Wilsdon and Willis walk us through some of the past attempts to democratize science highlighting the UK’s failure of the Public Understanding of Science paradigm. They suggest that public engagement must have a useful impact. In other words, the people who participate in such deliberative polling, focus groups, juries, conferences, and dialogues should have a sense of how their input will influence the organization’s decisions before choosing to engage. I appreciated the distinction between interests and world views. World views suggests a fundamental difference in the lenses through which entities see the world, while interests denotes a self-conscious tunneling of actions based on desired outcomes.
Restoring public confidence in science at a time when the UK floundered on key issues was the motivation behind this paper. A number of important themes are mentioned early on in this pamphlet. One being that, “Processes of engagement tend to be restricted to particular questions, posed at particular stages in the cycle of research, development, and exploitation” (18). HSD student Sharlissa Moore’s research on the siting of a massive solar power plant is case in point of this problem. The activists knew that the only way to convince decision-makers to site the plant elsewhere was through the powerful Endangered Species Act. This restricted the conversation to how many desert tortoises were located on the site and if their relocation could be mitigated. Not only did this reduce the debate to a particular law, but it also constrained it to the logic of numbers and science.
Another really interesting and important concept in this paper was the deliberative model of democratic opinion forming. The authors observe that when most politicians and economics (I would add some academics to this list) wish to engage with the public they simply conduct a public opinion poll. Instead, they argue that the deliberative model whereby citizens work out their opinions through dialogue, is a more useful tool for engaging with the public. This is because, according to the authors, people do not know how they feel about something unless they are forced to form an opinion about it (46). I am a bit confused because they also say that this could include reading something in the newspaper which leads me to believe that an opinion poll would force someone to think about their views on such and such issue. I agree, however, that engaging in a reasoned debate will allow one to more closely examine their own thoughts on a matter than simply to answer a question or to think briefly about a news story. The key to this, though, is that if the fundamental structure of decision-making processes is not changed, then little will have been added by the addition of public input.
One more thing which I mentioned in class: these types of engagements would seem to be to be already filtered by people’s interests. There is no way to get an accurate picture of “the public’s” view on any particular topic. While I am a fan of the upstream model, I am still trying to work out how it would be integrated into a part of our lives in a meaningful, ongoing manner. There would need to be a major shift in the way politicians, business leaders, scientists, and academics view the public. I have long lamented that I feel it is in error which scholars too assume the public is ignorant or has less knowledge than we do about the workings of the world. Humans are self-aware beings no matter if they choose to spend their time watching TV all day or what have you. I fall into this trap as well at times when I think about the desire of the average American to maintain the status quo (convenience, individualism, opulence, etc. etc), and what it would actually take to shift society’s perspective to a climate more conducive to what the authors (of all the papers) lay out. I want to spout some Marxist rhetoric here, but I will just leave it at the point that we are not any happier in our fully modern world than before despite some securities we have fought hard for and murdered many in the wake. (land, food, “safety”, religious freedom, etc). Are people disconnected because they don't have enough opportunity to be involved? Or because it is not offered as a meaningful option?
In this information overload age, maybe what is missing is a sense that our voice actually matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment