Jeff Fossett

Seance for a Stand of Oaks

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With my friend Elise, I have a piece in Issue 7 of the Quinobequin Review. The issue theme is “Magic”. Our piece is called “Seance for a Stand of Oaks” and is about the Waverley Oaks which once stood at Beaver Brook Reservation. The Q review is print-only, so I would encourage you to order a copy if you would like to read the piece (along with other great local art & writing).

Turkeys in Public Space

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With Quinn, I’ve been working on a project called Turkeys in Public Space which is about documenting the turkeys that live in and around my neighborhood in Cambridge, MA.

The project involves both a handmade photo zine and a website where people can share their own turkey photos. Here is what the site looks like:

Here is what the first edition of the zine looks like:

The idea is that if people upload their own turkey sightings to the site, they could be included in future editions of the zine.

There is a bit more about the project here; there, we write the following about the project:

Turkeys in Public Space is a community project documenting the wild turkeys of Cambridge and Boston, MA.

Cities — and their roads, parks, and sidewalks — are designed by humans for humans. But we share these spaces with other non-human plants and animals, often without noticing. Wild turkeys are a vivid reminder of that: conspicuous and willing to occupy spaces that were not designed for them, whether on the road, in the park, or strolling down the sidewalk.

This project is a small way to draw attention to these non-human stakeholders in our public spaces.

Norma: Value-Checking for Political Speech

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With Jesse, I received some funding from Cosmos Institute and FIRE to work on a project called Norma: Value-Checking for Political Speech.

A version of the project is live here. Here is a screenshot of the interface:

We wrote about the project concept here. Generally, I think the very general direction of the project is more interesting than the project implementation itself. Even subtracting out the “AI” part of the project, I think it’s interesting to consider whether/how it might be useful provide more support for citizens in reasoning about non-fact-based claims.

Below I will re-post the remainder of the project write-up; the write-up was written in somewhat promtional terms for fundraising purposes, but still gets at the main ideas.

****

About Norma

Norma surfaces the hidden moral and philosophical commitments in political speech. Rather than judging whether a statement is true or false, Norma clarifies the values underlying a claim and connects them to traditions of philosophical debate, helping readers reflect more deeply on where they stand.

The Problem

Today’s tools for governing online political discourse—such as community notes, fact-checking tools, and dis/misinformation moderation—focus heavily on ensuring the factual accuracy of public claims. But facts alone do not settle questions of value.

The normative decision of what we ought to do on the basis of shared facts—what policies to enact, which candidates to support, what principles to uphold—is treated as the domain of individual preference and persuasion. Citizens often find themselves reacting along partisan lines without the resources to articulate why they agree or disagree at the level of moral reasoning. This contributes to polarization and shallow discourse.

Philosophers have long developed methods for clarifying and reasoning about normative commitments; however, these resources remain largely locked in academic references, inaccessible in the fast-moving context of contemporary public debate.

How Norma Works

Norma is an LLM-powered value-checking tool. It ingests normative political statements—tweets, op-eds, speeches—and produces short annotations that:

Identify the underlying moral values at stake (e.g. appeals to fairness, liberty, patriotism).
Connect those assumptions to relevant philosophical frameworks and traditions of debate.
Expose tensions or counter-arguments to encourage reflection rather than partisanship.

Our Vision

Norma does not aim to persuade users of a particular position; instead, it aims to expand the space for inquiry, equipping citizens with intellectual tools to better understand where they stand and why.

By making visible the underlying value structures across different debates, Norma may surface unexpected overlaps or coalitions. Actors who appear opposed on the surface may in fact share normative commitments, meaning that unlikely alliances could form around principles that contemporary political identities obscure. In this way, Norma may help illuminate new possibilities for political cooperation, or at least highlight the complexity of existing divides.

****

The above framing is simplistic in a number of ways, including in its naive division of “facts” and “values”. When we presented this project at Cosmos demo day, there were some questions about this aspect of the framing.

In general, I am intellectually sympathetic to complicating these kinds of divisions.

However, at the same time, for the purposes of Norma, I think there’s also an argument that we can sidestep some of these foundational conceptual questions. Taking a constructivist approach, this line of what is a “fact” that can consequently be “fact-checked” is already one that exists in the world, and is deeply naturalized / taken for granted by digital platforms and other institutions like, say, Snopes or Politifact (among many others). There are certain parts of, say, a Bernie tweet that an institution like Snopes thinks can be “fact-checked” and other parts that cannot be.

So one way to think about what we are up to with Norma and this “value-checking” idea is to suggest that these sorts of institutions (or other builders, platforms etc.) might consider how they can support citizens in reasoning about whatever they imagine is on the other side of that existing boundary of “fact” (regardless of whether that existing line is one that is philosophically defensible).

This doesn’t and shouldn’t preclude engaging with the normativity that’s inherent in the “facts” themselves. Instead, it raises a separate question about where and when we think it is useful to provide reasoning support to citizens in public contexts.

A final note is that this “value-checking” direction does not have much to do with AI or LLMs per se, even though our implementation uses this approach. It’s an interesting question what non-AI versions of this type of direction might look like – e.g. something like “Community Notes” that’s less oriented around fact-making.

Light a Candle

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Light a candle for someone you care about:

More

I started this sketch for another project but didn't wind up using it for that purpose. I've been enjoying making digital elements like this "by hand" on my computer. This one was drawn with the pencil tool in Figma, then styled a bit more ex post and animated. It'd be nice to add a few more animation frames for the candle to be extinguished when clicked again, with little bits of smoke.

Documenting Repairs

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to think about and engage more with maintenance and repair, especially when it comes to my clothes. In this post, I want to create a place to document some of these mends and repairs.

Some recent mends on my forever-repair jeans. These were done at still life.

I repaired two buttons that had broken on this jacket. I decided to go with a contrasting color for fun.

Hand repair on the elbow of one of my Dad's old flannels. The patch fabric was leftover from a previous project.

Classic bike & denim repair; these are on my favorite jeans, so I tried to maintain some semblance of neatness. The patch fabric was from the same denim, leftover from when the jeans were hemmed.

More elbow patch repairs on my Dad's old flannel. This is the flannel that most reminds me of him.

I got one of those little mending loom things to try out. This turned out pretty nice and satisfying.

Yet another repair on the seat of these jeans. Patch made from more leftovers from original hemming of the jeans.

Governing the Laundry Room: Micro-scale Organizing with Polis

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s laundry day. You lug your hamper of clothes down the stairs to your apartment building’s shared laundry room, only to find that none of the washing machines are “available”. Three of the machines are fully “in use”, turned on and mid-wash. But the fourth has completed its cycle and is now sitting idle, someone’s damp clothes occupying the machine, blocking you from starting your own load and heading back upstairs.

What do you do? Do you move your anonymous neighbor’s clothes to the dryer and start your own load? How long do you wait before doing this? Maybe their cycle has just finished and they’ll be back momentarily. And what if a dryer is not available? What do you do with the clothes then? Maybe, instead of moving the clothes you simply claim “next” on the machine and plan to come back; but how exactly do you do that? Do you leave your hamper of clothes on or by the machine? Do you place your quarters by the coin box to show you’ve claimed it?

***

If you have lived in an apartment building with a shared laundry room, you may have experienced something like the situation described above. The shared apartment laundry room is an odd, quasi-public space, often governed by a nebulous mix of mostly-unspoken norms and perhaps rarely-enforced “rules”.

Some laundry room norms are obvious, mostly agreed to by all. For example, we’d probably all agree that you should clean out the lint trap after using the dryer, or that you should clean up after yourself if you spill detergent. But other norms are more uncertain, and might reasonably admit differing perspectives. For example, people might feel differently about others touching their laundry, or whether it’s okay to claim “next” on a machine. Some other questions might include:

Is it acceptable to use bleach or fabric softener in a shared machine? If so, what are your obligations for cleaning the machine afterwards?
Is it okay to use more than one machine at a time, or should you leave space for others?
What are your obligations if a machine you are using does not work properly?
Are there different rules around moving someone’s laundry out of the dryer vs. the washer?

The list goes on.

The shared laundry room can also fall victim to the usual collective action pitfalls: everyone benefits when the space works well, but no one quite feels the obligation, incentive, or ownership to invest in it. People might feel mildly annoyed when others do something they don’t agree with (e.g. not cleaning out the lint trap), but don’t have an easy way to talk about it or give feedback, aside the high bar of a passive-aggressive note or message.

Starting a Conversation

Is there a better way? Over the past month or so, I decided to try a little experiment in laundry room governance in my apartment building’s shared laundry room. My building has maybe 30 or 40 apartment units and a shared laundry room with four washers and four dryers. The laundry room has recently been beset by a number of broken machine issues; because of this, I thought the other tenants might be interested in discussing how to make the space work better.

My first step was to start a shared conversation about the norms of the space. How do people think the laundry room should work? Is there consensus on the governance questions outlined above, or more disagreement? Are there things that people think could work better?

