Hans Asenbaum
Biographic Data
| ID | 284998 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hans Asenbaum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hans |
| FAMILY NAME | Asenbaum |
| SIGNATURE | ASENBAUM H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canberra |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9780-9735 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The trajectory of democratic innovations in Australia: Between democratic creativity and institutional stubbornness
This article examines the divergent trajectories of democratic innovations in Australia and contextualises the institutional constraints on efforts to revise and improve traditional mechanisms of political participation and decision-making. Adopting a broad definition of democratic innovations as interfaces between citizens and government designed to enhance citizen participation, it distinguishes between two main types: electoral (vote-centric) …
Populism and Queer Masculinities: Hegemony, Hybridity, and Fake Subversion
Current research conceptualizes the gender performance of populist leaders in terms of toxic hypermasculinity expressed through their sexist, misogynist, and transphobic rhetoric. This article challenges and complicates this perspective. As hegemonic masculinities, which formerly gained their power through their invisibility, are increasingly contested, they engage in a strategic hybridization by borrowing aesthetic elements from marginalized ide…
More-than-human research: Being with as onto-epistemological method
The increasing recognition of human entanglement with nonhuman agents, including animals, plants, natural entities, artefacts, and digital technologies, calls for new methodological approaches in qualitative research. This research note introduces being with as a research method. Inspired by Indigenous epistemologies and multispecies ethnography, being with entails a meditative state that opens up spaces for the perception of nonhuman presence. I…
The self and the other in democracy: Exploring the opposite of identity through the politics of becoming
Objects as Participants in the Democratic Assemblage: A Playful Exploration of the Affective Materiality of Junk
Objects, their material affordances, and agentic potentials are neglected by research on democratic participation. This article draws on new materialist assemblage theory to make sense of objects in participatory settings and explores the claim that objects may act as participants. It conceptualises participatory processes, commonly framed as democratic innovations, as democratic assemblages, which draws attention to the affective role of nonhuma…
Democratic Assemblage: Power, Normativity, and Responsibility in More-than-Human Participation
Over the past two decades, the scholarly community interested in participatory and deliberative democracy has focused their attention on democratic innovations. Designs such as participatory budgets and citizens assemblies have been conceptualised as the actualisation of democratic ideals in a micro setting, in relative isolation from each other and the wider society (Bussu et al. 2022). In recent years the attention of democracy scholarship turn…
A multiperspectival approach to democratic theory: Five lessons for democratic innovations
Deliberative democratic theory and the practice of deliberative minipublics currently hold a dominant position within the study of democratic innovations. This one-dimensional view inhibits learning from other perspectives in democratic theory. Responding to the post-model debate in democratic theory, the article argues for a multiperspectival approach that combines the normative grounding provided by models with diversity and innovation. Through…
Participatory democracy and participatory research
While normative theories of participatory democracy and practical experiences of participatory research share a common democratic commitment, the two fields have emerged and to date exist in isolation from each other. This article bridges this divide and asks what participatory democracy and participatory research can learn from one another. It argues that participatory democracy can learn how to realize its own democratic ideals within its resea…
Radical Pluralization: Mobilizing the Multiple Self in Democratic Engagements
Decolonizing deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy advances an emancipatory project of inclusion, equality, and freedom. Yet these ideals have been produced within a context structured by colonial power. This article argues that if deliberative democracy is to unfold its full democratic potential, it needs to face its colonial legacies and position a decolonizing ethos at its center. The article proposes a framework consisting of six moves toward decolonizing deliberative d…
Democratic Self-transformations: Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming
Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but …
The Politics of Becoming: Introduction to the Symposium
Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy
The Politics of Presence Revisited
Almost three decades after its first publication, Anne Phillips reflects on the Politics of Presence in the context of contemporary developments from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Granting the importance of a contingent and intersectional understanding of presence, she reemphasizes the necessity of descriptive representation. Phillips reflects on questions of anonymity, essentialism, the multiple self, unconditional equality, and the current role…
A Democratic Theory of Life: Living Democracy with Black Lives Matter
In response to its current crisis, scholars call for the revitalisation of democracy through democratic innovations. While they make ample use of life metaphors describing democracy as a living organism, no comprehensive understanding of ‘life’ has been established within democratic theory. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement articulates the urgency of refocusing on life and its meaning through radical democratic practice. This article employs …
The nonhuman condition: Radical democracy through new materialist lenses
This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? In our introd…
Whiteness, masculinities and radical democracy: Mapping Four Spaces of (Dis)appearance
Radical democratic theory conceptualizes public visibility as empowering. In particular, feminist democratic theorists propose a politics of presence through identity politics, according to which it is the visibility of the marginalized body that in itself articulates a political claim for inclusion. Today, a new subject enters the space of appearance: the white, cisgender, heterosexual man claims recognition through embodied identity performance…
