Séminaire « Politiques des sciences » : Minipublics – the technoscientific roll out of a new democracy
Invité : Jan- Peter Voss (Center for Technology and Society, Technische Universität Berlin)
We pick up on the problematization of participation methods as ‘technologies of participation’ which perform specific versions of citizens, democracy and politics. Our contribution is to reconstruct the innovation journey of ‘citizen panels’, as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of ‘aggregation’ leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 1980s over the disembedding and proliferation of procedural formats in the 1990s, and into the trans-local consolidation of participatory practices through laboratory based expertise since about 2000. Our account highlights a central irony: anti-technocratic engagements with governance gave birth to efforts at establishing technoscientific control over questions of political procedure. But such efforts have been met with various forms of reflexive engagement that draw out implications and turn design questions back into matters of concern. An emerging informal assessment regime for technologies of participation as yet prevents closure on one dominant global design for democracy beyond the state.
Lieu : UPEM – Bois de l’Etang, salle C219
Horaire : 14h00 – 17h00