Participatory Turn Research Articles

Ant logic and necrolocutors

As environmental research increasingly values and foregrounds traditional knowledge in a reinvigorated participatory turn, many of the original problematics and harms re-emerge through ostensible collaborations with knowledge-holders. These issues are not just instances of ethical oversight; they are the result of ant logic: narrow, spatialized conceptualizations of power, knowledge, and death as contained and fixed within bodies and space and preoccupations with visibility that produces ontological conceptions of local communities, traditional knowledge-holders, state actors, and neoliberal forces. This article unwinds the tight Foucauldian grip with which environmental social sciences are held to reveal power, knowledge, and death as vibrant, immaterial actors and explores the role of ant logic as an actor itself. In doing so, another key environmental actor is uncovered, one who leverages the death-centric form of articulation to define power and knowledge: the necrolocutor.

Patient engagement in drug development: dialogically problematizing participation

ABSTRACT For many years, the field of drug development remained insulated from patient engagement initiatives that became commonplace in healthcare, it is currently experiencing a participatory turn. This has been informed by a re-evaluation of the patients' insights and of the roles they can play in drug development, with both democratising and technocratic arguments invoked in support of their more substantial engagement. This article problematises the democratising potential of drug development through a knowledge co-production process between the authors of this paper - two scholars and two practitioners in this field. It scrutinises what patients can participate in drug development by zooming in on the Patient Expert Training provided by EUPATI, arguably the most influential and reputable patient education provider in Europe currently. Through their dialogue, the authors highlight the considerable epistemic requirements placed upon patients and warn about the risk of the emergence of participatory practices that rely exclusively on a narrow patient elite. They also reflect upon the benefits and challenges of close collaborations between researchers and practitioners and call for the systemic transformations needed for such knowledge co-production initiatives to become commonplace in academia.

Introduction: participatory knowledge co-production

ABSTRACT This special Forum presents three articles that demonstrate efforts at participatory knowledge co-production. The three experiences were successful in the modest sense that they provided meaningful agency for participants and their knowledge roles, though in different ways. All three articles comment on the participatory turn that emphasizes an increasing role in public participation in scientific and policy data knowledge production and acknowledge that participation can have diverse meanings, contingent on the interests of the groups involved. This can mean a performative participation with coercive means to achieve particular goals with the participants or the groups that they represent; alternatively, participation can mean liberatory approaches that are designed to remove oppressive structures from disenfranchised populations and shift power to them. The cases here add nuance to critiques of power. Two cases demonstrate how participants are molded to conform to institutional power structures, though at least some participants find that shift (and recognition of their contribution) legitimizing and desirable. While each considers the relevance of participation for democracy, they highlight differences in values related to democracy, as regards whether participation is the endpoint value in democracy, or else whether democracy is a larger process towards redistributing power towards achieving equity and justice.

Understanding the role of physical spaces in social de-segregations: Spatial lessons from Kerala and Northern Ireland

Within development literature, recent decades have seen an unequivocal turn towards a call for a decentralised and more contextual and vernacular understanding of social, political and economic development. This paper brings together the development literature on the “participatory turn” with Henri Lefebvre’s work on social spaces and autogestion, to move beyond the “what” and “how” of participation, to add the question of “where” in exploring efforts to overcome social segregation and build sustainable integrated communities. It discusses two very distinct regional cases—Kerala (India) and Northern Ireland—as examples to argue that our analysis of the potential for transformative politics in society needs to include a study of its “participatory spaces”, and that this requirement transcends simple binaries like North/South, institutional/non-institutional, and top-down/bottom-up.

Reclaiming artificial intelligence accounts: A plea for a participatory turn in artificial intelligence inquiries

Reclaiming artificial intelligence accounts: A plea for a participatory turn in artificial intelligence inquiries

Participation versus scale: Tensions in the practical demands on participatory AI

Ongoing calls from academic and civil society groups and regulatory demands for the central role of affected communities in development, evaluation, and deployment of artificial intelligence systems have created the conditions for an incipient “participatory turn” in AI. This turn encompasses a wide number of approaches — from legal requirements for consultation with civil society groups and community input in impact assessments, to methods for inclusive data labeling and co-design. However, more work remains in adapting the methods of participation to the scale of commercial AI. In this paper, we highlight the tensions between the localized engagement of community-based participatory methods, and the globalized operation of commercial AI systems. Namely, the scales of commercial AI and participatory methods tend to differ along the fault lines of (1) centralized to distributed development; (2) calculable to self-identified publics; and (3) instrumental to intrinsic perceptions of the value of public input. However, a close look at these differences in scale demonstrates that these tensions are not irresolvable but contingent. We note that beyond its reference to the size of any given system, scale serves as a measure of the infrastructural investments needed to extend a system across contexts. To scale for a more participatory AI, we argue that these same tensions become opportunities for intervention by offering case studies that illustrate how infrastructural investments have supported participation in AI design and governance. Just as scaling commercial AI has required significant investments, we argue that scaling participation accordingly will require the creation of infrastructure dedicated to the practical dimension of achieving the participatory tradition’s commitment to shifting power.

