Universities are increasingly being challenged to show leadership in responding to and addressing climate change. Staff, students and the wider UEA community are already attempting to address some of these challenges on their own terms. However, universities have wider untapped potential to move beyond a siloed approach to decision-making and address the many social and…
Prof Jason Chilvers (3S Chair; UKERC Co-Director and Observatory Lead) and Dr Phedeas Stephanides (Senior Researcher) have published a new briefing reporting on the findings of a collaborative experiment with partners from the Climate Citizens Project at Lancaster University, the Climate Change Committee, and Shared Future CIC on public engagement with home energy decarbonisation. This experiment in evaluating a citizens’ panel on…
The UKERC Public Engagement Observatory, based in the 3S Research Group, maps the many different ways that people are engaging with energy, climate change and net zero on an ongoing basis. In this webinar, taking place on Monday 11th September 2023, 2-3pm, the Observatory team will present the findings of a major new analysis of…
New 3S PhD researcher Cat Acheson shares her perspective on the role and policing of publics at COP26. COP26 has been widely portrayed as a make-or-break moment for global efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change. During the first week of the conference, I joined protests on the ground in Glasgow, with a diverse coalition of…
There are 4 competition funded PhD projects advertised at UEA with researchers from the 3S group. MAPPING PARTICIPATION IN ENERGY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NET ZERO will be supervised by Dr Helen Pallett and Professor Jason Chilvers, and is part of the UEA Science Faculty funding competition. To date, approaches to involving the public in decisions…
3S members Helen Pallett and Jason Chilvers are among the authors of a new briefing note on public engagement with algorithms in public services in the UK. This briefing note is one of the outputs of the ‘Just Public Algorithms‘ Project which was funded by the Not Equal Network+ (EPSRC). The briefing note summarises the…
New funding announced today will see our 3S Research Group become a core part of the new five-year phase of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). As part of this significant investment 3S will establish and house the first ever national observatory for societal engagement with energy and net zero transitions, which is a new core…
UK Parliament announced in a press release today that Professor Jason Chilvers of 3S has been appointed to serve on the Academic Panel advising Climate Assembly UK. Climate Assembly UK is the UK’s first nationwide citizens’ assembly on climate change. It was commissioned by six cross-party House of Commons Select Committees in summer 2019 in…
3S Chair Jason Chilvers and Jan-Peter Voß (Berlin University of Technology) are advertising a Call for Papers for an open panel on “Democracy in the making” to be held at the 4S/EASST conference in Prague, 18-21 August 2020. They invite submissions which reconstruct how ‘the demos’ is enacted in practice and how this is supported by…
3S members Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett are advertising two Calls for Papers for forthcoming conferences around the topic of experiments in participation, building on the work they have undertaken in the Remaking Energy Participation UKERC project.
3S researchers Jason Chilvers, Helen Pallett and Tom Hargreaves have today launched an important policy briefing calling for a new approach to public engagement with energy. The UK Energy Research Centre briefing – entitled ‘Public engagement with energy: broadening evidence, policy and practice’ – translates findings from our Remaking Energy Participation project to policy-makers…
A new report has just been released as part of the UK Energy Research Centre project Remaking Energy Participation, which is being led by the 3S research group. This report was put together by 3S faculty members Helen Pallett, Jason Chilvers and Tom Hargreaves, and reports on a systematic mapping of public participation in UK…
The 3rd seminar in the ‘Nuclear futures: re-making sociotechnical research agendas’ interdisciplinary seminar series will be held at UEA on 9th-10th January 2017. Its title is ‘Publics and participation in radioactive waste management’.