To start a conversation, I used a simple “deliberative technology” called Polis. If you are not familiar with Polis, it is a tool that allows conversation participants to anonymously post and vote on statements about a topic. The tool then helps group and synthesize results from the voting.

Starting a Polis conversation about my laundry room was fairly easy. The main design choices I had to make were (1) what to choose for my “seed” statements (the initial set of propositions for participants to vote on), and (2) how to invite people to participate.

To develop a list of seed statements, I relied on my personal best guesses about what topics might be interesting and relevant to the community, and collaborated with an LLM to flesh out the list. Broadly, I tried to include a mix of statements that (i) covered different aspects which might be of interest, and (ii) might vary in terms of their level of agreement, disagreement, consensus, and divisiveness. If you are curious about my full list of seed statements (perhaps to run your own laundry room conversation!), I’ve included them below.

The choice about how to invite people to the conversation was also relatively straightforward. Since it was a conversation about the laundry room, I drew up and posted a simple flyer in the laundry room with a QR code and link to join the Polis conversation. Here is a pic of the flyer after it was posted (I drew the laundry machine clip art “by hand” on my computer for a personal touch):

I wasn’t too sure if anyone would be interested to engage in the conversation, but the effort involved in setting it up was so minimal–maybe an hour of work–that I figured it was worth a try. I planned to let the conversation run for a few weeks to give time for folks on different laundry schedules to participate, and waited. I was curious to see what would happen.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised with the level of engagement from folks in the building. According to the final Polis report, there were 25 participants in the conversation who cast a total of 659 votes on different statements. In addition to voting on the seed statements, participants added a handful of their own statements for others to vote on.

I decided a reasonable next step was to simply share back the results with the community so that everyone could see what everyone else thought. After all, the initial goal was to clarify the shared norms of the space.

To this end, I generated a polis report and created a new flyer linking folks to it. Here is what the main results flyer looked like:

I also did a bit of my own summary of the results, since there’s a lot going on in the raw Polis report. In my summary, I tried to clearly separate the statements where there was broad consensus (i.e. the agreed-upon norms) from those where there were more varied perspectives. I also split out some of the helpful suggestions that people in the community had made. Here’s what that part looked like:

I printed things out and posted it all in the same spot as my previous flyer:

One perhaps unsurprising result from the Polis conversation was that there was broad agreement among tenants about all the statements that suggested that building management should do more to maintain or improve the laundry room space (add more machines, add a coin machine, reimburse tenants for issues etc.). People also generally agreed about standard norms like clearing the lint trap after using a dryer, or cleaning up spills. However, there was also more disagreement about some of the topics noted above – e.g. when/whether it’s okay to move someone’s laundry over to the dryer, or whether it’s okay to claim “next” on a machine.

I was also very interested in the new suggestions that participants offered. Some of these – like the whiteboard and the magnetic “out of order” sign – seemed both clever and easy to implement. So I decided to give them a go.

For a total of maybe $20 at Michaels, I was able to pick up a basic whiteboard, and a few magnetic picture frames, which I filled with “Out of Order” signs. I hung everything up in the laundry room and again waited to see if folks would engage:

I didn’t have to wait long. Straight away, folks started writing notes on the community whiteboard. Here is a pic of the board a few days later:

The blacked out bits includes the name of the building’s appliance tech who also wrote on the board. Likewise, here is someone using one of the magnetic “Out of Order” signs:

I also appropriated a bin that someone had left behind to become the new “Lost and Found”, which was quickly put to at least modest use:

As time has gone on, people have used the whiteboard in different ways, both for productive and fun uses. Someone began a game of anonymous tic tac toe in the corner of the board. Someone drew a picture. Someone made a note that they’d submitted a work report about ants in the building.

Interestingly, I haven’t seen anyone post contact info just yet (to be texted when laundry is done), as suggested by the original commenter. But still it seems to have been a helpful community space, and I am curious to see what else will evolve.

Next Steps and Takeaways

I am not sure what will happen next with this experiment in laundry room governance. Perhaps we tenants should join together to share some set of requests to building management; maybe we could encourage them to add a coin machine, or be more proactive about maintaining the laundry machines.

However, running this experiment has raised a few key questions and takeaways for me.

