Policymaking too often happens among small groups of people, behind closed doors, which can lead to poorer design, worse outcomes, and a sense that government is a force to be reckoned with rather than a partner in problem solving. The New Practice Lab has long championed for participatory planning--bringing impacted people directly into…

Background: Behavioural public policies, known as nudges, suffer from lack of citizen consent and involvement, which has led to an argument for more reflective nudges, known as 'nudge plus'. Aims and objectives: How can more citizen reflection be introduced in a way that is not itself top-down and paternalist in spite of good intentions? How might…

Citizen science's (CS) deployment and benefit over the last ten years have been remarkably substantial in their contributions to the massification of citizen participation in tech-based CS projects. Insights into how CS projects influence community changes through proposals of actions and public policies are essential to understanding how they…

The Instagram Activism Slideshow helps undergraduate students bridge theory and practice by connecting the media arguments they see in their daily lives to the principles of policy argument they learn in argumentation courses. Students use a relevant argumentation theory or concept to argue for a public policy in a concise and palatable Instagram…

While public consultation is a signature process of democratic policy formulation, many governments manoeuvre to refract citizen's opinions or conduct it perfunctorily. Using the case of a medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong, this article unveils the strategies that the state and citizens employ to put their opinion through to the final…

Education is returning to a sense of normalcy, but as education issues remain in the headlines, parents, voters, and students are left dealing with both new and persistent problems. 2024 marks the continuance of education in the headlines and minds of Americans across the nation. As the United States recovers from pandemic learning, graduation…

Children's policies at the local level stimulate initiatives in the municipalities to encourage child participation. In this article, we focus on the local political sphere as a space for the promotion of child participation and citizenship through digital mediation. It is in this immediate environment where the rights of children and adolescents…

Engaged learning seeks to cultivate integrative approaches that require students to use multiple points of view or approaches in their coursework. Similarly, civically engaged courses ask students to consider public problems that involve multiple stakeholders, institutions, and policies. We are interested in whether courses designed to meet civic…

Background: Like other professional training programs, social work pedagogy has long recognized the value of experiential learning for professional development. Despite social work's rich experiential learning literature involving field education, direct practice courses, and program evaluation, there is a dearth of literature examining how to…

This short article reflects on 'public switching' as a methodology for research on public perspectives on potential responses to the climate crisis. There have been recent calls for early public engagement with potentially controversial science and technology. Such 'upstream' engagement is often conducted by those close to the science, presenting…

Background: Debates about evidence-based policy (EBP) were revived in the UK in the 2010s in the context of civil service reform and changing practices of policy making, including institutionalisation of public participation in science policy making. Aims and objectives: This paper aims to explore this revival of interest in EBP in the context of…

This article critically explores how laws and practices of states and international organisations attempt to control refugees, drawing upon conceptions of 'biopower' and 'technologies of anti-citizenship' (Foucault 1972). This is examined in the Lebanese context, which has an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees (HRW 2016a), in an overall…

This paper revisits and reanalyses data from a study carried out in the further education and training sector in the Republic of Ireland to investigate (1) how adults access and participate in numeracy courses and (2) how adult numeracy provision might support active citizenship. We analysed 45 interviews with adult education providers, adult…

In this article we argue that a refined understanding of "public" and "public engagement" can help researchers who produce critical research make better decisions towards achieving policy influence. We acknowledge the challenges critical researchers face in putting their research to work within the public domain. Critical…

Civic education historically has focused primarily on preparing students to influence politics and government policy. Less attention has been paid to the curricular implications of civil society, even though it is a crucial site for deliberatively informed action and one of the primary ways in which students will enter the public sphere. This…