about citizens’ co-participation in democratic institutions, I will now turn to recognition theory. What We Do When We Meet and Speak About Problems of Common Concern – Using Recognition Theory to Get a More Robust Picture of Interpersonal Engagement Within Designs “Deliberative” Part of the problem with the deliberative literature, then, is the preoccupation with a kind of rational debate oriented towards problem-solving, all unfolding in the communicative exchange of citizens a preoccupation I think is – best attributed to its Habermasian foundations. Efforts to broaden the understanding of cooperative citizen interaction often continue to run up against this prefigured understanding, restricting how we design and evaluate these spaces. This was evident, for instance, in Gutmann and Thompson’s struggle to see the value in Truth Commissions. In the remainder of this essay I want to suggest that recognition theory might open up our understanding about what we envision for small scale institutions: what kinds of things we can hope unfold in “deliberative” these designs, how we envision participation, and what kinds of outcomes “good” might be appropriate. Deliberative theory accounts for some of the possibilities, but not nearly all, while often obscuring other valuable outcomes. And it may also be that even the deliberative project itself is based on some interpersonal elements that it cannot offer a good account of how to create and secure (like trust and solidarity). Thus, to get a sense of what else we might focus on when thinking about designing institutions that bring citizens into direct contact with one another, I turn to the work of Axel Honneth.
about citizens’ co-participation in democratic institutions, I will now turn to recognition theory. What We Do When We Meet and Speak About Problems of Common Concern – Using Recognition Theory to Get a More Robust Picture of Interpersonal Engagement Within “Deliberative” Designs Part of the problem with the deliberative literature, then, is the preoccupation with a kind of rational debate oriented towards problem-solving, all unfolding in the communicative exchange of citizens – a preoccupation I think is best attributed to its Habermasian foundations. Efforts to broaden the understanding of cooperative citizen interaction often continue to run up against this prefigured understanding, restricting how we design and evaluate these spaces. This was evident, for instance, in Gutmann and Thompson’s struggle to see the value in Truth Commissions. In the remainder of this essay I want to suggest that recognition theory might open up our understanding about what we envision for small scale “deliberative” institutions: what kinds of things we can hope unfold in these designs, how we envision “good” participation, and what kinds of outcomes might be appropriate. Deliberative theory accounts for some of the possibilities, but not nearly all, while often obscuring other valuable outcomes. And it may also be that even the deliberative project itself is based on some interpersonal elements that it cannot offer a good account of how to create and secure (like trust and solidarity). Thus, to get a sense of what else we might focus on when thinking about designing institutions that bring citizens into direct contact with one another, I turn to the work of Axel Honneth.
WPSA%20Paper%202015%20-%20Andersen.docx