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- Convenors:
-
Martijn Vos
(Athena Institute)
Jaron Harambam (University of Amsterdam)
Anne Loeber (Athena Institute, VU University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how public engagement with science initiatives manage the tension between the inclusion of diverse groups, people and viewpoints while preserving the merits of expert knowledge.
Description
The inclusion of diverse stakeholders in democratic decision-making around technological and scientific issues is a core promise of much ‘participatory’ work in STS and science communication. However, this promise of inclusive engagement has largely remained unfulfilled since only a few science dialogues have included truly different participants and viewpoints. In fact, the opposite appears to be true: participants are often white, college-educated men with similar viewpoints who do not represent contemporary European societies. While self-selection mechanisms may be at play, another reason lies in the design and organisation of these public dialogues. Indeed, there appears to be a reluctance to open up these dialogues to potentially ‘dangerous’ participants such as conspiracy theorists, Great Replacement adherents, anti-vaxxers, climate sceptics and anti-LGBTQIA conservatives.
Some argue that these people are legitimately excluded because accepting participants who (allegedly) do not accept basic epistemic norms governing science would deteriorate the quality of the dialogue by spending too much time on ‘irrational’ and anti-scientific convictions. Others contend that the inclusion of all kinds of citizens should be the sine qua non of public engagement, particularly when building resilient futures in a context of crisis and polarisation. They fear that excluding people who adopt a critical stance towards science only generates a ‘manageable’ conflict among like-minded participants, which may intensify social antagonisms and incentivise these excluded groups to settle their conflict in undemocratic and potentially violent ways.
In short, the “more-than-now” question for STS and this panel is: how can we include a diverse group of people and viewpoints, while preserving the merits of expert knowledge? What happens when participants who adopt a critical stance towards science are invited to public dialogues on knowledge-intensive issues? This panel specifically invites empirical contributions that deal with the particular inclusion/exclusion dynamics governing public engagement efforts, though philosophical reflections on this question are also welcome.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This ethnographic study explores how science engagement projects navigate the tension between inclusive intentions and exclusionary outcomes through participant observation and expert interviews with two German cases: a science pop-up store and a transdisciplinary urban mobility project.
Paper long abstract
Despite promises of inclusive and accessible engagement, science communication—as "social conversation around science" (Bucchi & Trench, 2021)—often reproduces exclusionary dynamics through well-intentioned practices that overlook diverse contexts and community needs by assuming a universal relevance and value of science. I call this phenomenon 'academic saviourism'(Welz, In Review). My ethnography investigates how such dynamics manifest in practice across two contrasting German inclusive science communication projects through participant observation and expert interviews.
Case A follows a science pop-up store engaging with various locals through different event formats. Case B examines a transdisciplinary equal mobility project bringing together dis/ability advocates, sustainability, cycling and automotive lobbies, and neighbourhood associations.
My preliminary findings reveal a dilemma: Although co-creation processes successfully transform 'opposing' participants from mere 'opinion holders' to complex individuals and enable compromise, genuine inclusion fails at a structural level. Moreover, practitioners demonstrate a high degree of reflexivity when it comes to aspects of academic saviourism in their work. They are aware that their participants lack diversity in terms of life realities and opinions, which carries the risk of creating a "bubble", but feel unable to change these circumstances due to the structural conditions of science engagement work.
This presentation explores the gap between good intentions and actual practice in science communication. By examining why even well-intentioned projects struggle to move beyond homogeneous participants, it raises fundamental questions about the feasibility of including truly diverse—or even contentious—voices in public engagement with science.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how science-based, evidence-driven participatory infrastructures in smart cities shape public engagement by privileging expert knowledge and digitally literate publics. Drawing on Barcelona and Amsterdam, it develops a Networked Justice perspective on participatory governance.
