IRI THESys<\/a><\/p>\nMore information on my doctoral research:<\/strong>
\nFor several decades, Science Studies scholars emphasising the contingency and performativity of knowledge have promoted public engagement in science (PES). However, looking at PES practice, an analysis of project rationales and methods used in the field of participatory socio-ecological modelling points towards the persistence of different concepts of participation within public engagement practice. Project reports reproduce a positivist understanding of science and science-society relations alongside postmodern tendencies. Building on the notion of knowledge production as performative practice, I want to gain a more nuanced picture of what participatory research does in society, why participatory modelling is worth pursuing, and how it relates to processes of social ordering. I study the participatory research process as a social process of symbolic interaction in which ways of knowing the coupled human-environment system are interlinked with ways of producing it. Based on the idea of co-production, socio-ecological modelling is not only political as a site of environmental decision-making. We can widen our understanding of what it means to engage in a participatory scientific practice by inquiring into the ways in which epistemology and ontology \u2013 ways of modelling and of engaging stakeholders, and ideas on the nature of the system, the world, democracy, humans, and human-environment relations \u2013 are co-produced within participatory modelling processes. In order to trace out how social dynamics, power relations and epistemic processes around \u2018socio-ecological systems\u2019 feed into the making of those very systems, I do fieldwork in three participatory modelling projects. My data collection methods involve participant observation, ethnographic interviews, qualitative in-depth interviews, recording of speech events, and focus groups.<\/p>\n