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< Back Kei Nishiyama Former PhD student About Kei Nishiyama studies deliberative democracy with a specific focus on the role of children and young people. Kei worked at the University of Canberra and the Australian National University and will join the Doshisha University, Japan, from April 2020.

< Back Political parties as participatory arenas Anika Gauja, University of Sydney Tue 9 October 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract In this presentation I engage with the often-made claim that shifting patterns of political participation threaten parties as viable organisations and as mechanisms of linkage between citizens and the state. I explore the possibilities for partisan democratic renewal and increased citizen engagement that arise with a shift to more individualised, or personalised types of political participation. Using data from a comparative study of party reform and an Australian-based study of contemporary party membership, I examine how political parties have accommodated new demands for participation within their organisational arrangements, focusing on the key party functions of candidate selection, policy development and campaign communication. Many of these participatory opportunities are being extended beyond party members to supporters, blurring the boundaries of party. I reflect on how these new structures and processes are reshaping the role of parties as mediators between citizens and the state, and the challenges involved in reconciling personalised politics with collective identity. Previous Next

< Back Call for Papers: Deliberative Democracy Summer School 2024 ​ ​ APPLY HERE! Please submit the completed form to our research assistant, Hans Asenbaum at hans.asenbaum@canberra.edu.au by 30 June 2023. For questions, please contact the summer school convenor, Hans Asenbaum at hans.asenbaum@canberra.edu.au .

< Back A Q study in waiting: Three hunting discourses Lucy Parry, University of Sheffield Mon 16 March 2015 11:00am - 12:00pm Fishbowl, Building 24, University of Canberra Abstract Here I present some tentative findings from my pilot Q study which aims to map out the current discourses that exist around the hunting of wild mammals in the UK. I first provide an overview of Q methodology, before going on to outline how I approached the study. I will then present some initial interpretation of three anti-hunting discourses and return to my original aim of the study - to understand how animals are represented in hunting discourses and to understand the role of scientific knowledge in people's evaluation of hunting - and query whether it is possible to achieve these or even desirable in the context of Q. Relevant to this is the 'Q community's' particular approach to using the method which can pose challenges to researchers. Finally, I will ask the audience to inspect my Q statements and there will be an opportunity to participate in a Q sort for those who are interested. As this research is still in the developmental stages, feedback is most welcome and as such I advance an informal, discussion style seminar. About the speaker Lucy Parry is a PhD Student from the University of Sheffield, and is here to take part in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance’s Summer School. Lucy will be here for slightly over 2 months, and to read more about her research topic and research interests please click on this link: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/research/phd/lucy-parry Previous Next

< Back Lyn Carson Associate About Lyn Carson has taught and researched in the field of deliberative democracy, asking how the wider public can help to resolve policy challenges. She was involved in convening Australia's first Consensus Conference, the first Deliberative Polls, the first Australian Citizens' Parliament, and numerous Citizens' Juries and Community Summits.

< Back When deliberative democracy travels to China: An example of cultural exceptionalism Li-chia Lo, University of Melbourne Tue 7 February 2017 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract As Edward Said elaborates in his Travelling Theory, theory is like human beings who travel from its birthplace to other foreign places. This is where the meaning of theory begins to transform, and Said’s work points to a new direction of investigating the transcultural transformation of knowledge when theory is disseminated in our globalised world. By following this line of thinking, the development of deliberative democracy in China offers an excellent example to review how the actual contexts transform the meaning and implication of deliberative democracy. Engaging with the issue of translation and its related contexts, the development of deliberative democracy in China is deeply connected with its culture, institution, and socio-political traditions. Also, the background of introducing deliberative democracy to China is also tightly bridged with the studies of democratization. The double movements between the local contexts and the universal trend of democratization form the basic theme of deliberative democracy in China. Deliberative democracy in China is therefore, struggled between universalism and exceptionalism. By making use of Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of example and exception, I will go into details about why and how the development of deliberative democracy in China is heading toward a cultural exceptionalism rather than embracing the universalism prescribed in the normative goal of deliberative democracy. About the speaker Li-chia Lo is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. His doctoral thesis is about deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting in China. He is particularly interested in formations of related knowledge and local experiments in Chinese cities. Previous Next