Civil Society Participation in Global Food Security Governance: Deconstructing the Discourse of Evidence-based Policy Making

Food security has been described as a very tough problem, suggesting that there is no single or simple solution to the problem of food insecurity. Meanwhile, there is a growing body of academic literature on food security that proposes solutions. Global governance is marked by a participatory turn, meaning that there are increasing numbers of global governance processes working to develop processes and mechanisms to enhance the participation of non-state actors in governance and policy making processes. Given this trend, it is not surprising that participation in governance processes has become an interesting site of investigation for research. The result has been the development of a growing body of literature analysing diverse aspects of increased participation, which calls for evidence-based policy making are increasing evidence in global food security policy processes, and beyond. For example, the follow up and review process for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to be “rigorous and based on evidence, informed by country-led evaluations and data which is high-quality, accessible, timely, reliable and disaggregated” (UN General Assembly, 2015, paragraph. 74). Evidence-based policy has become pervasive as a universal recipe for transparency, accountability, and good governance. However, its declamatory pervasiveness within public policy buries conglomerate discourses, signification, and practices around what counts as evidence, how and by whom it is utilised, and what impact it has on scholars, researchers, and policy officers. This research furnishes an overview of comprehensive reviews of literature and analyzes special issues of global food security, and policy frameworks. The conquest of evidence-based policy as a discourse, highlighting its close relationship with food security policies, the political, cultural context of its initial emergence in the global world, and its discourses. Evidence-based policy is customarily articulated as a means of speaking truth to power, separating facts from their human contexts. Global discourses on the governance of food security span competing approaches. For example, a neoliberal approach advocates commercialized, industrial agriculture, while food sovereignty and resilience are part of an alternative discourse to food security that prioritizes locally-based agroecological food production. Understanding how global discourses play out locally and how they impact the environment and biodiversity is important to identify appropriate pathways towards sustainability. In addition to their effects on food security, different approaches could reinforce or impede the success of biodiversity conservation because of the strong interdependence of food security and ecosystems. I examined alternative approaches to food security and biodiversity conservation pursued by 30 stakeholders from local to national levels. Agricultural intensification, commercialization, and profit were widely considered important, while support for agroecology and resilience was largely restricted to non-governmental organizations. Except for supporters of the agroecology and resilience approach, biodiversity conservation was considered as a secondary goal. In conclusion, it is important to acknowledge plurality of food security approaches because local conditions are characterized by a multiplicity of stakeholder interests, and because food security is a complex problem that requires a multidimensional approach. However, major contradictions among existing approaches need to be reconciled, and the agroecology and resilience approach should be strengthened to ensure the sustainable achievement of food security and biodiversity conservation.

City Governance, Participatory Democracy, and Cultural Heritage in Barcelona, 1986–2022

ABSTRACT Citizen participation in Barcelona has undergone a gradual process of institutionalisation that has accelerated over the last ten years. Today, participatory governance in areas such as urban planning and the management of social spaces is a hallmark of the city. However, citizen participation is only now beginning to occur in cultural heritage and comes with certain limitations. Through three diachronic case studies, this article explores the architecture of participation in Barcelona and its contribution to cultural heritage management. It analyses the role of cultural heritage as an actor in participatory processes and explores the degree of citizen participation in cultural heritage management. Our findings reveal that there is no participation in heritage itself, but there is participation in issues in relation to cultural heritage. This leads us to reflect on the lack of a true participatory turn in cultural heritage management.

Persons or data points? Ethics, artificial intelligence, and the participatory turn in mental health research.

This article identifies and examines a tension in mental health researchers' growing enthusiasm for the use of computational tools powered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Although there is increasing recognition of the value of participatory methods in science generally and in mental health research specifically, many AI/ML approaches, fueled by an ever-growing number of sensors collecting multimodal data, risk further distancing participants from research processes and rendering them as mere vectors or collections of data points. The imperatives of the "participatory turn" in mental health research may be at odds with the (often unquestioned) assumptions and data collection methods of AI/ML approaches. This article aims to show why this is a problem and how it might be addressed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Cancel Culture or the Realpolitik of the Participatory Turn

My argument is that the participatory ethos has contributed to cancel culture. I analyse various framings of cancel culture, as it is a complex phenomenon, one aspect of which concerns myth and ritual. I connect this to criticism of the participatory turn in contemporary art, which claims that participation is a public ritual that has been politically co-opted for different ends, such as producing fake consensus or the illusion of democratic engagement. To test my argument, I analyse my own cancellation, whilst being involved in Hungarian feminism, which in my experience has been a backwater in political parties and lobbies. I claim that the participatory turn has indeed been co-opted, either to represent participation, or as formats for politically instrumentalised subjectivation rituals. Cancellations take place when rituals of subjectivation and representation become sacrificial rituals, since sacrificing someone imbues participation with affect.