My first takeaway has to do with the value of providing “containers” for public participation. As documented above, I was happily surprised by the willingness of my fellow laundry room users to engage on the Polis conversation once it was established; there were a variety of good ideas about how to make the space work better, many of which were ultimately quite easy to implement (e.g. the whiteboard, the lost and found). However, prior to the Polis conversation, these ideas and perspectives were “latent”, un-realized. To make them real, all that was required was a tiny bit of investment to create a “container” for folks to engage and share thoughts.

To me, this seems like a nice way to approach organizing more broadly: how might I provide the right “containers” for people in my community to come together, discuss, identify, and hopefully solve their shared problems?

Of course, this perspective also raises deeper questions about when and why people feel a sense of agency and responsibility over the spaces and communities that they inhabit. When I am a member of a public or a user of a public space, when do I think of myself as “agentic” or “responsible” for that public’s upkeep or well-being? When do I feel able to take actions to improve it? And why? And if I do not feel agentic or responsible, why not? Is it that I am just not thinking about it? Do I feel like I need “permission” from someone? Do I assume that it is someone else’s responsibility? Does it seem like too much work?

This brings me to my second takeaway about the role of deliberative technologies like Polis in all of this. Much of the discourse about tools like Polis has emphasized their ability to support public deliberation at huge, even country-level scales. For example, Polis has been used as part of an initiative called vTaiwan where, according to the website, it “has been pivotal in achieving ‘rough consensus’ on various policy issues at the national level, addressing scalability challenges in deliberative democracy.”

While scale may be a useful goal, deliberative technologies like Polis also make it easier to set up and facilitate a (kind of) decentralized deliberative conversation in the first place. In other words, Polis makes it easy to create a basic “container” for public conversation–it’s free, open source, publicly available, and relatively easy to use. Given this, I am curious if we might see deliberative technologies facilitate more “scaling down” as well as “scaling up” – making it feasible to have deliberative conversations in ever smaller-scale settings like the apartment laundry room, where it might otherwise be too difficult to set something up.

Approached in this way, deliberative technologies might help us see ourselves as participants (and agents!) in a richer, more granular, and dynamic set of publics and communities.

Try it For Yourself?

If you want to facilitate a deliberative conversation in your own laundry room (or in another community), you can start a Polis conversation here. Sign in and click “Create a new conversation”. Here are the configuration settings that I used:

Topic: Laundry Room Community Guidelines
Description: Help shape the shared norms for our building’s laundry room! You can participate in two ways: (1) vote on statements you agree or disagree with, or (2) add your own statements for others to vote on.
Seed Statements: Here is the complete list of seed statements that I used (also available as a CSV download for easy import into your own Polis conversation):

Expand to see full list of seed statements

It's okay to claim 'next' on a machine that's currently in use.
You shouldn't be able to claim 'next'—whoever is there when a machine finishes gets it.
Placing quarters on a machine that's in use is a fair way to claim it next.
Placing a basket by a machine that's in use is a fair way to claim it next.
It's okay to move someone's finished laundry from the dryer to the folding table or a chair.
It's okay to move someone's finished laundry from the washer to an open dryer.
You should never touch someone else's laundry, even if it's been sitting there a while.
I try to collect my laundry within 10 minutes of the cycle ending.
5 minutes is enough grace period before moving someone's finished laundry.
People should get at least 15 minutes to collect their laundry before it's moved.
If you move someone's laundry, it should go in their basket or on a clean surface—not the floor.
If you spill detergent, you should clean it up immediately.
Everyone should clean the lint trap after using the dryer.
If a machine is broken or malfunctioning, you should report it to building management right away.
People should wipe down the inside of the washer if they notice residue after their load.
It's fine to leave your laundry basket in the room while your cycle runs.
Playing music or taking phone calls in the laundry room should be avoided.
I like when neighbors say hi in the laundry room.
I prefer to be left alone when doing laundry.
If you use bleach in a laundry load, you should run an empty rinse cycle afterward to protect the next person's clothes.
I should be able to use bleach in my laundry without having to do anything special afterward.
Strongly scented detergents should be avoided in shared machines out of consideration for people with sensitivities.
People should be able to use whatever detergent they prefer in shared machines.
It's fine to use multiple washers or dryers at once.
People should limit themselves to one washer and one dryer at a time.
If I find a forgotten item like a sock, I leave it somewhere visible like the folding table.
There should be a designated lost-and-found spot in the laundry room.
Management should fix broken machines within 48 hours of being reported.
Management should do regular maintenance on machines, not just wait for them to break.
Laundry costs too much in this building.

Finally, I’ve uploaded all my flyers and assets to a public Google drive folder here. Feel free to modify or reuse as you see fit.