Paper long abstract
Smart cities increasingly rely on science-based and evidence-driven tools to support public engagement and participatory governance. While these initiatives promise more inclusive decision-making, they often reproduce asymmetries between expert knowledge and everyday urban experience. Participatory infrastructures and digital engagement tools are frequently designed according to technical and institutional logics that presuppose high levels of digital literacy and familiarity with scientific or administrative language, thereby privileging specific publics and forms of participation.
Drawing on qualitative research and case studies from Barcelona and Amsterdam, this paper explores how gaps between system designers, planners, and citizens shape patterns of inclusion and exclusion in science-based urban governance. The findings highlight how participation is often structured around “manageable” forms of engagement that align with dominant epistemic norms, while alternative forms of knowledge and lived experience remain marginalised.
Building on these insights, the paper develops a Networked Justice perspective for analysing participatory governance through digital, temporal, and experiential dimensions. It argues that addressing these limitations requires rethinking participatory design beyond technical efficiency, towards more reflexive and context-sensitive models that preserve the value of expert knowledge while expanding democratic legitimacy in smart city governance.
Keywords: participatory governance; science-based public engagement; expert knowledge; inclusion and exclusion; Networked Justice.
Paper short abstract
Analysing participatory practices in air pollution governance in India, the paper traces how institutional practices shape the promise of inclusion. It makes the case for designing participatory practices that can exceed manageable consensus while remaining responsive to the heterogeneous publics.
Paper long abstract
Public participation is widely framed as a democratic corrective to technocratic decision-making, yet it can also function as a mechanism through which authority is stabilised and legitimised. The paper analyses the implications of this duality through an examination of air pollution governance in India. It traces how institutional practices shape the promise of inclusion, from technical management of air quality knowledge and policy strategies that foreground behavioural compliance and individual responsibility to participatory platforms that structure how publics encounter pollution data and policy discussions. These practices reveal how citizens are mobilised within a broader governance arrangement that stabilises authoritative forms of expertise.
The analysis unfolds across three planes: the tension between singularity of the expert authority and the diverse claims of affected publics; the temporal politics of crisis; and the infrastructures of participation that act as sites of boundary work. Our central analytical wager in this paper concerns designing participatory practices that can exceed manageable consensus even as they remain responsive to the heterogeneous publics who must live with the futures. The true measure of “inclusion,” we argue, lies in moments of friction where claims arrive from the publics as smell, irritation, symptoms, unequal vulnerabilities, and contested responsibilities which must be rendered actionable within policy.
Paper short abstract
STS has long emphasised opening up knowledge and decision-making. Yet less attention has been given to how to 'close down' well. We propose a post-foundational exploration that combines critique with constructive ways of composing provisional, contingent yet democratic collective groundings.
Paper long abstract
Facing now the challenge of ‘the limits of inclusion’ should not be surprising. Over the past three decades, Science and Technology Studies and democratic theory have converged around a shared commitment to opening up knowledge and decision-making processes. Through a post-foundational critique of the naturalisation and opaque mediations of politics, scholars and practitioners have challenged the authority of technocratic expertise and narrow forms of democratic representation. Yet the emphasis on inclusion and openness leaves a persistent question insufficiently addressed: what does ‘closing down’ well mean from a post-foundational standpoint?
Drawing on ongoing work towards a collaborative interdisciplinary process titled “Democracy in-the-making”, we propose a two-edged post-foundational approach to this challenge. First, a critical orientation that continues to denaturalise and contest hegemonic closures by exposing their exclusions and power asymmetries. Second, a constructive or associational orientation that focuses on how heterogeneous actors, including ‘the merits’ of expert knowledge, and interests can be composed into provisional yet binding collective arrangements.
