Under Construction: The Field of Online Deliberation Research

摘要

How might we describe the development of online deliberation as a field of research and practice? How should we interpret its signifi cance? In this introductory essay to the Special Issue, we argue that deliberative citizenship is best thought of as a construction, rather than something naturally occurring and given, and that the modest field of online deliberation has contributed to its contemporary enactment. Researchers and practitioners of online delib eration tend to deny their hand in constituting deliberative citizenship, since they continue to assume, if only implicitly, that the deliberative citizen is a natural and universal phenomenon, not a constructed one. We argue instead that the deliberative citizen is a construction all the way down, a contingent product of a particular set of discourses and practices, and that online deliberation research plays an important role in enacting as well as studying deliberative citi zenship (Cruikshank, 1999; Law & Urry, 2004; Olson, 2008; Osborne & Rose, 1999).