Epistemic Pluralism & Deliberative Democracy

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I am starting to engage on a project that is focused around the themes of epistemic pluralism in deliberative processes. In short, I understand the project as broadly asking the question:

How might we design deliberative processes (or tools) to produce “better” (more legitimate, more just, more productive) outcomes in a world of epistemic pluralism – i.e. where deliberative participants have foundational differences in how they come to “know” things about the world?

In this post, I am going to capture some notes as I seek to develop better understandings on these themes, and read related materials. One thing I decided to try on this was to work with an LLM to help develop a reading list / curriculum oriented around my particular directions of interest here. Below is the result. I will work through some of these pieces progressively, and add my notes as I go.

Foundations of Deliberative Democracy

A 2–3 Week Intensive Reading Plan

This plan is designed to move from foundational theory (public reason and legitimacy) toward epistemic diversity and STS critiques. The structure is cumulative: later readings respond directly to earlier ones.

Week 1: Core Architecture — Public Reason and Legitimacy

1. John Rawls

Political Liberalism (1993)
- Lecture I: Fundamental Ideas
- Lecture VI: The Idea of Public Reason
“The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997)

Core idea:
In a society marked by “reasonable pluralism,” the use of political power is legitimate only if it can be justified in terms all reasonable citizens could accept. Public reason defines that shared justificatory space.

Secondary

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Public Reason”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “John Rawls”

2. Jürgen Habermas

Between Facts and Norms (Introduction + chapters on discourse theory)
“Three Normative Models of Democracy”

Core idea:
Legitimacy arises from procedures of rational discourse. Norms are legitimate if they could win the assent of all affected in ideal conditions of communication.

Secondary

SEP: “Habermas”
SEP: “Deliberative Democracy”

Conceptual contrast to track:

Rawls: legitimacy via public reason under pluralism.
Habermas: legitimacy via discourse conditions that generate rational acceptability.

Week 2: Deliberative Democracy Expands (and Complicates)

3. Joshua Cohen

“Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy” (1989)

A clean formal statement of deliberative democracy as a normative model.

4. Amy Gutmann & Dennis Thompson

Democracy and Disagreement

Focus:
Persistent moral disagreement is normal. Reciprocity is the moral core: citizens should offer reasons others could reasonably accept.

5. James Bohman

Public Deliberation
“Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom”

Emphasizes plural publics and democratic complexity beyond a single unified demos.

6. Iris Marion Young

“Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy”
Inclusion and Democracy (selections)

Critiques rationalist bias in early deliberative theory. Argues that storytelling, rhetoric, and situated knowledge must count as legitimate forms of political communication.

7. David Estlund

Democratic Authority (chapters on epistemic proceduralism)

Bridges legitimacy and truth. Democracy has epistemic value but does not justify rule by experts.

Week 3: Epistemic Diversity, Expertise, and STS Interventions

8. Hélène Landemore

Democratic Reason

Argues that cognitive diversity can outperform expertise under certain conditions.

9. Sheila Jasanoff

Science and Public Reason
“Technologies of Humility”

Shows how scientific knowledge and social order are co-produced. Challenges narrow definitions of legitimate knowledge in liberal public reason.

10. Brian Wynne

“Misunderstood Misunderstandings”

Empirical case (Cumbrian sheep farmers) demonstrating that lay knowledge is not ignorance but differently situated rationality.

11. Miranda Fricker

Epistemic Injustice

Introduces testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Shows how epistemic inequality distorts deliberation.

12. José Medina

The Epistemology of Resistance

Develops plural epistemic virtues and “epistemic friction” as productive rather than destabilizing.

Key Tensions to Track

Legitimacy vs. Truth
Is democracy legitimate because it respects persons, or because it produces better decisions?
Reasonableness vs. Deep Pluralism
Rawls assumes “reasonable” pluralism. What happens when epistemic frameworks clash more radically?
Expertise vs. Inclusion
How do we respect scientific authority without collapsing into technocracy?

Optional Advanced Layer

Elizabeth Anderson — “The Epistemology of Democracy”
Cristina Lafont — Democracy without Shortcuts
Philip Pettit — Republicanism

Reading Strategy

Read Rawls and Habermas slowly.
Read Cohen and Gutmann/Thompson structurally.
Read Young and Jasanoff polemically.
Read Estlund and Landemore analytically.

As you reflect, consider:

Is public reason a moral constraint, an epistemic filter, or a political technology?
Does deliberation require shared standards of evidence?
What happens when those standards are contested?

The central puzzle: how collective decision-making remains legitimate when the criteria of knowing themselves are in dispute.

