Deliberate Mode Research Articles

Evolving Prefigurative Politics in an Intentional Community: The Auroville Citizens’ Assembly Pilot

In this paper we explore how a Citizens’ Assembly project in Auroville – the largest intentional community in the world – sought to prefigure new practices in collective decision-making. A Citizens’ Assembly model is a democratic innovation that enacts a deliberative mode of political decision-making by everyday citizens. It has been used by diverse bodies, from social movements to nation-state governments around the world. Auroville’s 2021 Citizens’ Assembly pilot – concerning a water vision for Auroville – is a unique case study that enables us to make a distinctive contribution to the existing academic scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and prefigurative politics on two grounds. Firstly, Auroville is an intentional community shaped by specific spiritual and self-governance values – an uncommon setting for a Citizens’ Assembly that supports us to make specific empirical offerings not seen in the literature on Citizens’ Assemblies to date. Secondly, given that Auroville’s pilot Citizens’ Assembly sought to prefigure the community’s foundational ideals of “human unity” and “unending education” in its collective decision-making practice, we connect our analysis to the academic scholarship concerning prefigurative politics. In doing so, we uniquely draw together the scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and the literature concerning prefigurative politics to explore whether such democratic innovations have a transformative effect on the political contexts they are embedded in, which we freshly consider with a focus on local scale, and the role that institutionalisation might have in terms of ensuring the reproduction, and thereby lasting impact of such experiments, or conversely their nullification.

The Rise of Procedural Legitimacy of the EU under the Juncker Commission: The Impact of the Better Regulation Agenda

The aim of this paper is to examine if, and to what extent, the EU governance system corresponds to the principles and demands of procedural legitimacy. We analyze procedural legitimacy as this is developed in the work of Lon Fuller and Robert Summers, and we conceptualize and examine legitimacy at the EU level through the three criteria of input, output, and throughput. We use these criteria to analyze the basic rationale and components of the 2015 Better Regulation Agenda of the Juncker Commission, arguing that it has enhanced citizens’ involvement in the policy-making process of the EU and has led to increasing participatory practices, by strengthening throughput legitimacy. However, there are still shortcomings in establishing a deliberative mode of public engagement. Throughput seems to have a considerably increased importance in the EU’s quest for legitimacy, although there is still room for improvement.

Transformative Translations? Challenges and tensions in territorial innovation governance

Since the 1990s, changing ways of producing and circulating knowledge have been accompanied by debates that diagnose and call for change in the relationship between science, society, politics, and innovation. Most recently in Europe, some of these debates emphasize the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI). In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of different territorial RRI-pilots within the Horizon 2020-funded project TRANSFORM. In these pilots, different translations of RRI become visible. RRI (1) gets translated as participatory and deliberative modes of innovation governance aimed at transformative change, (2) takes the shape of citizen science projects; and (3) is enacted as participatory agenda setting and (plans for a) citizen assembly. We argue that it is the often-invisible work of establishing, nurturing, and caring for relationships within the territorial R&I ecosystems – what can the thought of as ongoing “maintenance work” – that creates the conditions for more responsive modes of innovation governance, and thus a shift towards transformative change in innovation policy. Through describing these translations and the related practices we will direct attention to the potential, challenges, and systemic barriers of this kind of work.

The Valuable Plurality of the Citizen Sciences

Citizen science is a multilayered concept. Although it is generally understood as a form of public engagement with science and technology, it can take various forms, with widely different roles for citizens. Despite this vastness, a “contributory” strand of citizen science dominates the field, which formally limits citizens’ roles to those of data gatherers for professional scientists or experts. This has led critics to argue that citizen science is not as inclusive, socially transformative, or democratizing as its advocates claim, and to appeals by scholars, practitioners, and policymakers for more dialogue and deliberation in all stages of citizen science processes. In this piece, we share our reflections on these questions drawing on our experiences as participant observers in contributory citizen science projects in various parts of the world. Responding to the above critiques, we illustrate how such projects can have emancipatory potential in terms of impacting policy agendas, inciting behavioral change, and engaging hard-to-reach societal groups. We argue that the future of citizen science lies in pluralizing the citizen sciences by experimenting with various modes of democratic representation, participation, and deliberation.

