As part of the launch activities for their new Remaking Participation book Jason Chilvers of 3S and Matthew Kearnes are hosting two panel discussion sessions at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting in Denver on Saturday 14^th November. The sessions will feature presentations from authors who have written chapters for the edited volume, and open the themes of the book up to wider discussion and debate with conference participants.

The first session – entitled ‘Participation in the making’ – will involve contributions from Ulrike Felt (University of Vienna), Alan Irwin (Copenhagen Business School), (Brice Laurent, CSI – Mines ParisTech), Brian Wynne (University of Lancaster) and Jason Chilvers. The session will explore what it means to rethink public participation with science in co-productionist terms. The authors and conference participants will explore the co-production of participation not only through the performance of situated participatory practices, but also through wider spaces of standardisation where expertise and technologies of participation circulate, spaces of controversy within which ecologies of public engagement intermingle, and how these spaces of participation link up with political power and culture in wider constitutional formations.

The second session – entitled ‘Remaking participation’ – will involve contributions from Sarah R Davies (University of Copenhagen), Jan-Peter Voss (Technische Universität Berlin), Claire Waterton (CSEC, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University), and Matthew Kearnes. The session will explore what a co-productionist and relational way of understanding public participation with science and democracy means for reconfiguring and remaking participatory practices, institutions and constitutions. In many respects this is a significant challenge and one that co-productionist accounts of participation have often sidestepped. We will address these more normative and instrumental questions head on in the second session, in order to consider how participation could and should be remade in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways.

The sessions will take place from 8:30am-noon (U.S. Mountain Standard Time).

Remaking Participation is a new edited volume published this week by Routledge. For further details see: remakingparticipation.com and #RemakingParticipation on Twitter.