First Reflection (March 3)

I want to start by reflecting on a few key ideas that I am familiar with at the outset or want to pay particular attention to.

Deliberation and preference evolution. One of the things I find interesting about the idea of deliberative democracy is the idea that – contra a lot of economic theory – part of the usefulness of deliberative processes (i.e. talking about, discussing, justifying ideas etc.) is that it can support preference evolution or preference change. In other words, the idea is that individual preferences about e.g. policy outcomes are not considered wholly “exogenous” things to be aggregated through, say, voting. Instead, they are something that can change and evolve; if I am part of a deliberation about a topic, I might come to better understand and appreciate an alternative perspective, allowing my preferences to evolve in terms of what I think is right or appropriate. I think that this approach speaks to me both as someone who personally resonates with this kind of “growth” mindset (and its benefits), and as a more realistic and cooperative model of how human beliefs work. If we imagine that people come to the table with fixed and exogenous preferences, there is really not much that we can do in terms of cooperation or creative problem solving. Either people agree or disagree; someone can win and someone can lose. However, if we instead relax this assumption, we dramatically reopen the space of cooperative possibility.

Legitimacy and Public Reaon. I am really interested in this theme of “legitimacy” and the idea that the legitimacy of coercive laws of policies is related to whether they can be justified to citizens in terms of reasons that they can understand and accept. This dimension of thinking seems tightly related to questions about epistemic pluralism. If citizens have deeply divergent “ways of knowing” what is true in a particular context, what does it look like to produce this kind of legitimacy? Can there exist this neutral space of “public reason” or “public facts” that can produce legitimacy? What if there is not enough overlap in basic beliefs about facts of the matter?

I am also curious about the intersection of these two themes. To what extent can people’s epistemic perspectives evolve in the course of deliberation, and how?

Something that I am also curious about is whether there are more relaxed notions of this idea of “legitimacy” and its relation to reasons. For example, suppose that there is some deliberation between groups with deeply different perspectives on a focal issue, such that there is not some shared terrain of public justification that is legible to both groups. Is there still some notion that deliberation might be useful in terms of increasing something like “democratic reciprocity” – i.e. even if they still completely disagree, both groups can come to better understand the other group as having their own reasons that are legitimate and worthy of respect, even if those reasons are not actually fully legible or accessible or justificatory for me?

Second Reflection (March 10)

Today I am reading and taking notes on Jasanoff’s “Reason in Practice” from Science and Public Reason. In this section, I will summarize a few notes and takeaways from reading the piece.

Public Reason and the State

The first key idea in this piece for me is in terms of its framing of what “public reason” is, and how to analyze it. In the style of STS, Jasanoff takes an explicitly constructivist approach; she writes:

Public reason, for me, is not simply the result of meeting exogenously defined criteria of logic or argument … rather, it is what emerges when states act so as to appear reasonable.

So the analysis of public reason is not about characterizing some particular universal standard of rationality or anything of that sort; instead, the idea is to analyze more empirically how public reason is “accomplished” by the state. What is it that states do so as to appear reasonable to the public? As Jasanoff goes on to explain, there are many possible features of this kind of analysis:

Reasoning comprises the institutional practices, discourses, techniques and instruments through which modern governments claim legitimiacy in an era of limitless risks – physical , political, and moral. Included here as well is an inquiry into the background conditions that lead citizens of democratic states to accept policy justification as being reasonable. (i.e. “civic epistemologies”).

In short, the achievement of seeming “reasonable” can and does involve recruitment and engagement of a variety of practices and resources; it also depends on the expectations of those publics who are the audience receiving these performances of reasonableness (communication involves both a “pitch” and a “catch”). When it comes to the expectations of public, Jasanoff invokes her concept of civic epistemologies, which she characterizes further later on in the piece:

Just as cultures have routines and scripts … that assign meanings to actions, … so political cultures are acharacterized by relatively stable “civic epistemologies” … that comprise preferred modes of producing public knowledge and conducting policy deliberation.

A few things that jump out to me about Jasanoff’s approach in the context of my current project:

First, Jasanoff seems to frame public reason as mainly something that the state does with the goal of legitimizing itself and its governing decisions to a questioning public. Public reason does not seem to be something that is done by citizens or groups qua members of the public. The public is framed as recipient, audience of the performance of public reason, and ultimate determinant of its successful achievement. I am not sure if this is a typical way of framing the issue. Where is the role of deliberative processes and reasoning amongst citizens in this framing?

