A Review of Research on Participation in Democratic Decision-Making Presented at SIGCHI Conferences : Toward an Improved Trading Zone Between Political Science and HCI

We present a review of 80 papers representing efforts to support participation in democratic decision-making mostly related to local or national governments. The papers were published in leading human–computer interaction (SIGCHI conferences) venues. Most of this literature represents attempts to support assembly- oriented participation, wherein decisions are made through discussion, although referendum-type participation, involving decision-making based on voting, has gained attention too. Primarily, those papers addressing agenda-setting have examined organization-led forms, in which the agenda is controlled by those issuing the call for participation. Accordingly, the authors call for more research into support for representative models and participant-driven agenda-setting. Furthermore, the literature review pinpoints areas wherein further interdisciplinary engagement may be expected to improve research quality: in political science, HCI-informed methods and new ways of using physical input in participation merit more research, while, from the HCI side, cultivating closer relationships with political science concepts such as democratic innovations and calculus of voting could encourage reconsideration of the research foci. These observations speak to the benefits of a new research agenda for human–computer interaction research, involving different forms of participation, most importantly to address lack of engagement under the representative model of participation. Furthermore, in light of these findings, the paper discusses what type of interdisciplinary research is viable in the HCI field today and how political science and HCI scholars could usefully collaborate.Peer reviewe

Online Deliberation Lived Experiences of Kānaka Maoli Women.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Exploring the role of sociotechnical systems to support deliberative localist decision-making

Ph. D. ThesisThe importance of civil society to our communities has always been socially significant but has an increasingly important economic and democratic function. The localism agenda of successive governments has pushed local authorities to devolve powers and responsibilities for community-level policymaking to civil society organisations while, at the same time, significantly reducing the funding required to adequately support such processes. Civil society groups are expected to fill the gaps left by local authorities without the skills, resources and experiences, or without the bureaucratic processes or participatory models of their erstwhile incumbents. At the same time, a crisis in democracy caused a growing mistrust of the political class has raised questions about the legitimacy of our political systems, and the aggregative logic of the internet, fuelled by nefarious politically motivated actors, has further obfuscated the boundaries between truth and knowledge. The thesis put forward in this dissertation is that in order for civil society to cope with the increased responsibilities that have been devolved to it while maintaining their civic and democratic duty, new and more extensive participatory forms of public engagement, and the sociotechnical systems to support such processes, are required—first, to foster inclusion and second, to realise the ethical, epistemic, democratic and civic virtues fostered through public deliberation about issues of shared concern. Deliberative systems—the idea of a distributed talk-based model of democracy—forms the underlying theory that drives this research, both conceptually in the way it motivates design and practically in the ways in which it shares the participatory ideals of localism. This dissertation seeks to explore the use of sociotechnical digital artefacts (or, sociodigital artefacts) to investigate the ways in which deliberative democracy is enacted in instances of localism where ‘highly interested’ but ‘nonrepresentative’ actors are collaboratively carrying out policy-making activities, taking decisions that affect the lives of their communities. This exploration takes shape over three case studies where I design, deploy, and evaluate the role of a sociodigital system intended to foster the qualities of deliberative democracy. In the final chapters I synthesise the insights from each study around a discussion on the interrelationship between HCI, localism, and deliberative democracy with a focus on the role of technology to support devolved decision-making

The Youth of Early Modern Women

Through fifteen varied case studies that draw on a rich array of primary sources, this collection of essays makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognized that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, social, and psychological transformations. Drawing on two mutually shaped layers of inquiry--cultural constructions of youth and lived experiences--the essays examine a rich array of primary sources, including literary and autobiographical works, conduct literature, asylum and judicial records, drawings, and material culture. The geographical and temporal ranges traverse England, Ireland, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, Germany, and the Netherlands from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It brings fresh attention to representations of female youth, the training for adulthood, their own life writings, courtship and the emergent sexual lives of young unmarried women

La città, il viaggio, il turismo: Percezione, produzione e trasformazione

[English]:The city as a destination of the journey in his long evolution throughout history: a basic human need, an event aimed at knowledge, to education, to business and trade, military and religious conquests, but also related to redundancies for the achievement of mere physical or spiritual salvation. In the frame of one of the world's most celebrated historical city, the cradle of Greek antiquity, myth and beauty, travel timeless destination for culture and leisure, and today, more than ever, strongly tending to the conservation and development of their own identity, this collection of essays aims to provide, in the tradition of AISU studies, a further opportunity for reflection and exchange between the various disciplines related to urban history./ [Italiano]:La città come meta del viaggio nella sua lunga evoluzione nel corso della storia: un bisogno primario dell'uomo, un evento finalizzato alla conoscenza, all'istruzione, agli affari e agli scambi commerciali, alle conquiste militari o religiose, ma anche legato agli esodi per il conseguimento della mera salvezza fisica o spirituale. Nella cornice di una delle città storiche più celebrate al mondo, culla dell'antichità greca, del mito e della bellezza, meta intramontabile di viaggi di cultura e di piacere, e oggi, più che mai, fortemente protesa alla conservazione e alla valorizzazione della propria identità, questa raccolta di saggi intende offrire, nel solco della tradizione di studi dell'AISU, un'ulteriore occasione di riflessione e di confronto tra i più svariati ambiti disciplinari attinenti alla storia urbana