Agonizing debilitation. I rather like that. Well, deliberation is often formally conceived of as occurring when a group of people who have some stake in a current issue or problem come together to talk through the problem and come to some consensus on a solution (Habermas's theory of Communicative Action, and Structural Transformation, are generally cited as the theoretical justification for deliberation in democratically organized governments). The National Issue Forums are a good example of this in practice, with research being done on the citizens' discussions notably by John Gastil at the University of Washington, or James Fishkin with his Deliberative Poll (TM) is another example. Others conceive of deliberation more generally as a group of people coming together to discuss social, political, and cultural issues with or without a move to consensus. I research online discussion groups, like you'd find on Usenet or Yahoo! chat, for example, to understand why people do it, and more recently to investigate what people are doing in their talk with each other. Others might answer your query a bit differently, Ellis, but that's my quick and dirty description. Best wishes, ~Jenny -----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ellis Godard Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 4:04 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: RE: [Air-l] analyzing deliberation I first misread the subject heading here as "agonizing debilitation". I'm not really sure what that means, but, then, I'm not sure what "deliberation processes" include or exclude, either. Could you clarify? Thanks, Ellis _______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org/airjoin.html