We argue that more work is needed to explicate and experiment with how this stabilisation process ought to occur. As a starting point, we propose grounding concepts that allow us to address two levels of the challenge: 1. How to ‘do’ normativity post-foundationally? And 2. What qualities can support democracy in this current historical challenge (this Zeitenwende)? By examining these potential supporting concepts, we can reframe the problem of inclusion and consider how, post-foundationally, to open up and close down in tandem, thereby putting our own expert knowledge to use for democracy.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines public engagement formats in which participants mobilise science and expertise in conflicting ways. Drawing on agonistic theatre dialogues on climate controversies in the Netherlands, we show how encounters across epistemic divides clarify positions and humanise disagreement.
Paper long abstract
The inclusion of diverse stakeholders in public engagement with science is widely regarded as a democratic imperative in STS. Yet, empirical practice reveals a reluctance to include participants who reject dominant epistemic norms of science, e.g. climate sceptics or self-declared conspiracy theorists. This paper investigates the value of including such actors in public engagement formats in which science is contested. Hereto, we draw empirically on the Dutch Theatre Dialogues of Dissent project, comprising three ‘agonistic’ image theatre workshops and three public theatre dialogues, in which polarised participants engaged on climate controversies. Engaging in a dialogue between empirics and theory, we identify three benefits of such inclusion.
First, participants in a confrontation across epistemic divides are compelled to explicate what typically remains implicit in non-diverse engagements. When faced with fundamental disagreement on science, participants are forced to reflect on and articulate the role science and expertise play in their position. Second, such a sharpening of perspective also occurs vis-à-vis the (epistemic) positions of ‘opposing’ participants. While none of the participants argued that they revised their epistemic beliefs in response to arguments from the other side, they observed that they gained insight not only into the (epistemic) standpoints of the other participants, but also into the emotions, experiences and values underpinning these. Finally, in the encounter, they were reminded of the humanity of the other side. Thus, the agonistic engagements transform antagonistic exclusion into adversarial co-presence: disagreement persists, but the legitimacy of the other’s voice is affirmed without reducing difference to sameness.
Paper short abstract
This talk explores Public Involvement in animal research through the lens of curiosity. It will examine the meeting of public and scientific (in)curiosities around animal research, which modes of curiosity are (un)acceptable, and the tensions of being curious where it may come at a cost.
Paper long abstract
Well-established in health research, Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) is emerging as a top-down expectation in preclinical biomedical research. Rather than producing clinical interventions, preclinical research often aims to develop understandings of fundamental biological mechanisms or disease. Though frequently justified as done in the name of publics and patients, such groups are rarely involved in any stage of the research process. Where studies use non-human animals, involvement also materialises against the backdrop of enduring efforts to win public approval for animal research. Questions of who should be involved, what they might contribute to, and what they can change in this controlled and controversial context require specific attention.
Taking curiosity as its starting point, this talk draws on empirical insights from qualitative research with UK scientists, laboratory staff, and publics. Preclinical research is often described as ‘curiosity-driven’, with the generation of new knowledge valued as an end in itself and curiousness held as a scientific virtue. However, public curiosity about preclinical animal use, and how publics might make meaning of the purpose of curiosity in fundamental science, are often regarded with apprehension. Those across the research community also express different modes of (in)curiosity towards societal views of their work. In tracing the role of curiosity in thinking and feeling around the prospect of public involvement in preclinical animal research, this talk asks who is allowed to be curious, which curiosities are made (un)acceptable, and the ethics of being curious where knowing can come at vital cost.
Paper short abstract
How can diverse viewpoints be included in public engagement with science while preserving the merits of expert knowledge? Drawing on the eDemOS deliberative platform used in the Czech Open Science debate, this paper explores how digital deliberation both enables and limits inclusion.
Paper long abstract
Public engagement with science promises more inclusive and democratic forms of knowledge production. However, participatory initiatives often face a persistent tension between the inclusion of diverse viewpoints and the preservation of expert knowledge and epistemic standards. How can we include a diverse group of people and viewpoints while preserving the merits of expert knowledge?
