Lunch seminar with Ruth Breeze

Forging new relationships between people and lawmakers? Petitions to parliament from the Scottish and Welsh Parliament.

This paper examines the innovative systems of public petitioning established by the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments to foster public engagement with the newly devolved Powers. Using the framework of interpersonality, I examine the relations envisaged between lawmakers, citizens and other social actors as conceptualised in the guides, and explore how citizens themselves understand the limits and possibilities of this affordance, using a sample of petitions submitted to each institution. In my comparison, I find that the Scottish model currently holds greater potential for the promotion of civic consciousness within the new, devolved public sphere. Interestingly, the Scottish petitioners themselves are more likely to appeal to the public or public interest as a motivating factor, suggesting that this system encourages petitioners to develop a more sophisticated awareness of community values, moving towards the common good.

Speaker bio

Ruth Breeze is Full Professor of English at the University of Navarra, Spain, and PI of the Public Discourse Research Group in the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad. Her most recent books are Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy (with Andreas Musolff, Bloomsbury, 2022), Teaching English Medium Instruction Courses in Higher Education (with Carmen Sancho Guinda, Bloomsbury, 2021), and Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist Discourses across the Political Spectrum (with Jan Zienkowski, John Benjamins, 2019).

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https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/66005126328?pwd=ldiieviNeSkeeQBS37b994uZ4rfJoa.1

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