Research Impact

Research in Deliberation impacts UK Citizen Engagement

Professor Erik Schneiderhan studies the ways diverse groups make decisions by engaging with each other through deliberation. He and his collaborator Shamus Khan (Columbia University), along with U of T graduate students Athena Engman and Jennifer Elrick and UTM undergraduate Ayah Barakat, have recently brought their research in deliberation to the UK, where the Runnymede Trust put their findings into practice in multi-ethnic deliberative assemblies. This January a group of black and minority ethnic Britons came together on issues of financial inclusion.  Many people in the UK, particularly older black and minority ethnic people, are excluded from essential financial goods and services.  They are unable to open bank accounts, obtain affordable loans, or receive good financial planning advice. Black and minority ethnic people in the UK have relatively low savings and hold few assets.  To try and better understand why this is the case, Professors Schneiderhan and Khan, along with their Research Assistants, facilitated an all-day deliberative assembly with fifty BME pensioners. The research team also spent a day training Runnymede Trust staff on the theory and practice of running their own deliberative assemblies across the UK.  View a short video about this work.