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Journal ArticleDOI

Biobanking, public consultation, and the discursive logics of deliberation: five lessons from British Columbia.

Heather Walmsley
- 01 Jul 2010 - 
- Vol. 19, Iss: 4, pp 452-468
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TLDR
Ethnographic and transcript analysis reveals small group deliberation to be a two-stage process, operating according to two different discursive logics, and concludes with five lessons for theorists and practitioners of deliberative public engagement with science.
Abstract
Genomics-related "deliberative" public consultations are all the rage. Drawing from theories of deliberative democracy, run by social scientists, governments and non-profit organizations globally, these events can produce valuable insights and governance solutions. There is a danger, however, of "deliberation" being viewed by its new practitioners as a homogenous "tool" due to a marked lack of analysis of the discursive processes at play. This paper addresses this gap, employing the discourse theory of Laclau to analyze small and large group deliberation at a public consultation on biobanking in British Columbia (BC), Canada, during 2007. Ethnographic and transcript analysis reveals small group deliberation to be a two-stage process, operating according to two different discursive logics. The paper concludes with five lessons for theorists and practitioners of deliberative public engagement with science.

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The Foundations of Deliberative Democracy: Empirical Research and Normative Implications

TL;DR: The Foundations of Deliberative Democracy: Empirical Research and Normative Implications as mentioned in this paper, by Jurg Steiner, 2012, 277 pp, ISBN 978-0-1
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Engaging the Public on Biobanks: Outcomes of the BC Biobank Deliberation

TL;DR: A critical analysis of how the results of a public engagement such as the BC Biobank Deliberation can be conceptualized given the context of a large qualitative data set and an imperative to provide useful information to policy makers, while honoring the mandate under which deliberants were recruited is provided.
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From ‘trust us’ to participatory governance: Deliberative publics and science policy

TL;DR: Recent experiences are considered that demonstrate that it is possible to bring together those with policy making responsibility and diverse publics to co-produce policy and standards of practice that are technically informed, incorporate wide social perspectives and explicitly involve publics in key decisions.
References
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Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics

TL;DR: The authors traces the genealogy of the present crisis in left-wing thought, from stifling of democracy under Marxist-Lenninism and Stalinism to the contemporary emergence of new forms of struggle and reexamines the idea of hegemony, from the formation of the idea in the writings of Lenin and Gramsci, to the expanded and discursive ideas of Foucault to posit a claim for the new possibilities of a radical democracy.

Development sequence in small groups.

BW Tuckman
TL;DR: The stages identified in these articles are separated into those descriptive of social or interpersonal group activities a: therapy-group studies, T-groups studies, and natural- and laboratory- group studies.
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TL;DR: In Between Facts and Norms as discussed by the authors, Jurgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962.
Journal ArticleDOI

Developmental sequence in small groups.

TL;DR: In this article, 50 articles dealing with stages of group development over time are separated by group setting: therapy-group studies, T-Group studies, and natural and laboratory group studies.
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