Second, there’s a particular prioritization of national political cultures and epistemologies, with transnational comparative analysis providing the entrypoint into revealing the contingency of these things (which are otherwise easy to naturalize). While I am sympathetic to this approach methodologically and don’t particularly disagree that there exist national-level epistemic cultures, a focus on the national level also risks obscuring or ignoring the epistemic pluralism that exists within nations and even particular expert communities in some cases. Jasanoff’s focus on the national level is presumably related to the above framing that centers analysis of the state as purveyor of “reasonableness”, since states obviously operate at the national level.

Unintended Consequences, Uncerainty and Public Reason

A second idea that sticks with me from this piece is Jasanoff’s high-level analysis of the problem that public reason “solves” for Western democracies in the second half of the twentieth century. The basic idea is that by that point in history, there is a general recognition that the Enlightment idealism about science and technology (and technocratic goverance) is not as durable and reliable as it initially might have seemed. Jasanoff cites the emergence of various technologically-mediated disasters and scientific failures in bringing about this anxiety about S&T as reliable tools of technocratic governance:

Technology in operation proved far mor unruly (Wynne 1988), more error prone, less predictable, and less easily transferable across geopolitical boundaries than optimiststs had proclaimed. Increasingly, technological systems seemed to develop lives of their own, overflowing the pilots, models, and field tests that had once justified them (Callon et al. 2009).

These failures raise important questions: “who is at fault, who should have known, who was responsible, who should be compenated?”. Jasanoff then identifies two (limited) ways that states attempted to manage this crisis of reliability:

Through denial and claims of “unintended consequences”.
Through rational calculation and “risk management” exercises.

For J, neither of these methods were perfect or wholly effective. Renegotiation of “public reason” is framed as another pathway to reconciling this relationship between the state, S&T and the public.

Civic Epistemologies and Political Cultures

Coming back to the idea of civic epistemologies, I am reminded of E’s metaphor of traveling to other countries as a way of being exposed to different cultural attitudes. If the goal of a deliberative process is to simulate this kind of epistemic “travel”, what might it involve? Continuing with the travel metaphor, there’s a real sense in the case of travel that first-hand experience is a different kind of thing than, say, understanding conceptually or reading about what it’s like to be somewhere else. I also think about the role of media like fiction and cinema in “simulating” this aspect of travel. E.g. some random pithy quotations on this theme:

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” (Jhumpa Lahiri)

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” (George R.R. Martin)

In both of these cases, the implication is that fiction books and media offer an experiential kind of knowing.

Summary

In general, while I think this piece is interesting and useful, I don’t know if it is the most helpful for the purposes of framing this project, aside in very general methodological terms. Reading this made me feel like I need to read more about the theory of deliberative democracy; some of the references above might be helpful on that front.

A Roll of Photos

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up an old camera on Facebook marketplace. Here are a few photos from my first roll, taken on walks round Cambridge, mostly during and around a big snowstorm we had. The turkeys, of course, are a big interest for me. I enjoy how boldly they inhabit public spaces around Cambridge that were not designed for them. A snowstorm places a premium on the use of public space for humans and turkeys alike. Sidewalks, parking spaces, bike lanes all must be manually kept clear. The margins are contracted, their inhabitants forced into the core.

For my own future reference, these photos were taken with Kodak Ultramax 400 on my Canon Sure Shot, developed at Hunts, then scanned and touched up in Lightroom. There’s lots to learn about all of these steps. The Lightroom tuning was especially new and interesting to me. For a few of these photos I found the adaptive “subject” presets helpful to draw the turkeys away from the background a bit.

How Do We Know What We Know? (Workshop Series)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am participating in a digital workshop series titled How Do We Know What We Know? Integration, Translation, and “Right Relationship” Across Ways of Knowing in Civic & Tech Systems. It’s an interesting set of themes for sure. In this post I will keep track of some notes and ideas as they come up for me in the series.

Bridging between ways of knowing

Session one was about the Rights of Nature movement; it featured a presentation and some discussion.

Early on in the session, the organizers offered this prompt for reflection and discussion:

Have you ever had to translate or bridge between different ways of knowing, cultures, or institutions? What felt challenging, or meaningful, about that experience?

