension 3
There is a third way of seeing what is happening to contemporary publics that can also be useful. This encourages us to look at how publics are being invited to ‘self-organise’ in contemporary settings.

When we look across the contemporary field of engagement and participation it is clear that publics are being supported to self-organise in a wide range of different ways. Initiatives such as Puzzled by Policy, for example, illustrate how highly structured procedures are put in place in certain settings, designed to channel (and thereby potentially limit) possibilities for forms of public self-organisation.

Initiatives such as Restore/Restory, Guerilla Gardening or Loomio illustrate that a range of frameworks designed to support more open-ended forms of public self-organisation also now exist.

Pre-existing literature on public self-organisation is useful as it calls on us to look at the mediated, indeterminate and potentially innovative qualities of contemporary publics. For those interested in how publics might play a more critical and creative role in settings of engagement and participation, it will be useful to attend to distinctions between the growing number of ways that participative infrastructures now support dynamics of call-and-response; as well as to the range of often unforeseen outcomes that emerge from these public interactions.

Seeing contemporary publics in 3-D
In shifting times, there is a need to see contemporary publics from each of these three perspectives.

Looking at how initiatives work to target and enroll pre-existing groups can help us to see the evolving set of ways that publics are being represented in contemporary settings of engagement and participation.

Looking at the roles publics are being invited to enact will help us to more clearly see the range of relationships now being tested-out.

If we are interested how new and more people-driven ideas, social innovations or ways of being public might potentially be generated in contemporary settings, it is also useful to look at how engagement and participation initiatives support forms of self-organisation and the outcomes that emerge from these processes.

Each of these three distinct ways of seeing the public can therefore be differently useful.

Used together these three perspectives can provide us with a clearer view of contemporary publics – particularly when it comes to identifying divergences and possible intersections between the versions of the public being supported by the increasing multiplicity of different kinds of engagement and participation initiatives.

Those interested in being creatively involved in the development of the field of engagement and participation and those involved in the reinvigoration of the public realm can therefore potentially all benefit from seeing contemporary publics in three-dimensions.

 

* This post draws on the outcomes of research and development work undertaken under the auspices of the Creating Publics and Participation Now projects. A version of the three-dimensional approach to contemporary publics set out here was first outlined in (2013) article called ‘The work of public engagement‘, by Nick Mahony, that’s available here. A more detailed version of this approach is elaborated in two further journal articles that are forthcoming, each of which is co-authored by Nick Mahony and Hilde C. Stephansen.

 

 

 

 

Futures of public participation? Meet The Practitioners

Mounting awareness of the limitations of top-down forms of public organisation is generating an explosion of interest in public participation.

To contribute to the on-going debate about these developments, we have teamed up with openDemocracy.net to publish a series of interviews that examine developments in contemporary public participation from the perspective of those who are responsible for organising them – we call them The Practitioners.

We’ve written a short introduction to our guest feature. Today (Monday) openDemocracy also publish our first interview, which is with 38 degrees. The other six interviews (with UK Uncut, Complaints Choirs, UDecide and others) will be published between tomorrow and Friday.

For those working to creatively anticipate and realise futures that are both more public and more participative, we hope you will find these interviews as interesting as we do.

These interviews are published as part of a project called Participation Now, which is a new Open University web platform that hosts debate and an accessible and expanding collection of over 120 of the most creative examples of contemporary publicparticipation and engagement initiatives.

‘The work of public engagement’: new article by Nick Mahony in special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali

Part of a (2013 no. 3) special issue devoted to the theme of ‘Academia’s values of critique and social relevance’ edited by Maria Francesca Murra and Nico Carpentier and featuring contributions by Peter Lunt, Peter Dalhgren and others.