< Back Deliberations with American Indian and Alaska native communities about genomics Erika Blacksher, University of Washington / Justin Reedy, University of Oklahoma Tue 4 August 2020 11:00am - 12:00pm Virtual seminar Seminar recording is available on our YouTube channel. Abstract With the rapid growth of genetic and genomic research and medical testing in recent years, more attention is being paid to their ethical and societal implications, including citizens’ concerns about potential risks and benefits of these technologies. Indigenous peoples represent a particularly important group where such advances are concerned, due to a long history of exploitation and marginalization by the U.S. federal government and the marked disparities they experience in health services and health outcomes relative to other populations. A consortium of researchers and practitioners in the US, in close partnership with indigenous community partners, has begun to study the concerns and views of American Indian and Alaska Native peoples on genomics through a series of deliberations in three communities in Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Alaska. This presentation will describe the design and implementation of these deliberative forums, as well as the results of the deliberations from a process perspective. In addition, it discusses some of the implications of this work for scholarship and practice in deliberation, both for efforts involving indigenous peoples and for forums focused on genetics and ethical, legal, and societal implications (ELSI). About the speaker Erika Blacksher is an associate professor and director of undergraduates studies in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Blacksher studies the ethical and policy implications of the social determinants of health with focus on ethical questions raised by health inequalities, debates over health responsibility, and the role of participatory and deliberative forms of engagement in advancing health equity. She often works in collaborative community-academic partnerships to design and conduct deliberations that convene minority and marginalized groups to identify their health priorities and policy preferences. Justin Reedy is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and research associate in the Center for Risk & Crisis Management at the University of Oklahoma. He studies political communication and deliberation, group and organizational communication, and the perception of risk. In particular, his research focuses on how groups of people make political and civic decisions in face-to-face and online settings, as well as how people and policy makers can come together to deliberate and make better decisions on public policy issues that involve significant societal and personal risk. Previous Next

< Back Bora Kanra Former PhD student About Bora was the lead investigator of the ARC Discovery Project ‘Communication Across Difference in a Democracy: Australian Muslims and the Mainstream.’ He completed his PhD at the ANU, under the supervision of John Dryzek, about deliberative democracy in divided societies, focusing particularly on the case of Turkey.

< Back Empirical assessment of the impacts of deliberative democracy processes A Wendy Russell Tue 9 February 2016 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract A key standard for judging the quality of deliberative processes is impact on political decision-making. Yet impact is a multi-faceted and contested concept, in theory and practice. Macro-political impacts are often indirect and deliberative processes compete with a range of other inputs and factors for influence. The assessment of impacts is complicated by the difficulty of distinguishing measurable impacts from important impacts. As well as the impacts of particular processes, the research is interested in the ‘uptake’ of deliberative democracy generally, and how impact and uptake interact. This seminar relates to a research project, funded by the New Democracy Foundation (nDF), on the impacts of deliberative processes, particularly nDF processes. I will present a preliminary framework for assessing the impacts of deliberative processes, with a focus on macro-political impacts, which will be used in the empirical phase of the research. Input at this stage will be very gratefully accepted. About the speaker Wendy Russell is director of Double Arrow Consulting, a Canberra business specialising in deliberative engagement, and an associate of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance. She is also affiliated with the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU, and is ACT regional coordinator for the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2). She previously worked in the National Enabling Technologies Strategy – Public Awareness and Community Engagement program of the Commonwealth Department of Industry & Innovation, where she managed the Science & Technology Engagement Pathways (STEP) community engagement program. Before this, she was senior lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Wollongong, where she researched social aspects of biotechnology, transdisciplinary inquiry, and technology assessment. Previous Next

< Back Karin Backstrand Associate About Karin Bäckstrand is a Professor in Environmental Social Science at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. Karin’s work is published in journals including Global Environmental Politics, European Journal of International Relations and Journal of European Public Policy.

< Back Revitalising intra-party democracy through digital democratic innovations: The case of Danish political party Alternativet Nikolai Gad, Newcastle University Tue 3 July 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract The Danish political party Alternativet constitutes a recent example of an emerging political party that claims to promote and practice new and inclusive ways of doing politics, experimenting with digital technologies for this purpose. In this respect, they share many characteristics with other emerging, European political parties, including the Pirate Parties in Germany, Iceland and elsewhere, Podemos in Spain, and M5S in Italy. Similarly, to these parties, Alternativet also experienced electoral success relatively quickly and has been represented in parliament since 2015. Thus, Alternativet, like similar emerging parties, is an attempt to combine democratic innovations with party politics and traditional political institutions in liberal representative democracies. This is interesting considering how democratic innovations are often conceptualised in contrast to classic representative political institutions, and these parties’ potential ability to provide consequentiality to citizen participation. In my PhD, I explore how digital democratic innovations are used in Alternativet, to involve members and supporters directly in intra-party policy formation and decision-making. Based on semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in Alternativet, I identify four different models of intra-party democracy promoted by the party elite; each with their own justifications for and aims of involving people in party politics. These include an aggregative crowd sourcing model, a participatory DIY model, a deliberative model, and a more traditional delegation model. I theorise that different digital technologies utilised by the party, each cater for different models of intra-party democracy, and test this through a membership survey. About the speaker Nikolai Gad is a RCUK (Research Council UK) funded PhD candidate at Newcastle University, where he studies the role of digital technologies in emerging European political parties, that claim to re-invent how to “do politics” from the bottom up. Here, he is based at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics based at the university’s Open Lab, from where he also earned a Master degree in preparation for the PhD. Additionally, he is part of the School of Geography, Sociology and Politics at Newcastle University, and he holds a BSc degree in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen, and an MSc degree in Digital Design and Communication from the IT-University of Copenhagen. Previous Next

< Back Walter Baber Associate About Walter F. Baber is a professor in the Environmental Sciences and Policy Program and the Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Long Beach. He is also a lead member of the Amsterdam-based Earth System Governance Project and an Affiliated Professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University.

< Back Debashish Munshi Associate About Dr Debashish Munshi is Professor of Management Communication at the University of Waikato. His interdisciplinary research, informed by critical theory and postcolonial theory, focuses on the intersections among issues of communication, diversity, ethics, sustainability, and science and technology.

< Back Indigenous grassroots participation and the coevolution of deliberative systems Mei-Fang Fan, National Yang-Ming University Tue 2 October 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract Research on deliberative systems with detailed discussions on indigenous democracy and the deliberative features of indigenous activism is limited. The heterogeneous and ambivalent complexity of colonial history and geographical contexts has had a considerable effect on indigenous representatives and indigenous forms of deliberation. Indigenous movement and environmental protests against the dominance of the state are traditionally regarded as nondeliberative. The systemic approach of deliberative democracy argues that activism constitute an integral part of public deliberation, which recognises the contribution of indigenous knowledge and democratic practices to policy-making and wider deliberative systems. This article considers indigenous activism and political communication as a part of the macro-deliberative system as well as a micro deliberative system in itself. Drawing on the controversy on flooding and wild creek remediation projects on Orchid Island, Taiwan, this study explored how indigenous activism facilitate space for deliberation and improve the democratising quality of deliberative systems. Tao tribesmen transcended their original boundaries to engage in communication and activate plural deliberative spaces when facing conflicting new challenges and the government’s dominant policy positions with limited discursive space. Tao activists used the virtual community as both an internal and external communication platform and engaged in transmission and visualisation of traditional knowledge system and practices. Indigenous grassroots participation facilitates knowledge coproduction and social learning and reshapes tribal political subjectivities, which reveals the coevolution of tribal deliberative systems and their interaction with the State, intertwined with deliberative systems. About the speaker Mei-Fang Fan is Professor at the Institute of Science, Technology and Society, National Yang-Ming University and research fellow at the Risk Society and Policy Research Centre, National Taiwan University. She holds a Doctoral degree in Environment and Society from Lancaster University, UK. Research interests include environmental justice and governance; deliberative democracy and public participation in decision-making on risk; participatory budgeting; local knowledge and citizen science. Her recent work on environmental justice, public deliberations on GM foods in Taiwan and nuclear waste facility siting controversy has appeared in the journals Human Ecology, Public Understanding of Science and Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. Mei-Fang sits on the editorial board of Taiwanese journal of public administration and is a member of the Taipei City participatory budgeting government-academia alliance. Previous Next

