Focusing Interests: Sample response from John Forester
Here is one way that Professor John Forester has answered the "Focusing Your Interests" questions.
1. What are the elements of practice that interest me? What do I want to find out about the challenges and types of actual work in this field?
I am interested in how planners deal with the challenges of citizen participation. Specifically, I want to know about their work as an “in-between” mediator, how they work with multiple stakeholders who want different things, how they maintain confidences. I also want to know how they deal with the inequality of resources, information, training, and so on and yet still get something done that is good for many, not just for the powerful.
2. If I am interested in X, what kinds of things might I be looking for?
Given these interests, I look for the ways that planners pay attention to who is at the table and who isn’t. I look for how they share information with people, especially those less “in the loop,” what they do with different groups to strengthen those in a weaker position, and how they structure public processes to deal with problems of domination by some groups or individuals; etc. I also look for how they handle the different emotional aspects of the conflict and how they have the confidence to feel that they can get something done in a challenging situation.
3. Ask yourself: What are my hunches about what I might find?
I have a hunch that planners often play “in-between” roles, mediating all the time, even though they don’t necessarily think of themselves as “mediators.” I also think that planners have a large repertoire, many different ways of responding to imbalances of power.
4. What kinds of questions do I have after reading discussions in the literature? What questions do they leave me with? What hunches do they lead me to have that I can explore further by looking at a real practice situation?
The literature doesn’t talk well about “impartiality.” Planning theory tends to suggest that practitioners are either “neutral” or “biased.” I believe that the situation is much more complicated that that, and that practitioners use many different approaches to maintain trust without “neutrality.” I want to draw from practice to deepen our theoretical understandings of this work. Further, the academic literature tends to avoid issues of emotion, so I am particularly interested in learning more about that.