Victim, villain, or scapegoat? Mediating organizational crises embedded in social problems and the transformation of order

ABSTRACT Western crisis communication theories focusing on individual attribution and stable underlying norms fail to account for crises embedded in larger social problems that lead to regulatory changes. By analysing three cases that Chinese crisis managers initially identified as “commission”, “control” and “agreement” situations (Bradford & Garrett, 1995) but ended up as crises involving “absent standards”, “bad standards” and “overrated standards”, in which the first two resulted in normative changes, we highlight the deliberative potential of crisis communication embodied in the “standards situation”. When neither journalistic narratives portraying the accused as a “villain” nor organizational accounts foregrounding a “victim/scapegoat” self-perception can contain attribution at individual levels, the society enters a deliberative mode that interrogates actors’ collective guilt complicit in a crisis.

The Reconstruction Logic and Institutional Realization of the Substantiation of Court Hearings in China's Commutation of Sentence and Parole Cases

The manuscript discusses the importance of sentence commutation and parole cases as an essential stage in the execution of criminal judgments, related to both judicial justice and trial authority. To clarify this issue, this article mainly adopts a literature research method to systematically review the research on China's establishment of parole and commutation since its inception, and uses case studies to provide examples to illustrate the existing situations.The author argues that substantive hearings for these cases can remove the issue of "paper-pushing" and strengthen procedural justice, transparency, and judicial justice. The manuscript suggests that the current "tripartite" linear model for parole hearings should be transitioned to a deliberative mode with statements from both prosecution and defense to achieve a substantive hearing. The author proposes that the "tripartite trial structure" reform should be the starting point for reconsidering the legal identity and rights of the participating subjects and their responsibilities.

Smart farming and artificial intelligence in East Africa: Addressing indigeneity, plants, and gender

Precision agriculture, including the deployment of robotic farm workers, artificial intelligence (AI) driven equipment, and corresponding “smart” systems, is being enthusiastically lauded for improving crop yields, strengthening food security, generating economic growth, and combating poverty. Techno-optimism has captured the imagination of media, industry, and governments alike. Simultaneously, researchers in the computer science and machine learning spaces have begun cataloguing potential harms that arise from information technologies that are shaped by bias, discrimination, and Western hierarchies of power. While precision agriculture and smart farming technologies may provide some opportunities for East African smallholder women farmers, they may also emerge as a new—yet familiar—system of appropriation and control over their labor and knowledge. Concurrently, there is a need to address how such technologies continue to reinforce plants as mere objects to be optimized and managed, rather than “smart” beings with their own material forces and ways of knowing that shape our worlds. This article considers how precision agriculture and smart farming are potentially managing, surveilling, and optimizing both women farmers and plants in ways that reinforce hierarchies and disregard Indigenous ways of knowing and being. It models a decolonial mode of deliberation toward governing smart farming and related artificially intelligent technologies in more meaningful and inclusive ways.

Liberation Theology: A Pragmatist Perspective

Liberation Theology: A Pragmatist Perspective

Electrophysiological Features to Aid in the Construction of Predictive Models of Human-Agent Collaboration in Smart Environments.