< Back Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy Selen A. Ercan, Hans Asenbaum, Nicole Curato, Ricardo F. Mendonca 2022 , Oxford University Press ​ Summary Offers comprehensive coverage of 31 research methods written by a global and diverse line-up of scholars in the field. Covers a selection of both established social science methods and novel methodologies specifically developed to investigate deliberative democracy in practice. Read more Previous Next

< Back The role of evidence, evidence-providers and the evidence-giving format in citizens' juries Jen Roberts, University of Strathclyde Tue 28 March 2017 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract Three citizens’ juries were run in different locations across Scotland in 2013/14, each with varying proximity to built and planned wind farms. One of the aims of this multi-disciplinary research project explored how deliberative processes, such as citizens’ juries, could be used to engage citizens and inform policy on public issues. One of the key lessons for designing, organizing and facilitating citizens’ juries that arose from the project concerned the provision of information. This includes issues surrounding witness selection, the format of evidence provision, the evidence itself, and how the witnesses were supported through the project. Although the juries were successful overall, it was felt that the jurors might have benefited from more support to make sense of the issues at hand and relevance to their task. To enhance the valuable outcomes from this unique project it is important to establish if, and how, these issues could be avoided or managed for future deliberative processes. Here, we revisit the process and consider how it could be improved so that contested evidence might be put forward in a way that is most useful (supportive, informative) to participants and most fair to the witnesses presenting the evidence. To inform our work, we draw on the experiences from other citizens’ juries that have been conducted on environmental or energy topics together with the learnings from the citizens’ juries on wind farms in Scotland project. We also interview the witnesses involved in the wind farms project to draw on their perspectives. These data are synthesised to examine the role of witnesses in presenting expert information, the processes of doing so, and how different roles or formats affect the experience of the witness and the audience. This enables us to recommend processes or approaches that will encourage a fair environment. About the speaker Jennifer Roberts is a pioneering young researcher linking energy systems with social and environmental risk. She uses her technical background in geoscience to address questions on the social and environmental impacts of energy developments, including CCS, unconventional gas, and onshore wind. Her work aims inform how a low-carbon energy system can be optimised and implemented in a way that is acceptable for the environment and society. On the strength of her genuinely interdisciplinary research she was awarded the Scottish Energy Researcher of the Year 2015 - Energy Infrastructure and Society category. Jen’s work is closely linked with Scotland’s Centre of Expertise on Climate Change (ClimateXChange), which works to provide independent advice, research and analysis on climate change & policy in Scotland, and she regularly contributes to policy briefs, public events, and training workshops. Jen was the Research Co-ordinator for a ClimateXChange research project that conducted citizens’ juries in three locations in Scotland on the topic of onshore wind farm development, to trial the deliberative method and also to find out the publics’ views on the issue. The research highlighted some of the complexities of involving experts in deliberative processes, which is a theme she continues to follow in her research. Previous Next

< Back Deliberation in schools Pierrick Chalaye, University of Canberra / Kei Nishiyama, University of Canberra / Wendy Russell, Double Arrow Consulting Tue 2 April 2019 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract In 2018, we conducted a pilot Deliberation in Schools project in two ACT public schools (Ainslie Primary School year 5 and Hawker College year 11), partially funded by the International Association for Public Participation Australasia. Working with teachers and school principals, we facilitated a series of deliberative sessions with students. Through the program, we investigated how students deliberate, understand and practice democracy, and what sorts of curriculum design are needed to cultivate democratic competencies. In this presentation, we will show some tentative findings of our pilot, with a specific focus on the role of facilitator in classroom deliberation. While the role of facilitator in deliberative mini-publics has gradually received attention from scholars and practitioners alike, little is known about how to facilitate deliberation in the classroom. In this presentation, we will show how our pilot partially responds to two key questions: "How can a facilitator ensure the epistemic and inclusive quality of deliberation in the classroom?" "How can this deliberative work address power imbalances between facilitators/teachers and students?" Previous Next