Researching Deliberative Democracy: Methods and Approaches
Research on deliberative democracy has been flourishing over the past decades. We now know more about the conditions that enable or hinder inclusive and consequential deliberation, and how different actors, such as politicians, activists, and citizens, perceive and experience deliberative practices. Yet there are still many unknowns that drive research in deliberative democracy, especially as the field continues to develop in new directions and s…
Democratic Theorizing
This chapter presents democratic theorizing as a participatory approach to developing democratic theory. Democratic theorizing is inspired by the deliberative values of inclusion, diversity, listening, and transparency. In contrast to established approaches to theorizing democracy, democratic theorizing includes human and nonhuman research participants in the theorizing process. Bringing together insights from grounded theory, participatory resea…
Copyright Page
Performing Democracy: Non-verbal protest through a democratic lens
Contemporary protests draw on a rich variety of performances to communicate their messages, attract attention to societal problems and display potential solutions. In addition to verbal and textual expressions, protesters employ various forms of nonverbal expression, such as images, sounds, silence as part of their public performances. This article offers a way of making sense of nonverbal protest performances, relying on insights from contempora…
Beyond Deliberative Systems: Pluralizing the Debate
Normative democratic theory with a focus on civic engagement is increasingly interested in how participatory instances connect into democratic systems (Dean, Rinne, et al. 2019; Elstub et al. 2018). The deliberative perspective has pioneered this debate and proposes a systemic view that observes how everyday talk and media discourses connect deliberative forums including parliaments, mini-publics, and protest formations (Mansbridge 1999; Mansbrid…
Rethinking Democratic Innovations: A Look through the Kaleidoscope of Democratic Theory
The study of democratic innovations has long been situated in the deliberative paradigm. Today, however, a new scholarly generation conceptualizes democratic innovations from various theoretical angles. This article reviews participatory, agonistic and transformative accounts of democratic innovations. This multiperspectival analysis presents democratic innovations in a new light. The term changes its meaning, going beyond institutions designed b…
More than Words: A Multidimensional Approach to Deliberative Democracy
Since its inception, a core aspiration of deliberative democracy has been to enable more and better inclusion within democratic politics. In this article, we argue that deliberative democracy can achieve this aspiration only if it goes beyond verbal forms of communication and acknowledges the crucial role of non-verbal communication in expressing and exchanging arguments. The article develops a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy …
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Doing Democratic Theory Democratically
Over centuries, democratic theory has developed emancipatory ideals of inclusion, agency and transparency. These ideals, however, have scarcely been applied to the process of theorizing itself. Democratic theory is a product of the academic ivory tower. This article sets out to confront this problem and formulates democratic theorizing as an alternative to established approaches to theorizing democracy. It does so by conceptualizing democratic th…
Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere
Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies-not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti-it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawin…
More than Words: A Multidimensional Approach to Deliberative Democracy
Since its inception, a core aspiration of deliberative democracy has been to enable more and better inclusion within democratic politics. In this article, we argue that deliberative democracy can achieve this aspiration only if it goes beyond verbal forms of communication and acknowledges the crucial role of non-verbal communication in expressing and exchanging arguments. The article develops a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy …
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Rethinking Democratic Innovations: A Look through the Kaleidoscope of Democratic Theory
The study of democratic innovations has long been situated in the deliberative paradigm. Today, however, a new scholarly generation conceptualizes democratic innovations from various theoretical angles. This article reviews participatory, agonistic and transformative accounts of democratic innovations. This multiperspectival analysis presents democratic innovations in a new light. The term changes its meaning, going beyond institutions designed b…
(De)futuring democracy: Labs, playgrounds, and ateliers as democratic innovations
New laboratory formats worldwide, including policy labs, innovation labs, and living labs, invite political engagement of multiple stakeholders. Although this format shares the basic characteristics with democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies, it has yet to be acknowledged by this field of study. This article fills this gap. It finds that labs are torn between the logic of democratic agency and technocratic control, and argues that t…
A multiperspectival approach to democratic theory: Five lessons for democratic innovations
Deliberative democratic theory and the practice of deliberative minipublics currently hold a dominant position within the study of democratic innovations. This one-dimensional view inhibits learning from other perspectives in democratic theory. Responding to the post-model debate in democratic theory, the article argues for a multiperspectival approach that combines the normative grounding provided by models with diversity and innovation. Through…
Rethinking Digital Democracy: From the Disembodied Discursive Self to New Materialist Corporealities
To understand what digital democracy is, this article suggests looking at the individual level of democratic subjectivity. Who is the democratic subject and how is it constituted in digital democracy? It revisits the poststructuralist-inspired debate about cyberdemocracy in the 1990s, which conceptualized the democratic subject as disembodied discursive self, reifying through textuality in cyberspace. In contrast, current debates on new materiali…
Doing Democratic Theory Democratically