Achieving successful human–agent collaboration in the context of smart environments requires the modeling of human behavior for predicting people’s decisions. The goal of the current study was to utilize the TBR and the Alpha band as electrophysiological features that will discriminate between different tasks, each associated with a different depth of reasoning. To that end, we monitored the modulations of the TBR and Alpha, while participants were engaged in performing two cognitive tasks: picking and coordination. In the picking condition (low depth of processing), participants were requested to freely choose a single word out of a string of four words. In the coordination condition (high depth of processing), participants were asked to try and select the same word as an unknown partner that was assigned to them. We performed two types of analyses, one that considers the time factor (i.e., observing dynamic changes across trials) and the other that does not. When the temporal factor was not considered, only Beta was sensitive to the difference between picking and coordination. However, when the temporal factor was included, a transition occurred between cognitive effort and fatigue in the middle stage of the experiment. These results highlight the importance of monitoring the electrophysiological indices, as different factors such as fatigue might affect the instantaneous relative weight of intuitive and deliberate modes of reasoning. Thus, monitoring the response of the human–agent across time in human–agent interactions might turn out to be crucial for smooth coordination in the context of human–computer interaction.

Babel Fish Democracy? Prospects for Addressing Democratic Language Barriers through Machine Translation and Interpretation

AbstractThis article works to show that machine translation and interpretation technologies can play significant roles in addressing language barriers in democratic polities, including beyond the state. Numerous shared‐language or interpretation models have been proposed to address such barriers, while possible machine models have largely been dismissed in the literature. Yet, online translation is now ubiquitous globally, and governments and international organizations increasingly use machine translation and some interpretation applications. Such technologies, it is shown, can greatly expand information uptake and participation by ordinary citizens in linguistically diverse polities. They also can avoid key fairness and cost concerns faced by other models, or help address them in hybrid configurations, especially in online settings. While speech‐to‐speech applications may never achieve the seamless vernacular “Babel fish” interpretations implied as necessary for some deliberative modes, machine models can be seen as valuable for addressing language barriers within a range of approaches to democracy.

Respecting the subject in wellbeing public policy: beyond the social planner perspective

ABSTRACT We compare and evaluate two competing paradigms in the ‘wellbeing public policy’ (WPP) space with the intention of promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. We argue that most WPP proposals adopt the same ‘social planner perspective’ (SPP) that undergirds conventional economic policy analysis. The SPP is broadly technocratic, emphasising scientific standards for what constitutes good policy and empowering ‘dispassionate’ experts. We argue that WPP could lend itself to a more transformative agenda, one that embraces the value-laden nature of ‘wellbeing’ as a concept. We call this the ‘citizen’s perspective’ (CP). It would see WPP relinquish the SPP’s stance of detached analysis by technical experts and instead give a greater role to participatory and deliberative modes of policymaking to define, analyse, and measure wellbeing and ultimately make policy decisions. We present a preliminary framework for analysing when the SPP or CP is more suitable to a particular area of WPP.

Spontaneous or Deliberate: The Dual Influence of Mind Wandering on Creative Incubation

ABSTRACTTwo experiments examined the dual influence of mind wandering (MW) on the incubation of both deliberate and spontaneous modes of creativity. Specifically, using a modified version of Sustained Attention Response Task as the incubation task, this study assessed whether taking a break from a creative task and engaging in either an MW‐allowed task or an MW‐prevented task can exert differential effects on different aspects of creativity. Results showed that after engaging in an incubation task that allowed MW rather than prevented MW, participants generated ideas more flexibly but less persistently in the subsequent divergent thinking tasks, and were more likely to solve creative insight problems through intuitive insight but not systematic analysis. The results suggest that MW during incubation may simultaneously facilitate the spontaneous mode of creativity while suppressing the deliberate mode of creativity. These findings also indicate that creativity must be parsed into different subtypes in order to identify more specific ways to enhance creativity.