Members of the 3S group have organised panel sessions at three different European conferences over the summer of 2016 on the topic of relational and systemic approaches to public participation in science, innovation and sustainability transitions. These panels all draw on conceptual, methodological and empirical innovations in the 3S group from the recent Remaking Participation book and…
See the call for papers below for a session at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers’ Annual Conference in August 2016, organised by 3S members Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett. Relational geographies of participation Organised by Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett (3S Research Group, University of East Anglia, UK) For geographers…
See the call for papers below for a closed session proposed by 3S members Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett for the forthcoming 4S/EASST conference in Barcelona. 4S/EASST Conference Session, Barcelona, August 31 – September 3, 2016 Ecologies of participation: Thinking systemically about science and technology by other means Organised by Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett…
In a new open access paper in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning Jason Chilvers and Noel Longhurst set out a new framework that reconceives public and civil society engagement in energy transitions as co-produced, relational and emergent. The paper speaks to the urgent challenge of transitioning to sustainable low carbon energy systems and debates…
A new 3S Working Paper by Jason Chilvers and Noel Longhurst develops a novel approach to understanding and intervening in sociotechnical system transitions, in domains such as energy and sustainability. The approach builds a relational and co-productionist understanding of system change – grounded theories from science and technology studies (STS) and wider social theory –…
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 14th November. The sessions will feature presentations from authors who have written chapters for the…
3S Chair Jason Chilvers’ new book Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics is published this week by Routledge. The volume, co-edited with Dr Matthew Kearnes (School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Australia), develops ambitious new theoretical perspectives on public participation with science, technology and the environment and offers important practical…
The UK Government’s public dialogue body Sciencewise was the subject of 3S member Helen Pallett‘s PhD research into organisational learning from and about public participation. Helen’s PhD thesis is open access and available to download here, and she has also produced a short report on her findings and recommendations which is now available on the…
On July 14th 2015 Jason Chilvers, Helen Pallett and Tom Hargreaves published a scoping note entitled ‘Rethinking energy participation as relational and systemic’. As part of a the Systemic participation and decision-making in UK energy transitions UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) project the note develops new perspectives on energy participation and societal engagement with energy systems. It creates…
UKERC (2014-19) Seeks to develop an understanding of diverse forms of participation around the UK energy system
The final report from the ‘Making Energy Publics’ workshop hosted by the 3S group last year is released today. The workshop brought together leading voices from Science and Technology Studies, Human Geography and Sociology to discuss the future of academic research into and engagement with the making of energy publics. The central argument of the…
EPSRC (2012-16) Developing, appraising and realising pathways towards a UK low carbon electricity system by 2050.
EU FP7 (2010-11) How members of the public understand and engage with climate change impacts on marine environments, ranging from ocean acidification and species distribution change to sea-level rise and costal erosion.
The Science, Trust and Public Engagement project comprised a major review of public concerns about the governance of emerging science and technology through a meta-analysis of 17 UK public dialogues sponsored by Sciencewise on subjects ranging from nanotechnology and synthetic biology, through to low carbon energy and geoengineering of climate change. This analysis identified five…
The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in public engagement and participatory modes of governing science, technology and the environment, promoted by arguments that it enhances trust, acceptance, and the quality and social responsibility of science and decision-making. Most academic and practical effort in this field to date has been channelled into developing engagement…
This report comes from a Transition Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy workshop which took place 21-22 March 2012. The workshop aimed to develop a more comprehensive system-wide exploration of the diverse forms and sites of participation in low carbon energy transitions, and to build on this broader conception of participation to explore actor dynamics, inclusion…
Thursday 10 June 2010, University of East Anglia The third workshop of the ESRC seminar series Critical Perspectives on Public Engagement in Science and Environmental Risk explored the topic of emerging forms of public engagement and participation in the context of geologic and flood hazards. The management of natural hazards has traditionally been dominated by…
Institute of Hazard and Risk Research, Durham University Tuesday 15 December 2009 The second workshop of the ESRC seminar series Critical Perspectives on Public Engagement in Science and Environmental Risk explored the incipient institutionalisation of public engagement and deliberation. Contemporary science policy has taken a distinct ‘deliberative turn’. Across a range of domains – biotechnology,…
Friday 24 April 2009, University of Birmingham The opening mini-conference of the ESRC seminar series ‘Critical perspectives on public engagement in science and environmental risk’ explores the theoretical, methodological, empirical and practical dimensions of the emerging critical research agenda on participation in science and the environment. The morning session includes agenda setting presentations from leading…