The work of public engagement (copy can be accessed here) explores ‘the public’ in public engagement as a site of negotiation, production and possibility. It introduces a new conceptual framework, which draws on a set of distinctive disciplinary traditions of scholarship, to identify and bring together normative, calculative and emergence-oriented perspectives on the topic of the ‘public’. In contexts where ‘the public’ is increasingly opaque or in flux, this framework has been designed to provide a theoretical compass that enables emergent configurations of the public to be investigated in a pragmatic way. The article reflects on how this framework was used as part of the process of setting up a new participatory public engagement initiative called Participation Now, at The Open University (UK). The article also begins to illuminate how this process led to a particular set of ways of thinking about the social relevance and the responsibilities of contemporary research.

Mediating Energy Publics workshop, UEA London, April 3rd 2014

Happy to announce the details of the third seminar in the Publics then, now and beyond network‘s travelling seminar series ‘Making Energy Publics’, which will take place on April 3rd at UEA London. This seminar is organised by Helen Pallet and Jason Chilvers, of UEA.

Speakers: Andrew Barry (UCL); Linda Soneryd (University of Gothenburg); Alison Mohr (University of Nottingham); Tom Hargreaves and Noel Longhurst (UEA); Nick Mahony and HIlde Stephansen (Open University).

Here’s the blub:

What publics think, know, say and do has become a central concern of energy research and policy. Existing approaches tend to imagine an external public existing in a natural state waiting to be revealed, engaged, or mobilised by science and democracy. Yet, energy publics are actively brought into being by the ways one seeks to know and move them. This seminar – a collaboration between the Open University Publics then, now and beyond network and the EPSRC Realising Transition Pathways Project – explores the possible academic and practical value of radically rethinking energy publics as being emergent and coproduced in relation to social, technical and political orders. In doing so it has three main areas of concern and possible contribution.

1. To consider competing theoretical explanations for the coproduction, making and mediation of energy publics – including the relative roles of technologies, objects, issues, procedures, settings, imaginaries, and forms of human action in shaping (and being shaped by) instances and practices of public formation.

2. To open up a more ‘system-wide’ and symmetrical exploration of the diverse sites and forms of making energy publics – ranging from public deliberations on energy policy through to performing smart technologies in the home, and from grassroots energy innovations through to forms of public protest – than mainstream social science theories and approaches which attend to specific parts of the energy ‘system’ and/or particular publics (like rational actors, consumers, deliberative citizens, civil society, users, everyday practitioners).

3. To consider how relations between science, governance and society would need to be reconfigured in order to better account for the inherent uncertainties, diversities, materialities, and competing visions of emergent energy publics.

You can register for this event here.

Have questions about Making Energy Publics? Contact Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett

Participation Now: patterns, possibilities, politics

In this piece, just published here on the Participation Now site and here on the openDemocracy/Participation Now editorial partnership page, Hilde C. Stephansen and I review key milestones in the development and progress of the Participation Now project:

Milestone 1: this week, the collection of participatory public engagement initiatives, that’s been steadily building up in recent months, has passed the 100 mark. Various design upgrades, which we hope will improve the usability and experience of the site, have also gone live.

Milestone 2: we have begun to research this collection of 100 initiatives. The piece we’ve just written therefore also presents some initial results of a basic quantitative analysis of the 100 initiatives (there are charts). We have also recently started a piece of qualitative research which aims to develop a clearer picture of the different possibilities for being public (and for enacting forms of public action) being offered by these 100 initiatives. Three themes emerging from this qualitative analysis have already caught our attention and these are also briefly explored in the piece. The piece ends with a few thoughts about what’s at stake in this research and in this broader landscape of contemporary thinking and practice. Hope to hear from you if you have any comments.

If you haven’t done so already, do also check out the growing set of other short specially commissioned pieces about issues related to publics, participation and engagement that are now published  on the Participation Now and  openDemocracy/Participation Now pages. There’s some great stuff, authored by: Leah Lievrouw, Chris Kelty, Shannon Jackson, Janet Newman, Jenny Pearce, Ellen Stewart, Helen Pallett, Mike Mowbray, R.C. Smith, Sandra Boks, Paul Francois-Tremlett, Alex Dunedin, Andrea Beradi and others…