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Consistent with studies on inclusive management, this paper adopts the concept of "boundary object" and therefore an emergent approach to explain the collaboration of heterogeneous social actors in public deliberation. My long-term participant observation of the consensus conferences in Taiwan from 2002 through 2005 in general and the transcript of a national consensus conference on prenatal examination in 2005 in particular form the data sources. The identification of a series of boundary objects in the consensus conferences led me to conclude that, on the one hand, the consensus conference is a boundary infrastructure that fosters the establishment of a community of participation and thereby facilitates diverse parties' deliberation on sensitive issues. On the other hand, whereas a newly formed collective identity is emerging in public deliberation, boundary tensions and the differences between diverse social actors are managed and halted temporarily instead of eliminated permanently by boundary objects. That is, collaboration in public deliberation is always an achievement "in the making" by all parties.

AbstractNational‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. 'Converts' usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the 'awakening' plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous 'wrong' self and a current 'correct' self is mentioned, and the 'awakening' is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have 'a self in the making' which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that 'awakeners' usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the 'grand' awakening ('Awakening'). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015

AbstractAgreeing with the constructivist approach to nationalism, this article argues that the prevailing ambiguous attitude towards nationality among people in Taiwan is a reflection of different waves of nation‐building − each led people to imagine a distinct nation − and the mixture of these waves during past decades. Whereas all nations are artificially imagined, 'the style in which they are imagined' should be examined. This article aims to distinguish three waves of nation‐building in Taiwan after 1949 and address the issue of superimposition of contradictory elements in producing nation‐ness to highlight that nation‐building is a path‐dependent process. Three suppositions can be derived from the investigation of Taiwan's case. First, people are not empty vessels and the new national imagination has to compete and coexist with vestiges and crystallizations of former imaginations. Second, the content of a single nation‐building programme may be reinvented according to the external and/or internal environment. Third, depending on the social atmosphere, official nationalism may adopt a different method to instil the national imagination.

Consistent with studies on inclusive management, this paper adopts the concept of "boundary object" and therefore an emergent approach to explain the collaboration of heterogeneous social actors in public deliberation. My long-term participant observation of the consensus conferences in Taiwan from 2002 through 2005 in general and the transcript of a national consensus conference on prenatal examination in 2005 in particular form the data sources. The identification of a series of boundary objects in the consensus conferences led me to conclude that, on the one hand, the consensus conference is a boundary infrastructure that fosters the establishment of a community of participation and thereby facilitates diverse parties' deliberation on sensitive issues. On the other hand, whereas a newly formed collective identity is emerging in public deliberation, boundary tensions and the differences between diverse social actors are managed and halted temporarily instead of eliminated permanently by boundary objects. That is, collaboration in public deliberation is always an achievement "in the making" by all parties.

This article brings the aspect of collective memories (and thus identity) back "in" to facilitate our understanding of the intriguing relationship among memories, places, and deliberative projects. While we observe that the memories of a place assign meanings to it and thereby not only imbue a "sense of place" to local members but also influence the process of deliberation, we claim that the process of deliberation can serve as a place-(re)making opportunity in a bottom-up way. Taking an experimental participatory budgeting (PB) program in Taiwan as an example, we find that collective memories play a role to influence what projects are proposed, what projects win the voting, and how people react to winning projects. In the case of South-Peak, on one hand, the winning projects echo aspects of prevailing commemorative narratives; on the other, the voting results further confirm, connect, and align the local collective memories. That is, a self-reinforcing process occurs. Additionally, we discuss how prevailing memories may change due to significant events so the meanings assigned to a specific place may thus change accordingly. Nevertheless, this is not to say that PB can only be conducted in places of strong memories and thus where a sense of place exists; since the deliberation process itself acts as a place-(re)making chance, we can expect PB to encourage the emergence and/or refreshment of collectivity during its own process.