Synopses & Reviews
This volume explores the ways in which citizen voices on science and environmental issues are articulated, heard, marginalized, and silenced in mass media, policymaking, and other public venues. In a range of case studies from countries across Europe and North America, contributors offer empirical insights about the articulation of citizen voices, as well as citizens’ scope for action in different national, cultural, and institutional contexts. Drawing on science and technology, environmental studies, and media and communication studies, they also present methods for foregrounding the role of communication in scientific and environmental governance.
Review
"Citizen Voices is most satisfying in the way it interrogates, contextualizes, and challenges the all-too-familiar concepts of public participation and dialogue in a field generally considered complex."
Synopsis
This book concentrates exclusively on the dialogic turn in the governance of science and the environment. The starting point for this book is the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge in which practices claiming to be based on principles of dialogue and participation have spread across diverse social fields. As in other fields of social practice in the dialogic turn, the model of communication underpinning science and environmental governance is dialogue in which scientists and citizens engage in mutual learning on the basis of the different knowledge forms that they bring with them. The official aim is to involve citizens in processes of decision-making on scientific and environmental issues, including issues relating to the built environment such as urban planning. The attempt in this book has been made to build bridges across the fields of science and technology studies, environmental studies and media and communication studies in order to provide theoretically informed and empirically rich accounts of how citizen voices are articulated, invoked, heard, marginalised or silenced in science and environment communication.
About the Author
Louise Phillips is associate professor in the Department of Communication, Business, and Information Technologies at the Roskilde University, Denmark.
Anabela Carvalho is associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Minho in Portugal.
Julie Doyle is a principal lecturer in media studies in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Brighton, UK.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Louise Phillips, Anabela Carvalho and Julie Doyle
Part I: Public Participation and Media
2. When Citizens Matter in the Mass Mediation of Science: The Role of Imagined Audiences in Multidirectional Communication Processes
Ursula Plesner
3. Contested Ethanol Dreams—Public Participation in Environmental News
Annika Egan Sjölander and Anna Maria Jönsson
4. Citizen Action and Post-Socialist Journalism: The Responses of Journalists to a Citizen Campaign against Government Policy towards Smoking
Pavel P. Antonov
5. Discourse Communities as Catalysts for Science and Technology Communication
Hedwig te Molder
6. Online Talk: How Exposure to Disagreement in Online Comments Affects Beliefs in the Promise of Controversial Science
Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard, Dietram A. Scheufele and Michael A. Xenos
Part II: Public Participation and Formal Public Engagement Initiatives
7. Communicating about Climate Change in a Citizen Consultation: Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion
Louise Phillips
8. Public Engagement as a Field of Tension between Bottom-up and Top-down Strategies: Critical Discourse Moments in an ‘Energy Town’
Anders Horsbøl and Inger Lassen
9. The Stem Cell NetWork: Communicating Social Science through a Spatial Installation
Maja Horst
10. Issue-centered Exploration with a Citizen Panel: Knowledge Communication and ICTs in Participatory City Governance
Pauliina Lehtonen and Jarkko Bamberg