“Activism in paradise”: A critical discourse analysis of a public
Tracking number
relations campaign against genetic engineering.
ICA-15-10063
20
GE Free campaign used websites to organize - (networking, strategy co-ordination, and
training) allowing the generation of mass responses to events and policies, as well as using
email, telephone, and public meetings to organize public participation. Websites, as well as
public meetings and mass media, were used to inform - to communicate knowledge about
genetic modification - empowering publics as citizens to contest public policy. Websites were
also used to reposition the discourse both economically and politically - providing counter
information from academic sources.
Websites possibly play some role in creating a public sphere for dialogue about genetic
modification; although, there is much debate about whether websites themselves provide for
the two-way communication necessary for the creation of a Habermasian public sphere
(Lewis, 2000; Taylor, Kent & White, 2001; Weaver, 2002). In this campaign, the actions
taken by publics could be said to represent their participation in the debate; there was
certainly some opportunity created for dialogue in the sense that Heath (1997) refers to this in
the creation of zones of meaning. This may represent a move towards a democracy similar to
a conceptualization of “deliberative democracy” (Benhabib, 1996; Habermas, 1996; Mouffe,
1996). However, this campaign dialogue was a response to the Royal Commission and was
not formally sanctioned or regulated, in the sense that Habermas (1996) intended:
[D]eliberative politics should be conceived as a syndrome that depends on a network of fairly
regulated bargaining processes and of various forms of argumentation, including pragmatic,
ethical, and moral discourses, each of which relies on different communicative
presuppositions and procedures. (p. 25)
It is uncertain which identity for New Zealand will prevail. Industry and the technical
sciences argue from a position of power, with a resource-base legitimized by normalized
Convention