Democracy has long been studied and theorised in science and technology studies (STS) in relation to technoscience. However, a growing body of work treats democracy and participation as objects of study and experimental interventions in their own right. In this chapter we seek to make to two contributions to these ‘co-productionist’ STS engagements with democracy and democratic situations.
The first is to demonstrate how STS can take democracy – specifically, approaches to public participation – as an object of study in its own right. In doing so we focus on participatory forms of democracy that have emerged in response or in relation to representative and neoliberal democratic arrangements. We do this by tracing the democratic situation in which ‘public dialogue’ – a model of public participation based on deliberative workshops involving citizens and experts working towards consensus – became established as a dominant mode of public engagement with science policy in Britain. For more than 15 years public dialogue has been promoted and supported by the UK government-funded body Sciencewise as a way of democratising science policy. Through our account we trace the emergence, construction, institutionalisation and waning of British public dialogue as a ‘technology of participation’.
Second, we aim to situate the field of STS as part of, rather than apart from, crucial constitutional shifts in democracies and remain attentive to the role played by STS knowledges and concepts ‘in the wild’. In doing this we suggest that in democratic societies STS – or any other (inter)discipline, for that matter – is always co-produced with democracy. This necessitates humility and reflexivity on the part of STS scholars, to acknowledge both the deep influence of democratic practices and systems on our knowledge-making, but also to recognise the role played by STS theories and knowledges in the empirical sites and contexts we study. These insights force us to question the apparent uniqueness of the findings and arguments of STS, and to consider and anticipate the broader effects of our ideas and interventions.