Packaging, Persuasion and Propaganda: Popular Preaching and Islamic Counter-publics in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Indonesia’s Islamic counter-publics have entered a new phase. Dominant definitions of the counter-public emphasise its reliance upon modes of publicity and public deliberation that conflict with dominant ones. In contemporary Indonesia, however, the practice of contemporary counter-public preachers requires a new definition. Preachers linked to Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), such as Felix Siauw and Fuadh Naim, do not counter-position in relation to popular culture, but appropriate it to reach broader audiences. Where popular culture might suggest an ethic of freedom or liberal sociability, such cultural forms are appropriated alongside messages that explicitly proscribe those liberal meanings. Contemporary counter-public preachers appropriate the symbolic repertoires of multiculturalism such as Javanese puppetry and poetry, as well as the images and music of the Korean Wave, yet do so to critique emergent liberal interpretations. These strategies are connected to contemporary politics, for both preachers have been long-time devotees of the pro-Khilafah cause that has recently been banned from public activity by the Indonesian government. The appropriation strategy suits the current moment, when dissimulation is a necessary element of practice for preachers who support the cause. In other words, they rebrand HTI by packaging almost everything with persuasive purpose to propagate Islamist ideology.

An Electrophysiological Model for Assessing Cognitive Load in Tacit Coordination Games.

Previously, it was shown that some people are better coordinators than others; however, the relative weight of intuitive (system 1) versus deliberate (system 2) modes of thinking in tacit coordination tasks is still not resolved. To address this question, we have extracted an electrophysiological index, the theta-beta ratio (TBR), from the Electroencephalography (EEG) recorded from participants while they were engaged in a semantic coordination task. Results have shown that individual coordination ability, game difficulty and response time are each positively correlated with cognitive load. These results suggest that better coordinators rely more on complex thought process and on more deliberate thinking while coordinating. The model we have presented may be used for the assessment of the depth of reasoning individuals engage in when facing different tasks requiring different degrees of allocation of resources. The findings as well as future research directions are discussed.

Technocratic and deliberative nexus in policy analysis: Learning from smart city planning in Chiang Mai, Thailand

ABSTRACT Strengthened by rigorous developments in foundational principles and methods, the technocratic-vs-deliberative debate has long lapsed in policy analysis discourse. We attempt to remedy this debate by illustrating the case of Fah Ham smart city planning in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We argue that the assimilation of both technocratic and deliberative modes is feasible in policy analysis, which in turn makes policy-making process more productive. Utilizing participatory action research, we mainly observed and recorded the events. Certain assimilation points take place, which in gist, makes policy analysis successful. Embarking from the case’s illustration, it accentuates inclusivity should be safeguarded in policy analysis.

Managing Complex Crises through the Lens of Intuitive Expertise: A Naturalistic Decision-Making Perspective

This theoretical paper draws extensively on the extant literature to examine the role of expert intuition in the management of non-routine crises within a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. It follows a theoretically driven inductive design to explore the construct of intuitive expertise, with a specific focus on high-risk domains. Methodically, the paper builds on the naturalistic decision-making (NDM) theory to explore how experienced crisis managers perform complex tasks with the aid of their tacit and intuitive knowledge. Evidence suggests that experienced decision-makers are more likely to solve time-pressured tasks using their intuitive mode as the default strategy, only switching to a deliberative mode when the proposed course(s) of action require some form of justification or where pattern recognition has proven insufficient. The paper also develops a four-dimensional framework that describes both individual and situational factors that generally influence decision-making dynamics in a VUCA crisis environment. A synthesis of the literature results in the emergence of four theoretical propositions, with implications discussed for crisis and emergency practice. A key recommendation is to integrate the NDM sub-discipline into the field of crisis management, with suggestions that such integration may lead to significant improvements in crisis response effectiveness.

The dissatisfied and the engaged: citizen support for citizens’ assemblies and their willingness to participate

ABSTRACT Ireland is a setting where citizens’ assemblies (CAs) have played a prominent role, driving considerable policy change and impactful referendum initiatives. Irish citizens are therefore particularly likely to be aware of the potential of such deliberative processes. We examine citizen’s support for political reforms towards more deliberation, as well as their potential willingness to engage. We find that support and participation are driven by citizens who are dissatisfied with the regime, or who are particularly likely to be politically engaged. While the former tend to support most types of political reforms, the latter are in particular driven towards more deliberative modes of politics. Our findings furthermore suggest that participation rates in CAs will be lower among some cohorts of society than others and correlated with factors such as education, political interest, and perceived corruption.

