Refreshing democracy through better public engagement

Enhancing citizen engagement in cancer screening through deliberative democracy.

Cancer screening is widely practiced and participation is promoted by various social, technical, and commercial drivers, but there are growing concerns about the emerging harms, risks, and costs of cancer screening. Deliberative democracy methods engage citizens in dialogue on substantial and complex problems: especially when evidence and values are important and people need time to understand ...

Tutorial: Public Engagement Through Audio Internet Experiments

This tutorial paper details experiences of four public engagement projects that have communicated acoustic science to lay audiences using web experiments. Recent developments in personal computers, the Internet and software platforms offers new and exciting opportunities for engaging publics because technologies routinely allow the reproduction of sound. The projects are psychoacoustic experime...

Democracy and Public Health.

Sowing the seeds of dialogue: public engagement through plant science.

With enhanced public accessibility of scientific information, increased demand for a scientifically literate workforce and citizenry, stipulations from funding agencies to broaden the impact of science research, and changing rewards systems at universities, scientists are looking for ways to engage the public in their work. This commentary is designed to share our philosophy of engaging the pub...

Public Service and Liberal Democracy

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...