Between Open Deliberation and the Capturing of Public Opinion: Producing Opinions in Public Engagement

Abstract

The past decades have seen increasing calls to actively involve publics in the governance of science and technology. Many public engagement initiatives aim to facilitate the formation of public opinion. But what is an opinion? While the notion is often taken as self-evident, different imaginaries of what opinions are and how they should be formed are highly consequential for shaping relations between technoscience and society. Based on participant observations and interviews, we analyze how “opinion” is enacted as an emergent object and category with specific properties and uses in a series of public engagement events on genome editing. By identifying two prevalent goals tied to partially conflicting imaginaries of opinion—open deliberation and “capturing” public opinion—our analysis contributes to a more reflective understanding of the tensions that participation facilitators navigate when making opinions their central points of intervention in the coevolving relationship between technologies and their publics.