Citizenship and Participation: A Case Study from the Canadian Blood Transfusion Service. Wesley Dean, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
I will explore the relative merits of participatory versus expert forms of deliberation through a comparative case study with material gathered from my research into the contamination of the Canadian Blood Transfusion Service with HIV virus. More specifically, I will examine the development of a series of blood donor screening strategies. These will be compared in terms of the degree to which the affected publics were consulted, as well as the relative effectiveness of these strategies at preventing individuals at high risk from donating blood. The presentation will focus on two blood centers. The first relied solely on the professional expertise of the center coordinator in developing its donor screening procedure. It will be compared to a blood center that openly consulted with concerned and affected publics such as gay men and hemophiliacs in the development of its screening strategy. This center in Calgary, Alberta had the lowest infection rate in Canada. The centers that did not involve the public in deliberation had the least effective screening procedures. The thrust of this presentation will be to explain how these events can be understood in terms of theories of participatory democracy and citizenship with an emphasis on the work of Carole Pateman, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. [The Eco-Research Chair in Environmental Risk Management]
Go to . . .