Spontaneous and deliberate modes of creativity: Multitask eigen-connectivity analysis captures latent cognitive modes during creative thinking

Despite substantial progress in the quest of demystifying the brain basis of creativity, several questions remain open. One such issue concerns the relationship between two latent cognitive modes during creative thinking, i.e., deliberate goal-directed cognition and spontaneous thought generation. Although an interplay between deliberate and spontaneous thinking is often implicated in the creativity literature (e.g., dual-process models), a bottom-up data-driven validation of the cognitive processes associated with creative thinking is still lacking. Here, we attempted to capture the latent modes of creative thinking by utilizing a data-driven approach on a novel continuous multitask paradigm (CMP) that widely sampled a hypothetical two-dimensional cognitive plane of deliberate and spontaneous thinking in a single fMRI session. The CMP consisted of eight task blocks ranging from undirected mind wandering to goal-directed working memory task, while also included two widely-used creativity tasks, i.e., alternate uses task (AUT) and remote association task (RAT). Using eigen-connectivity (EC) analysis on the multitask whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) patterns, we embedded the multitask FCs into a low-dimensional latent space. The first two latent components, as revealed by the EC analysis, broadly mapped onto the two cognitive modes of deliberate and spontaneous thinking, respectively. Further, in this low-dimensional space, both creativity tasks were located in the upper right corner of high deliberate and spontaneous thinking (creative cognitive space). Neuroanatomically, the creative cognitive space was represented by not only increased intra-network connectivity within executive control and default mode network, but also by higher coupling between the two canonical brain networks. Further, individual differences reflected in the low-dimensional connectivity embeddings were related to differences in deliberate and spontaneous thinking abilities. Altogether, using a continuous multitask paradigm and a data-driven approach, we provide initial empirical evidence for the contribution of both deliberate and spontaneous modes of cognition during creative thinking.

The Fake Haven

This writing evolved out of a text that was rejected by my institution. I had to disentangle it and start again. Whereas artwork can be ever faltering, ever failing, not knowing how it will turn out, within practice-led research there is an expectation that you can predict an outcome. In my original text, the boundaries between my practice and a goal driven academic model became porous; poetry seeped into the academic writing and dissolved the fortress. The premise of the text is that through instructions and an imaginary video-game walkthrough, the player is going to return to their ‘pre-self’, which is a notion taken from Zen meditation (described as ‘no-self’). The text has become a proposal for a third-person player game produced for an exhibition. The text changes form, pronouns, possessive nouns, moving from concrete poetry to prose, from internal monologues to diatribes. It is a deliberate mode to dodge self-imposed restrictions when in the rest of life, I exist as queer beyond the gender binary and also as a mother.

A counterfactual account of diachronic structural rationality

ABSTRACT Philosophers who take rationality to consist in the satisfaction of rational requirements typically favour rational requirements that govern mental attitudes at a time rather than across times. One such account has been developed by Broome in Rationality through reasoning. He claims that diachronic functional properties of intentions such as settling on courses of actions and resolving conflicts are emergent properties that can be explained with reference to synchronic rational pressures. This is why he defends only a minimal diachronic requirement which characterises forgetting as irrational. In this paper, I show that Broome’s diachronically minimalist account lacks the resources to explain how a rational agent may resolve incommensurable choices by an act of will. I argue that one can solve this problem by either specifying a mode of diachronic deliberation or by introducing a genuinely diachronic requirement that governs the rational stability of an intention via a diachronic counterfactual condition concerning rational reconsideration. My proposal is similar in spirit to Gauthier’s account in his seminal paper ‘Assure and threaten’. It improves on his work by being both more general and explanatorily richer in its application with regard to diachronic phenomena such as transformative choices and acts of will.