[Air-l] analyzing deliberation

[Jennifer Stromer-Galley]

Agonizing debilitation. I rather like that. 

Well, deliberation is often formally conceived of as occurring when a
group of people who have some stake in a current issue or problem come
together to talk through the problem and come to some consensus on a
solution (Habermas's theory of Communicative Action, and Structural
Transformation, are generally cited as the theoretical justification for
deliberation in democratically organized governments). The National
Issue Forums are a good example of this in practice, with research being
done on the citizens' discussions notably by John Gastil at the
University of Washington, or James Fishkin with his Deliberative Poll
(TM) is another example. 

Others conceive of deliberation more generally as a group of people
coming together to discuss social, political, and cultural issues with
or without a move to consensus. I research online discussion groups,
like you'd find on Usenet or Yahoo! chat, for example, to understand why
people do it, and more recently to investigate what people are doing in
their talk with each other. 

Others might answer your query a bit differently, Ellis, but that's my
quick and dirty description.

Best wishes,
~Jenny



-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ellis
Godard
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 4:04 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: RE: [Air-l] analyzing deliberation


I first misread the subject heading here as "agonizing debilitation".
I'm not really sure what that means, but, then, I'm not sure what
"deliberation processes" include or exclude, either. Could you clarify?

Thanks,
Ellis
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