A smart city for all citizens: an exploration of children’s participation in Norway’s smartest city

ABSTRACT In recent years, a 'participatory turn' has emerged as a remedy to counter top-down and techno-centric smart city development approaches. While this shift in smart city policies and strategies offers promise, it also presents challenges. This paper scrutinizes the participatory shift within smart city policies and initiatives in Stavanger, Norway, a pioneer and driving force for smart city development in Northern Europe. Using a qualitative case study of the Lervig Smart Park project, with a particular focus on the inclusion of children and youth, we investigate the methods of participation employed and the stages at which children are integrated into the planning process. Our findings underscore the beneficial outcomes of including children and youth in the Lervig Park design process, yet also reveal significant limitations, especially in the perception of children as capable political subjects and the absence of suitable methodological tools for their engagement across planning phases.

'Together We Curate': Cultural Participation and Collective Curating

In the frame of the museums’ reflexive and participatory turn and given that curation has rarely been used as an inclusive practice, the co-curating program 'Together We Curate', initiated by the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Thessaloniki, Greece) after the first lockdown of the covid-19 pandemic, has served as an attempt to break with established theory and practice. The paper discusses the participatory experience of a co-curating exhibition and critically examines if and how such an approach enables curating to become an inclusive practice. Via a practice-led research methodology, the paper reflects on how a radical shift in the institution’s received practices can serve as a vehicle for togetherness, enabling visitors to become active agents and transforming curating into an inclusive practice, possibly opening new spaces for thought and action in the process of democratizing art and culture.

A Participatory Turn in Mathematics Education Research: Possibilities and Tensions

Mathematics education researchers concerned with justice and rehumanizing mathematics education are increasingly calling for research that takes seriously the values, commitments, and voices of the communities for which the research is most consequential. Exclusion of or superficial engagement with these perspectives and experiences in research and design processes have perpetuated deficit perspectives of minoritized communities, rendering them simply the object of reform efforts. Consequently, this Research Commentary conceptualizes a participatory turn in mathematics education research, offering a set of commitments that guide and examine the possibilities and tensions of such a turn.

Participatory versus analytic approaches for understanding risk perceptions: a comparison of three case studies from the field of biotechnology

Considering growing participatory turns in regulatory scientific risk analysis, this paper compares how social scientists use participatory and analytical methods to understand risk perceptions and meet competing demands for representativeness and inclusiveness. Drawing on case studies of how three European risk agencies use participatory and analytic methods in the context of biotechnology, it confirms difficulties of analytic methods to shed light on perceptions when applied to unfamiliar topics. It also shows the potential of participatory in particular deliberative formats to engage affected populations in the risk analysis process, despite challenges in promoting inclusiveness. The cases call for the integration of methods, while remaining aware of the need to understand the mutual interplay in the constructions of risks and structural inequalities.

Patient engagement in drug development: configuring a new resource for generating innovation

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the recent interest in patient engagement (PE) in drug development, expressed in the growing number of calls for engagement, novel organizations dedicated to changing the culture of drug development, and guidelines for directing and evaluating PE. By reviewing materials produced by actors in the field and analyzing publications reporting on PE initiatives, I map sites of action where PE is being conceived and practiced, delineate how PE is being shaped, and analyze relationships emerging within and around the collectives involved. Pharmaceutical industry players actively mold the landscape of PE in drug development through creating tools and frameworks for PE. These instruments for guiding the implementation of PE are disseminated via training and dedicated events, concurrently disseminating a particular configuration of PE. PE emerges as an attempt to open new avenues for increasing productivity amidst concerns about the future of drug innovation, while PE practices fit smoothly into the arrangements for producing and distributing pharmaceutical knowledge largely shaped by the industry. The ongoing participatory turn in drug development is taking place without shifting the established concentration of epistemic power among commercial entities.

