Constructing Public Engagement: Unexamined Assumptions In Framing Science And Technology Policy Problems

• In Event: Public Engagement in Science and Technology Policy 1

Abstract

Growing emphasis on public engagement as a component of policy discussions about emerging technologies raises questions about how public engagement has manifested with such prominence and what impact it has in configurations of the relationships between science, publics, and policymaking. However, these questions leave the ways in which public engagement has come to be constructed in particular ways unexamined. This paper aims to step back and interrogate the broader assumptions and values that underlie and contextualize the construction of public engagement.
Taking a close look at the deliberative discussions around genome editing and public engagement, this paper argues that assumptions about the kinds of challenges presented by emerging technologies can constrain how public engagement becomes constructed in ways that privilege scientific ways of knowing over more democratic approaches, even when attempting to prioritize non-technical perspectives. By framing challenges of emerging technologies as fundamentally problems of sufficient and appropriate knowledge rather than problems of legitimate, deliberative processes, these discussions constrain solutions to be concerned with better understanding and not necessarily better practice. Public engagement, then, is constructed primarily as a knowledge generating enterprise rather than a legitimizing, democratic process. The distinctions in these constructions are highly consequential for the relationships between science and publics in policy discussions and how those discussions unfold.

Author

• Christian Ross, Arizona State University