Abstract

This article provides a narrative review on the concept of dialogue within STS and Deliberative Democracy academic literature. Through this review I find that dialogue has been used in unsystematic, conflicting and sometimes even misleading ways that conflate dialogue and deliberation. Dialogue is used flexibly as an epistemological standpoint, an interactional format, a tradition and format of public engagement, an interactional phenomenon and an idealised moment. I provide a characterisation and theorisation of dialogue that seeks to integrate critical and historical accounts of dialogue, while introducing analytical dimensions that can be leveraged for further research. By bridging STS and Deliberative Democracy, I advance a definition of dialogue as a public technology.