Clik here to view.
Alternative horizons - understanding Occupy's politics
Occupy is to be assessed, firstly, in terms of the alternative public space that it creates and the mutual recognition between individuals that (in however fragile a fashion) it brings into existence....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pondering participation
Is there a profound contradiction between subjective expression and effective political deliberation, such that the first type of participation should be described as superficial? Emphasis on broad...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Volatile, stable and extractive participation
At a conference on the theme of ‘Participatory Cultural Citizenship’ in Aarhus, Denmark last November, Participation Now asked keynote speaker Chris Kelty about questions posed by his current research...
View ArticleClik here to view.
When is citizen participation transformative?
When is participation empowering and transformative? What is the relationship between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ modes of participation? At a conference on the theme of ‘Participatory Cultural...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Participation Now: patterns, possibilities, politics
At one end of this spectrum we have started to place initiatives that offer to rationalise public engagement and make the participatory self-organisation of publics more efficient. At the other end,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Introducing Bill McKibben: social movement creation today
Is one of America’s most prominent environmentalists, Bill McKibben, heading up a leaderless movement? If not, what kind of leader is he? Book review.Since the 2010 defeat of federal cap-and-trade...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Insider knowledge
While the literal meaning of utopia is ‘no place’, an OU-topia could be almost any place. Even when physically isolated, an Open University student, engaged in studying, could be part of a ‘public’,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Public engagement, a social priority?
Living in a perpetual state of fear, people prefer to isolate themselves from what they perceive as the “ineffective” mechanisms of public participation; creating and perpetuating a negative vicious...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The democratic potential of activist performance
One could hardly imagine a better illustration than Putin’s regime for the idea that the Presidency is itself a performative performance, ritualized but only too brutally effective, in contrast with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Raymond Williams and 'The emerging landscape of thought and practice'
The potential for this project to tap into the many and diverse informal ‘education-for-social-purpose’ groups and activities could extend ‘back to the future’ readings and reflections, making the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Science outreach in schools
There were so many questions that I had to stop taking them so that the children could finish school on time.“Someone who invents things.” “Someone who does experiments.” “A Hard worker.” ‘A man.”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building the middle ground
For my colleagues, nothing short of complete people-driven management would do. On the other hand, the government colleagues I befriended and worked with perceived participation as a necessary evil.In...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The myth of the keyboard warrior: public participation and 38 Degrees
Preliminary findings after completing an ethnographic study of 38 Degrees suggest that this is a new type of organisation.A cursory glance at the comment section of the UK's leading newspapers suggests...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Democratizing inequalities
Participation has become a necessary basis for institutional authority in an era of declining social mobility and government retrenchment. It has become a tool for sustaining hierarchies as much as a...
View ArticleIntroducing ‘Participation Now: meet the practitioners’
Participation Now is a new Open University web platform that hosts an accessible and expanding collection of over 120 of the most creative examples of contemporary public participation and engagement...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Organising today: stewarding and responding to ‘the people’
38 degrees aims to bring people together to take action on the issues that matter to them. As part of our series of interviews with practitioners, Participation Now researcher Nick Mahony talked to...
View ArticleChanging public opinion through direct action
“Starbucks felt so pressured by the public that they felt obliged to pay £20,000,000 to the HMRC.” Our series of interviews with activists and practitioners who organise public participation...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Complaints Choir: what is it?
"This project stays dynamic when people take the Complaints Choir as a tool and make use of it in their own context and modify it. That’s the spirit of open source." Hilde C. Stephansen interviews the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Taking responsibility for Friern Barnet Community Library
“Barnet claims to know what people want. But if you go into some of the libraries in Barnet, I would have to say that they probably don’t know what people want.” Nick Mahony talks to the Chair of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Engaging EU citizens in policy making
As part of our series of interviews with practitioners involved in public participation initiatives, Participation Now researcher Hilde C. Stephansen spoke to Deirdre Lee at Insight-NUI Galway, about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Occupy to online democracy: the Loomio story
Flexibility was important, with people being able to change their position if their mind was changed by a persuasive argument or new information. Democracy is a skill we can practice with people...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building relationships through participatory budgeting
As part of our series of interviews with practitioners involved in public participation initiatives, Participation Now researcher Hilde C. Stephansen spoke to Alison Lamb at Newcastle City Council...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Creating a culture of participation
As part of our series of interviews with practitioners and activists, Participation Now researcher Hilde C. Stephansen spoke to Mikey Weinkove of The People Speak, an artists’ collective that creates...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Journey into participation: a viewpoint from the Science Museum, London
Many institutions, including London's Science Museum, are now looking to invite their audiences to take a more active role in engaging with their sites and collections, rather than being the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
You take the high road, I'll take the low road, and we'll see who's more...
Whilst there are many apparent similarities between the rhetoric of ‘Localism’ in England and that of ‘Community Empowerment’ in Scotland, a closer look reveals striking contrasts in the ways that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
PPE in Oxford: people’s political economy
Wanted: more insight into effective community organisation, particularly in the field of education and political economy education.People's Political Economy (PPE) was set up by four Oxford-based...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Keyword: public
In our current moment, we are witnessing a global, if contradictory, conversation about what public-ness might mean.In cross-disciplinary gatherings at the Arts Research Center of UC Berkeley, we have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Researching Occupy London
Those few cold months camped outside St Pauls were a fragile attempt to create a political subject beyond the terrain of politics as usual. I conducted field work with Occupy London leading up to its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Researching austerity: participatory engagement
Any research that seeks to make positive interventions as well as produce ‘objective’ data, must foster new kinds of dialogue that support and engage those directly involved.There is a significant...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Knowing your citizens, making publics
What sets public participation techniques apart from other ways for governments to know about citizens is the emphasis on deliberation between a small number of participants. Take fracking…A pressing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Could volunteering be bad for our health?
Discussions of volunteering in British health-care organisations rarely discuss the possible downside. But we need awkward outsiders.A few years ago, while observing a meeting of a Public Partnership...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Participatory public engagement: reshaping what it means to be public?
In exactly what ways can participation and public engagement address the contemporary crises of democracy, expertise and legitimacy? Participation Now will provide a public platform for researchers,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bradford’s Community University: co-producing knowledge for a change
This is a year-long experiment in knowledge exchange and co-production, aimed at exploring what emerges when academics and community participants try to learn from each other. Universities are not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Inspired by the public
Experimenting with public participation at the Kröller-Müller Museum, 2010-2014.Whose exhibition? was the question I asked myself when writing my Master’s thesis. Posing this question led me to a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Quantified Self community, lifelogging and the making of “smart” publics
Gary Wolf, co-founder, suggests that self-tracking and life-logging data may be aboutus, but they should also be ours to generate, harvest, access, manipulate, interpret, and use - even sell. How can...
View Article
