Call for Book Chapters: “Participatory and Deliberative practices in Techno-scientific Innovation for a better relationship between Science and Society”

Vernon Press invites book chapters for a forthcoming edited volume by Giuseppe Pellegrini (University of Trento) and Chiara Piccolo (University of Padova) on the subject of “Participatory and Deliberative practices in Techno-scientific Innovation for a better relationship between Science and Society”.

Modern societies are characterised by an intense development of science and technology that influence the fields of human action in an increasingly significant way with very rapid processes of change. If, on the one hand, science and technology play an increasingly important role through political guidelines for the development and dissemination of effective, innovative tools, on the other hand, civil society requires more and more guarantees of sustainability and adequacy of innovations and the possibility of having a voice in the processes of change. However, these changes have social, political and economic repercussions that are variable across context and recent history.

Bringing together a rich diversity of cases and themes, the book builds on the idea that public participation and public deliberation are two democratic processes that involve different actors in activities strongly characterised by communication mechanisms that can make them effective or not. Alongside theoretical and methodological considerations, we intend to collect a group of cases and procedures for understanding the contemporary development of public participation and deliberation as a co-constructive process. We aim to use virtuous experiences as stimulus and inspiration for their replication and improvement, working on strengths and weaknesses. The intention is to collect these experiences from different parts of the world to compare emerging phenomena that drive innovative processes of public participation and deliberation, also considering the cultural contexts in which they arise.

The book will contain 12 chapters, ten of which illustrate the path of individual countries, recording important events, specific case studies, debates, activities and/or protagonists of techno-scientific innovation. We therefore invite authors to focus on the country in which they live or work to develop the chapter. We are aware that in ten chapters, we cannot represent the whole world; we would like to have good coverage of Europe and a couple of non-European countries presenting emblematic cases. Therefore, one of the abstract selection criteria is related to the specificity of the experience/case study it explores and a satisfactory distribution in terms of geographical variability.

Topics can include but are not limited to actors, processes, contents, communication, and democratic contexts in which recent forms of practices were developed to respond to the challenges of techno-scientific innovations. The chapters will contain theoretical references and connections to operational practices in the countries of interest.

Each chapter could have a maximum of 7000 words and four tables/graphs. We plan to collect references in one integrated list for all chapters, which will avoid overlapping references. We propose a one-year process to submit the manuscript to the publisher starting from the abstract deadline (February 2024).

Chapter proposal submission:

Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words to Giuseppe Pellegrini and Chiara Piccolo (volume editors) at giuseppe.pellegrini@unitn.it and chiara.piccolo.1@unipd.it by 25 February 2024. Additionally, please include a short biography (max. 200 words).