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Project COBRA: community-owned solutions for the marginalised indigenous...
Project COBRA is an EU project which advocates the position that local communities have the capacity to identify their own "best practices" and share them with others.Significant funds are being...
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The nQuire young citizen inquiry
We want young scientists to develop a personal sense of wonder.This government has expressed its intention to create a more democratic society in the UK by raising the levels of community...
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The Ragged University
These events are designed for sharing and learning in informal social spaces.The Ragged University project rests on the concept that everyone is a unique and distinct body of knowledge, accredited with...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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 ArticlePondering 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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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Call for contributions
The Open University’s new project, Participation Now, has teamed up with openDemocracy to support a debate about contemporary forms of participation and public engagement. Participation Now features an...
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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...
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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’,...
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