Material Trajectories: How Issues Come to Matter in a Citizen Conference

It is widely assumed that the key component of public engagement with science is deliberation. However, determining concrete political recommendations for a given issue is a complex process throughout which several processes of translation occur, not all having to do with the discursive realm. This article supposes experimentation focused on putting materiality into the fore in the making of policy recommendations in an empirical case: the Barcelona ICT Citizen Conference for Older People. The resulting ethnographic collaboration allowed the authors to report the process of production of a recommendation document. The precarious translation trajectory by which concerns-and proposals for addressing those concerns-emerged is detailed herein. Finally, this chapter shows how different assemblages (consisting not only of humans) are needed to sustain the viability of a specific issue: the concern regarding electromagnetic waves. We ultimately aim to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things. However, rather than proposing a general analogy to life, we suggest that close attention must still be paid to the specific matter at hand.