REMAKING CITIZENS · Reconstituting citizens: Public involvement as enactment of issue entanglement

Final Activity Report Summary - REMAKING CITIZENS (Reconstituting citizens: public involvement as enactment of issue entanglement)

This project considered alternatives to dialogic understandings of public involvement, by exploring material forms of engagement emerging in relation to climate change. Concentrating on a particular genre, the sustainable living experiment, the study sought to develop an advanced understanding of the ways in which everyday settings and things are used to enact public concern. The project drew its inspiration from a new current of 'object-centred' social and political theory, which emphasises the role of everyday, material arrangements in the organisation of publics, for instance around waste or food. As such, the project sought to move beyond 'weak' justifications for turning to everyday life as a site of engagement with climate change. Thus, while this focus is often justified as a way of making involvement more "do-able", this project asked whether it also provides new ways to dramatise people's "entanglement in issues"? A further important aim of the project was the analysis of the formative role played by information technologies in enabling object-centred forms of public involvement. To achieve these goals, the project undertook empirical studies of different types of sustainable living experiments, from "green home improvement" to "living with smart metres" and "personal carbon trading", both in situ and in publicity media. The project thus combined "home visits" with interviews and Web analysis, to elucidate the role and function of domestic objects in the enactment of public engagement. It was found, for instance, that some sustainable living experiments foreground home-made stuff (such as food and cleaning materials) as a way of establishing intimate relations with natural entities and thus 'internalising' the environment in the household. An important finding of the analysis is that sustainable living experiments have the effect of 'materialising' environmental change: in everyday settings, abstract objects, like CO2 emissions, are translated into physical effects, such as a house smelling of vinegar. On the basis of this analysis, the project evaluated material forms of engagement with climate change, and this evaluation stresses three points: Firstly, everyday forms of engagement are often interpreted as involving only "small changes," but the analysis suggests that this is to an extent deceptive: as physical effects like the above are extensively documented in publicity media, they add up to sizable inventories of the modification of habits and habitats that 'environmental change' brings with it. Secondly, the research indicates that information technologies are today used to format everyday material practices as forms of public engagement. This is giving rise to new forms of involvement with science and technology, among others those focusing on the enactment of 'intimacy' with objects in public. Thus, several of the experiments studies involved reporting of one kind or other on the insertion of measurement devices in practices of bodily comfort (heating, bathing and so on). Thirdly, the 'materialisation' of environmental change in sustainable living experiments has various constructive effects: it demonstrates that environmental change involves disruptions of everyday life, and establishes the relevance of wider issues of resource infrastructures in everyday terms. As such these experiments have the capacity to enrich "information and incentives" approaches to public engagement, though this potential is not sufficiently realised. In terms of its overall achievement, the research has established the relevance of technology studies to wider social and political theories of public engagement. Historians of technology have shown that in the past the introduction of "labour-saving" devices in the home was rarely a routine affair. Now devices that are advertised as making public involvement "easy" enrol everyday actors in what is likely to be a laborious experiment in environmental change.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз