Oliver Escobar
Oliver Escobar is Professor of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at the University of Edinburgh. He works on participatory and deliberative democracy, with a focus on public participation, policy innovation, the commons, political inequalities, and the governance of the future.
Oliver combines research and practice to develop social and democratic innovations across various policy and community contexts. He was Academic Lead on Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2019-2023) and Co-director of CRITIQUE, Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought (2021-2023). He also co-led the projects European Smart Urban Intermediaries, Distant Voices, and What Works Scotland, and currently co-leads research projects at the UKRI Behavioural Research Hub and the EU Horizon programme on Intersectional Spaces of Participation.
Oliver’s work has been shared in eighty publications and fifty courses for students and practitioners across the public sector and civil society. Before academia, Oliver worked in radio, retail, fishing, construction and literature.
Mastodon: [email protected] Twitter: @OliverEscobar
Full academic profile: https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/oliver-escobar
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Address: [email protected]
Oliver combines research and practice to develop social and democratic innovations across various policy and community contexts. He was Academic Lead on Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2019-2023) and Co-director of CRITIQUE, Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought (2021-2023). He also co-led the projects European Smart Urban Intermediaries, Distant Voices, and What Works Scotland, and currently co-leads research projects at the UKRI Behavioural Research Hub and the EU Horizon programme on Intersectional Spaces of Participation.
Oliver’s work has been shared in eighty publications and fifty courses for students and practitioners across the public sector and civil society. Before academia, Oliver worked in radio, retail, fishing, construction and literature.
Mastodon: [email protected] Twitter: @OliverEscobar
Full academic profile: https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/oliver-escobar
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Address: [email protected]
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Books by Oliver Escobar
Despite burgeoning interest and developments, however, scarce attention has been paid to the role of public engagement officials tasked with turning participatory and deliberative ideals into everyday practices. Indeed, we still know little about the policy work of official ‘public engagers’ who organise participatory processes by negotiating a contested milieu of actors and agendas, while being constrained and enabled by an evolving ecology of participation. Consequently, this thesis presents findings from two years of ethnographic fieldwork shadowing public engagers in a Scottish Local Authority Area. The uniqueness of these policy workers is that their expertise is not on a particular policy area, but on stakeholder and citizen engagement across policy domains. That is, their expertise is on process, and their job is to facilitate deliberative forums to inform local policy-making. The fundamental question addressed here is not whether participatory policy-making works, but rather how does it work, what kind of work does it take, and what kind of work does it do.
By foregrounding the ‘how’ question, this Doctoral Thesis provides a new practice-based analytical framework to both understand and inform participation processes. The findings highlight the importance of the engagers’ political work, thus illustrating the disciplinary force of engagement practice and the contested nature of participatory policy-making. Understanding these dimensions offers insight into new political spaces for the renegotiation of the relationship between authorities and citizens. Accordingly, the research shows how public engagers work to open and develop such spaces in order to foster new relationships through a new ‘politics of process’. In addition, it explores the impact that this work has on the engagers’ community of practice, as well as the challenges they face as engagement work gets institutionalised. Therefore, the thesis offers a distinct ethnographic account of the role of agency in developing official local spaces for participatory and deliberative democracy in Scotland.
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This booklet seeks to speak to people involved in creating public forums for meaningful conversations. In particular, I have taken as imaginary readers those practitioners and students that I have had the fortune to work with. If, with pragmatist and deliberative thinkers, we agree that communication is the very fabric of democratic life, then pondering over the quality of communication in public forums becomes critical. Thinking about dialogic communication encourages us to interrogate our public engagement work, the role our research institutions should play in society, and the ways in which we can develop collective capacity to deal with complex problems.
The premise of the experiment was simple: a Galician poet writing in English while living in Scotland, and then re-interpreting the poems in Galician.
The book is a collection of 50 texts in both languages.
This edited collection aims at providing a concise but comprehensive introduction to this area of research. The essays contained in this volume focus on a single case, the Obama phenomenon, illustrating empirically how the variable ‘emotions’ can enrich political analysis. Taken together, the essays reflect the plurality of approaches available to the study of politics and emotions and thus contribute to the cutting-edge debates on this fascinating topic.
With contributions by Marcos Engelken-Jorge, Ramón Maiz, Brad Verhulst, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Andrew J.W. Civettini, Oliver Escobar, Alan Sandry, Åsa Wettergren, Deborah Gould.
Papers by Oliver Escobar
Despite burgeoning interest and developments, however, scarce attention has been paid to the role of public engagement officials tasked with turning participatory and deliberative ideals into everyday practices. Indeed, we still know little about the policy work of official ‘public engagers’ who organise participatory processes by negotiating a contested milieu of actors and agendas, while being constrained and enabled by an evolving ecology of participation. Consequently, this thesis presents findings from two years of ethnographic fieldwork shadowing public engagers in a Scottish Local Authority Area. The uniqueness of these policy workers is that their expertise is not on a particular policy area, but on stakeholder and citizen engagement across policy domains. That is, their expertise is on process, and their job is to facilitate deliberative forums to inform local policy-making. The fundamental question addressed here is not whether participatory policy-making works, but rather how does it work, what kind of work does it take, and what kind of work does it do.
By foregrounding the ‘how’ question, this Doctoral Thesis provides a new practice-based analytical framework to both understand and inform participation processes. The findings highlight the importance of the engagers’ political work, thus illustrating the disciplinary force of engagement practice and the contested nature of participatory policy-making. Understanding these dimensions offers insight into new political spaces for the renegotiation of the relationship between authorities and citizens. Accordingly, the research shows how public engagers work to open and develop such spaces in order to foster new relationships through a new ‘politics of process’. In addition, it explores the impact that this work has on the engagers’ community of practice, as well as the challenges they face as engagement work gets institutionalised. Therefore, the thesis offers a distinct ethnographic account of the role of agency in developing official local spaces for participatory and deliberative democracy in Scotland.
"
This booklet seeks to speak to people involved in creating public forums for meaningful conversations. In particular, I have taken as imaginary readers those practitioners and students that I have had the fortune to work with. If, with pragmatist and deliberative thinkers, we agree that communication is the very fabric of democratic life, then pondering over the quality of communication in public forums becomes critical. Thinking about dialogic communication encourages us to interrogate our public engagement work, the role our research institutions should play in society, and the ways in which we can develop collective capacity to deal with complex problems.
The premise of the experiment was simple: a Galician poet writing in English while living in Scotland, and then re-interpreting the poems in Galician.
The book is a collection of 50 texts in both languages.
This edited collection aims at providing a concise but comprehensive introduction to this area of research. The essays contained in this volume focus on a single case, the Obama phenomenon, illustrating empirically how the variable ‘emotions’ can enrich political analysis. Taken together, the essays reflect the plurality of approaches available to the study of politics and emotions and thus contribute to the cutting-edge debates on this fascinating topic.
With contributions by Marcos Engelken-Jorge, Ramón Maiz, Brad Verhulst, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Andrew J.W. Civettini, Oliver Escobar, Alan Sandry, Åsa Wettergren, Deborah Gould.
Vacancy at University of Edinburgh: http://bit.ly/2ogyPVN
Vacancy at University of Birmingham: http://bit.ly/2oi7B1v
We are seeking two dynamic researchers to join our project ‘Smart Urban Intermediaries’. The Research Fellows will be part of a transnational team including the University of Edinburgh and Birmingham University (UK), Roskilde University and the Danish Town Planning Institute (Denmark), and Tilburg University (Netherlands).
The ideal candidates will have specialist theoretical and practical knowledge in ethnographic methodology, collaborative action research or practice-led inquiry, knowledge of current issues in at least one relevant field (i.e. policy, public administration, public management, urban studies, planning, political science, community learning and development), a PhD in a related field, and strong planning, organisation, facilitation and communication skills.
This part time, fixed term post is available for 17.5 hours per week from 1 June 2017 for 28 months.
About the research
This project is about people who make a difference in communities. We call them Smart Urban Intermediaries. Urban neighbourhoods are sustained and mobilized by networks of key individuals who act as intermediaries, forging connections between and within communities, and between communities and institutions of urban governance. This research project seeks to advance knowledge about the role of urban intermediaries in developing social innovation and smart urban development, with the aim to enhance liveability and resilience, and work towards vibrant, accessible and inclusive communities.