The political construction of the ‘citizen turn’ in the EU: disintermediation and depoliticisation in the Conference on the Future of Europe

ABSTRACT The EU has recently organised a series of ‘citizen-centred’ processes that may be indicative of a new pattern in terms of democracy and participation. The article begins with this observation in order to pose the following question: to what extent the introduction of ‘citizen participation’ mechanisms in the Conference on the Future of Europe reflects a rupture with the EU’s dominant understanding of democracy? While there are innovative elements in the Conference, which are described in detail, the article develops a normative critique of the underlying philosophy with which it was organised and constructed, as it followed an alternative legitimacy logic that fundamentally deviates from an agonistic public sphere perspective. The Conference illustrates a ‘citizen turn’ that breaks away from the ‘participatory turn’ described by Saurugger (2010) in that it decouples ‘citizen participation’ from civil society and the idea of a European public sphere, both in discursive terms as well as in the ensuing political practices. The article concludes with a wider conceptualisation of what the ‘citizen turn’ means for EU democracy, and why the disintermediation of European politics is coherent with the preexistent depoliticised EU political dynamics, conceived in the case of the Conference as ‘democracy without politics’.

The Web 2.0 social media as a space for the creation of classical music experiences in the time of the pandemic: The case of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra

This paper shows how classical music left its canon-guaranteed spaces of the concert hall and stepped toward a broader community of audience using the virtual sphere of Web 2.0 social media tools, on the example of the work of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra. We analyze how this orchestra uses social media to present and promote its repertoire and work during the period of pandemic measures and restrictions. The analysis indicates that in all its social media activities the orchestra was guided by the preservation of an autonomous aesthetic quality of classical music, as its value must remain present in whatever tools and formats an art institution presents itself. Various tactics of using social media tools were the opportunity to position classical music from the art of performance into a system of mediated and information-distributed culture along with the development of participatory turn as a wider audience engagement in classical music through producing social media user-generated content. The orchestra's use of social media during the time of the pandemic reflects several ways of changing classical music practice: connecting to new audiences in new ways, moving out of the concert hall, redefining the community relevance of a classical music institution, and initiating paths for collaboration between performers and the audiences.

The Logics of Invited and Uninvited Material Participation

This paper addresses debates concerning the ‘participatory turn’ in healthcare. It focuses on the case of blood pressure self-monitoring, understanding this as a form of patient participation at the level of individual care. Drawing and expanding on the work of Marres and Wynne and their notions of material participation and of uninvited engagement, we examine how patients’ home blood pressure self-monitoring is incorporated into clinical care, how the materials of blood pressure self-monitoring mediate participation and how we might characterise the practices of participation found within everyday clinical care. Our analysis makes new conceptual links, suggesting that, in this context, invited participation appears to align with participation made easy, while uninvited participation involves more invested, more engaged participation. We offer two further developments of these concepts. First, we trouble characterisations of invited and uninvited participation as distinct and separate, observing movement between these. Second, through applying the logics of material participation in a new context, everyday clinical practice, we suggest that the logic of participation made easy might be extended beyond lay people, to apply to professionals as well. Our analysis illustrates how materials are mobilised to facilitate invited and uninvited participation within the context of the on-going asymmetries in doctor patient relationships.

Beyond collegiality in environmental vigilance

The participatory turn in environmental monitoring is illustrative of several contemporary trends: in the context of political injunctions to participate actively in public life, it brings together sociotechnical changes associated with the multiplication of digital devices and organizational evolutions influenced by the widespread integration of knowledge infrastructures. This introductory article argues that participation in environmental monitoring initiatives cannot be understood by focusing on changes in collegiality that characterize how they are designed and carried out. We propose the concept of mediation as an avenue for exploring the issues that confront those who promote and analyze these initiatives. Mediation provides a way of examining their architecture, their governance in terms of a systemic understanding of how they distribute power, and the reflexive positioning of social science researchers that they imply. Thinking about the uncertainty of the environmental data produced, their heterogeneous nature and their scope of potential use appears a more fruitful line of inquiry.

AI, a wicked problem for cultural policy? Pre-empting controversy and the crisis of cultural participation

ABSTRACT This article explores the practice of pre-empting controversy as an example of the wicked problem of cultural participation in the digital media. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), research into the history of cybernetics, artificial intelligence (AI), and policy studies, it argues that the ongoing digital transformation and the expansion of the algorithmic public sphere does not solve but amplifies the problem of cultural participation, challenging the ‘participatory turn’ in cultural policy, defined as cultural policy’s re-orientation to encourage participation of different stakeholders at different stages of policymaking. This process is analysed through two cases: the postponing of a retrospective exhibition of the painter Philip Guston in the United States and the pre-emptive ban of a public art project centred on a monument for the Soviet Lithuanian writer Petras Cvirka in Lithuania. In both cases, risk management through pre-emption backfired and revealed the lack of institutional preparedness to foresee and deal with the digital social.