This paper explores this question by examining how digital deliberative infrastructures shape participation and mediate interactions between different forms of expertise. The analysis draws on experiences from the AMULET project, which develops advanced materials with potential applications ranging from energy technologies to medicine. Recognizing the broader societal implications of these technologies, the project includes STS-based activities aimed at mapping their social context and supporting research and innovation in line with the principles of Open Science.
The paper focuses on an online discussion conducted through the deliberative platform eDemOS, which accompanied the public hearing Making Sense of Open Science held at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague in September 2025. The discussion involved 233 participants and used several participatory tools, including discussion forums, proposal development and voting, and the card-based method Imagine OS.
Using this case, the paper reflects on how the design of digital deliberation platforms structures participation and shapes whose voices become visible in public engagement processes. While such platforms may create opportunities for broader participation and dialogue, the analysis also highlights some of the practical and conceptual limits of digital deliberation in addressing the tension between democratic inclusion and expert knowledge.
Paper short abstract
Institutional public participation is dominated by a narrow set of orchestrated formats that restrict who can take part from the outset. STS studies of participation in “uninvited” contexts can help illuminate and address these limits by seeking inspiring innovation from less controlled settings.
Paper long abstract
PEST studies have long examined the principle that increased, wider participation is both a condition for, and an indicator of, mature advanced democracies (or a pathway towards achieving them). In the decades since these processes have become institutionalised in the now-dominant formats of mini- and, increasingly, “big”-publics (e.g. national and global citizen assemblies), one characteristic stands out: they are ‘invited’ participatory processes (as the panel description notes). By analogy with wider social processes, invited participatory exercises are controlled by those who invite. Although this control is mediated by democratic participation principles, and by norms of dialogue and facilitation design – despite extensive rules and regulatory frameworks, invited participation is restricted from the outset. It cannot be fully open, it cannot be fully inclusive, and it cannot be fully democratic.
Parallel to PEST studies, STS has developed a rich tradition of work on public participation in ‘uninvited’ contexts. Admittedly, these encounters between publics and technoscience are less readily manageable (and transferable) than those carefully orchestrated; their reduced administrative legibility in institutional democratic settings, an obstacle for their political salience. Their ‘ecologies’ (Chilvers et al 2018) are messy, expertise compounded, outcomes uncertain, and who gets to participate can vary considerably through time and topic.
Based on two contrasting illustrations, each pertaining to the ‘ideal types’ broadly depicted above, I will make a case for a ‘more-then-now’ vision of public participation in science, claiming that the focus on ‘tested and tried’ models, even with innovations, carries fundamental limitations to the ‘PEST table’.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how the shifting dynamics of inclusionary/exclusionary politics is reshaping technoscientific deliberation on climate change, highlighting the impact of “post-truth” power politics on expert authority.
Paper long abstract
The perennial question of the democratic limits of technoscientific deliberation is arguably being flipped on its head. The threat of so-called "technological populism" has long been hypothetical or defined by a small number of examples. STS scholars could thus maintain that there was a general problem of exclusion. However, the global political landscape has changed and along with it the politics of science and technology. We are seeing the results of new kinds of inclusionary (and exclusionary) politics whereby expert authority is being diminished on issues of paramount importance to publics' well-being.
This paper explores these shifts by re-examining an issue that has long been a sticking point for STS scholars, namely, climate change. How can we make sense of the abandonment of climate targets? To ask a somewhat loaded question: if technoscientific deliberation was "more inclusive," could the current situation have been avoided? To get to these questions, this paper turns to inclusion as an actor concept. By re-tracing public debates about climate change in North America and Germany, it comparatively asks: how has inclusion and exclusion as articulated by actors defined climate politics? Who has positioned themselves as excluded? Who has justified exclusion? How are discourses of exclusion related to larger political currents? As we might expect, political framings of inclusion and exclusion vis-a-vis climate change are increasingly flexible and often weaponized. To cope with this, we should revisit the prevalent democratic theories in STS and ask how they respond to a world defined by "post-truth" power politics.