What came to mind for me on this prompt was my efforts during the PhD at bridging and translating back and forth across academic fields with very different perspectives and epistemologies. A few things that occured about the difficulty of this:

The question of where I am grounded as a translator. Where am I positioned and coming from? Am “from” group A, translating for group B, or the reverse? Do I think of myself as somehow sitting outside of both groups? How does that work? Or maybe I think of myself as part of both groups or perspectives instead, even if that entails apparently incoherent commitments or identities. I think there is a tight connection between translation, accessing different ways of knowing, and one’s relationship to coherence and hybridity. I wrote about this a bit in the context of Donna Haraway’s work here. It’s hard to really inhabit different ways of seeing if one insists on (intellectual) coherence. How might we re-position our emotional and intellectual attitudes towards the value of “coherence”, and what might we gain from that?
It takes a long time to really assimilate different ways of knowing, especially if they are different in meaningful ways. It is a paradigm-shift kind of thing – more similar to religious conversion than intellectual comprehension. Epistemic frames are encompassing and internally coherent; frame B will almost definitionally “not make sense” if approached from frame A. This underscores the importance of the kind of “unlearning” or space-clearing that the organizers mentioned in the setup discussion. But it’s often not something that happens overnight, and it may require extended periods of engagement with an approach that seems to obviously “not make sense” from the existing perspectives you are starting with. It would be interesting to think and learn more about religious and conversion experiences. I was remembering some of the discussion in James’ The Varieties of Religious Experiences, I think.

Notes on the Rights of Nature

I also captured a few more general notes and reflections on the “Rights of Nature” movement in general. Overall, it is not a perspective that I know a ton about in its applied forms, so it was interesting to hear more about. It seems to have an interesting and perhaps unsual theory of change as legal/policy interventions go. While it does have some practical dimension (e.g. offering new legal surfaces for advocates to bring suits), a big part of the goal seems to be more subjective / cultural. The idea is to reposition how people think about and relate to natural objects. The main goal is especially to help people think about natural objects as subjects rather than objects. The law is one site where we construct and culturally-enshrine subjectivity and agency, so I get the logic of pursuing change on the legal/policy front.

More conceptually, I find these themes interesting. They have strong STS resonances, especially in the Latour / Callon / Actor-Network Theory (ANT) vein of literature, which particularly emphasizes this kind of “symmetric” treatment of human- and non-human actors. I thought of this video of Latour discussing his “Parliament of Things” experiment, which is tightly connected to the Rights of Nature idea. I also thought of this influential paper from Callon which is a striking read.

Touching on the STS connections here also raises a conceptual question I was interested to have more discussion of in the session: namely, the crucial question of “translation”. Translation is part of the subtitle of the workshop series and is a heavy point of emphasis in the STS literature on these themes. Callon’s paper for example, is titled “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, and is structured explicitly around different modes and moments of translation, and how actors (attempt to) enact and stabilize them (see the paper’s abstract for a summary).

Of course, it makes lots of sense to foreground “translation” when we think about different ways of knowing, seeing, and relating. When we talk about the voice of nature specifically, there is an obvious and foundational set of questions: if nature is to have a voice, who gets to articulate this voice, how, and on what terms? Who knows what is best for nature, and why?

Someone asked a version of this question in the discussion session. The response was roughly to recenter the political goals of these Rights of Nature policies. The goal is to change people’s perspective – encourage them to put themselves “in the shoes” of natural objects. These legal frameworks are “not perfect”, but still point us in the right direction politically, presenting legal surfaces for new sorts of challenges, and encouraging broader conceptual reframing.

I think that STS analyses tend to take a different approach to these sorts of questions. Rather than take an explicit stand in the political contestation about who gets to “speak for” this or that natural object, STS analyses instead step back and seek to analyze these processes of contestation and translation themselves as the object of study. How is it that different actors (e.g. scientists, policy advocates, indigenous voices) seek to position themselves as voice of nature? What conceptual, material, political resources are recruited in these processes? Why are or are not they received as “legitimate” or “objective” or “fair” by insitutions or publics?

In general, I think that this is something to keep an eye on in this workshop series in the future. Is the goal here to amplify some set of relatively-marginalized epistemic perspectives, and likewise dislodge more hegemonic ones? Or is it to do something more like the STS analysis: trying to more deeply understand the processes and resources through which different forms of “knowledge” are produced, legitimized, entrenched etc? Of course, these two sets of questions are related, and the answer could be some version of “both”; however, in practice I’ve noticed that these perspectives tend to yield fairly different kinds of conversations and insights.

Snow

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your browser does not support the video tag.

There was a big snow today. Outside my window I can see just these patterns of the snow swirling, sometimes “falling” but other times wooshing in different directions. The above is based on a video, processed with code to try to emphasize this flow and tumble. The sound is artificial, but something like wind. Best watched full screen.