Leah Sprain

Utilizing “On Tap” Experts in Deliberative Forums: Implications for Design

Experts play important roles in supporting public deliberation. These roles include developing and vetting background materials, participating in question-and-answer sessions with citizens, and giving pubic presentations. Rarely, though, are experts asked to be on hand during deliberative forums, whereby they have the opportunity to interact with deliberating groups. The inclusion of experts during forums presents a tension because, although they can elevate the quality of the conversation by correcting factual errors, they can also, perhaps unknowingly, crowd out and silence citizen, or “nonexpert,” participation. Careful consideration of communication design can help public deliberation practitioners manage this tension so that experts, when involved in forums, enhance rather than undermine the deliberative process. Taking communication as design, we analyze the interaction of an invited expert at a water scarcity forum in Northern Colorado who derailed discussion and hindered dialogue by “going rogue.” We then turn to stasis theory to conceptualize the effective inclusion of technical experts in public deliberations. Through forum design and training practices, we propose that experts can help resolve issues of conjecture and definition in a manner that frees deliberating groups to discuss substantive and subjective issues of quality and policy.

Pedagogy for Sustainability Science: Case-Based Approaches for Interdisciplinary Instruction

Sustainability science represents a fundamental shift in the nature of research on environmental problems, calling for specialists to expand beyond their disciplinary perspectives in order to cooperate together to understand and address systemic problems. This shift demands a corresponding shift in education in order to equip students with the skills, theories, and methods they need to address contemporary challenges. We argue that case studies are a productive pedagogical approach to teaching about sustainability and teaching for sustainability. Case-based approaches equip students to encounter complexity, manage uncertainty, and generate innovative strategies. In laying out of the pedagogical challenges inherent in sustainability education, we highlight opportunities and demands for environmental communication scholars to contribute to the emerging discipline of sustainability science.

The Ethnographer of Communication at the Table: Building Cultural Competence, Designing Strategic Action

Ethnographers of communication are increasingly working within interdisciplinary teams to address social problems in communities, corporations, and governments. This special forum brings together ethnographers of communication to reflect on the opportunities, tensions, and challenges involved in using the ethnography of communication to seek workable solutions to social problems with fellow scholars, practitioners, and community members. Through empirical case studies, contributors demonstrate how the ethnography of communication is used to build cultural competence and design strategic action.

Research as a transdisciplinary networked process: A metaphor for difference-making research

[1] While it was Katriel and Philipsen’s (1981) claim, ‘‘that ‘communication’ labels the academic discipline we practice is more or less incidental to the general point being made’’, I believe that we need to recognize that we work within a discipline with terms that overlap with so-called ‘‘native’’ terms for similar behavior. This makes it all the more important that we carefully distinguish researcher’s discourse from everyday understandings.

The Imperative of Praxis-based Environmental Communication Research: Suggestions from the Step It Up 2007 National Research Project

In this essay, we discuss our development and implementation of a national research project on the Step It Up 2007 campaign calling for political action to mitigate climate change. Specifically, we discuss this project as it relates to our goal to engage in praxis-based research that can be accessible to activists, publics, and practitioners. First, we discuss the practice of organizing a national praxis-oriented research project. We offer this project, with its benefits and challenges, as one model for engaged research on relevant environmental issues. Second, we discuss how our research findings can serve as a form of praxis when an effort is made to make the findings relevant to practitioners in environmental campaigns and movements. Reflecting on our process, we offer four suggestions for making connections between environmental communication research and environmental advocates. The essay concludes by discussing the imperative of engaging in praxis-based research about our contemporary environmental crisis.

A new perspective on stories in public deliberation: analyzing small stories in discussions about immigration

Abstract We analyze small stories in a focus group on immigration to understand how small stories offer resources for group interaction in zero-history groups. Our analysis reveals two new functions of stories in deliberation: through small stories participants establish interactional identities (notably the role of expert) and reveal social categories relevant to the issue. Attending to how stories are elicited by other participants also reveals how group members use ventriloquism to have their arguments voiced by people representing particular social categories as a result of their small stories. This empirical analysis raises a normative question for public deliberation scholars: If narratives are vital to public deliberation, what happens when some people have relevant stories to tell and others do not? We suggest how small stories research can help deliberative theorists consider this question.

What Does it Mean to Deliberate? An Interpretative Account of Jurors’ Expressed Deliberative Rules and Premises

To advance deliberative theory and practice, this study considers the experiences of trial jurors who engaged in deliberation. Conceptualized as a speech event, this article inductively explores the deliberative rules and premises articulated by jurors. Jurors believe deliberation should be rigorous and democratic, including speaking opportunities for all, open-minded consideration of different views, and respectful listening. Jurors actively consider information, but face-to-face deliberation is essential for thoroughly processing evidence. Although emotions should not influence the final verdict, participants report that emotions often reinforce deliberative norms. These results inform theory and deliberative experiences in and beyond the jury.

Meetings: A cultural perspective

Abstract We draw on Helen Schwartzmans seminal work on meetings to make the case for studying meetings and studying them from a cultural perspective. In a global context marked by the increasing interdependence of social groups of all sizes, scholars need ways to study and interpret local phenomena; a cultural approach to meetings provides a means for discovering local practices and theories of communication, and for enabling cross-cultural comparison to generate empirically grounded multi-cultural perspectives. After reviewing how scholars have used Schwartzmans work, we revisit her scheme for studying meetings and demonstrate how it orients researchers to local cultural practices and processes. To illustrate the kind of theoretical innovation that can follow from the application of her scheme, we reformulate her work on the relationship between meetings and social order to argue that egalitarianism and hierarchy should be theorized as strategic communicative accomplishments that serve the locally relevant social ends of some or all meeting participants.

Thin Grey Lines: Confrontations With Risk on Colorado's Front Range

This paper reports on two years of ethnographic observation of the science and politics of flood risk in Colorado, as well as design research that examines citizen interaction with expert knowledge about flooding in the region. We argue that the 100-year floodplain standard that inform maps produced by the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)s National Floodplain Insurance Program (NFIP) represent a problematic form of discursive closure of scientific understanding of flood hazard. We show that in order to meet the requirements of the NFIP, this standard acts as a closure that conveys a certainty that the underlying science does not warrant and foreshortens dialogue on disaster risk and public understanding of flood hazard. Engaging with literature in science and technology studies and human-centered computing, we investigate design opportunities for resisting closure and supporting public formation through encounters with the uncertainty and complexities of risk information.

Communicating openness in deliberation

ABSTRACT Normative and practical accounts of deliberative democracy cite open-mindedness as a key feature of good deliberation. Yet scholars have often focused on attitude change or self-report measures to empirically demonstrate openness. This paper draws on grounded practical theory to understand openness as a discursive stance in public deliberation. Openness is used to address four practical problems encountered in deliberation: disagreement, opinion formation, dysfunctional community problem-solving, and deliberative sense making. Indicating openness and expressing attitude change are different discursive practices. Expecting participants to refrain from forming opinions before deliberation may be naïve. Instead, participants’ eagerness to make sense of deliberation by invoking shared understanding and openness should be used to develop meta-consensus.