ABSTRACT
The knowledge frameworks that constitute the structures of our political institutions are situated interactional achievements. The participants to public meetings within a participatory democracy project identify, claim and eventually solve emerging problems of hearing, understanding, speaking and accepting public speech as a means to establish shared knowledge and to manage institutional agendas. By using repair practices to negotiate their respective rights to access, and obligations to share (“acceptable” and “adequate”) information, for all practical purposes, they establish that the situated production of shared knowledge is politically relevant. Interactional repair is significant for our understanding of the participants’ understanding of “knowing” and “understanding” as practical and normative issues. The participants’ use of repair practices shows that the formal properties of action have implications for how we can understand situated political action and its moral orders.
