Constructing the public in public perceptions research: A case study of forest genomics

Abstract

Contemporary scientific and technological endeavours face public and political pressure to adopt open, transparent and democratically accountable practices of public engagement. Prior research has identified different ways that experts ‘imagine publics’ – as uninformed, as disengaged, as a risk to science, and as co-producers of knowledge – but there has yet to be a systematic exploration of how these views emerge, interact and evolve. This article introduces a typology of imagined publics to analyse how publics are constructed in the field of forest genomics. We find that deficit views of publics have not been replaced by co-production. Instead, deficit and co-productive approaches to publics co-exist and overlap, informing both how publics are characterized and how public perceptions are studied. We outline an agenda for deepening and expanding research on public perceptions of novel technologies. Specifically, we call for more diverse and complex methodological approaches that account for relational dynamics over time.