Over centuries, democratic theory has developed emancipatory ideals of inclusion, agency and transparency. These ideals, however, have scarcely been applied to the process of theorizing itself. Democratic theory is a product of the academic ivory tower. This article sets out to confront this problem and formulates democratic theorizing as an alternative to established approaches to theorizing democracy. It does so by conceptualizing democratic th…
The politics of becoming: Disidentification as radical democratic practice
Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens' engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and i…
Making a Difference: Toward a Feminist Democratic Theory in the Digital Age
This essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by power asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. It revisits debates of difference democracy of the 1990s, which promoted inclusion through a politics of presence of marginalized social groups. This strategy inevitably entails essentializing tendencies, confining the democratic subject within its physically embodied identi…
Cyborg activism: Exploring the reconfigurations of democratic subjectivity in Anonymous
This article develops the concept of cyborg activism as novel configuration of democratic subjectivity in the Information Age by exploring the online collectivity Anonymous as a prototype. By fusing elements of human/machine and organic/digital, the cyborg disrupts modern logics of binary thinking. Cyborg activism emerges as the reconfiguration of equality/hierarchy, reason/emotion and nihilism/idealism. Anonymous demonstrates how through the use…
The nonhuman condition: Radical democracy through new materialist lenses
This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? In our introd…
Beyond Deliberative Systems: Pluralizing the Debate
Normative democratic theory with a focus on civic engagement is increasingly interested in how participatory instances connect into democratic systems (Dean, Rinne, et al. 2019; Elstub et al. 2018). The deliberative perspective has pioneered this debate and proposes a systemic view that observes how everyday talk and media discourses connect deliberative forums including parliaments, mini-publics, and protest formations (Mansbridge 1999; Mansbrid…
The Marginalized Democracies of the World
This introductory article to Democratic Theory' s special issue on the marginalized democracies of the world begins by presenting the lexical method for understanding democracy. It is argued that the lexical method is better than the normative and analytical methods at finding democracies in the world. The argument then turns to demonstrating, mainly through computational research conducted within the Google Books catalog, that an empirically dem…
What Is Democratic Theory
What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently posed. Indeed, the last time this precise question appears in the academic archive was exactly forty years ago, in James Alfred Pennock's (1979) book Democratic Political Theory. This is an odd discursive silence not observable in other closely aligned fields of thought such as political theory, political science, social theory, philosophy, economic theory, and public policy/adm…
Participatory democracy and participatory research
While normative theories of participatory democracy and practical experiences of participatory research share a common democratic commitment, the two fields have emerged and to date exist in isolation from each other. This article bridges this divide and asks what participatory democracy and participatory research can learn from one another. It argues that participatory democracy can learn how to realize its own democratic ideals within its resea…
Democratic Assemblage: Power, Normativity, and Responsibility in More-than-Human Participation
Over the past two decades, the scholarly community interested in participatory and deliberative democracy has focused their attention on democratic innovations. Designs such as participatory budgets and citizens assemblies have been conceptualised as the actualisation of democratic ideals in a micro setting, in relative isolation from each other and the wider society (Bussu et al. 2022). In recent years the attention of democracy scholarship turn…
Decolonizing deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy advances an emancipatory project of inclusion, equality, and freedom. Yet these ideals have been produced within a context structured by colonial power. This article argues that if deliberative democracy is to unfold its full democratic potential, it needs to face its colonial legacies and position a decolonizing ethos at its center. The article proposes a framework consisting of six moves toward decolonizing deliberative d…
A Democratic Theory of Life: Living Democracy with Black Lives Matter
In response to its current crisis, scholars call for the revitalisation of democracy through democratic innovations. While they make ample use of life metaphors describing democracy as a living organism, no comprehensive understanding of ‘life’ has been established within democratic theory. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement articulates the urgency of refocusing on life and its meaning through radical democratic practice. This article employs …
Whiteness, masculinities and radical democracy: Mapping Four Spaces of (Dis)appearance
Radical democratic theory conceptualizes public visibility as empowering. In particular, feminist democratic theorists propose a politics of presence through identity politics, according to which it is the visibility of the marginalized body that in itself articulates a political claim for inclusion. Today, a new subject enters the space of appearance: the white, cisgender, heterosexual man claims recognition through embodied identity performance…
The self and the other in democracy: Exploring the opposite of identity through the politics of becoming
Democratic Self-transformations: Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming
Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but …
Facilitating Inclusion: Austrian Wisdom Councils as Democratic Innovation between Consensus and Diversity
Democratic innovations face the challenge of realizing deliberative democratic ideals in the context of structural inequality. Consensus decision making and expertise have been said to have exclusive effects on marginalized groups like women and ethnic and sexual minorities, which obstructs diversity. Wisdom Councils as practiced in Austria attempt to counter inequalities by including marginalized groups through the moderation technique dynamic f…
Osteuropa transformiert: Sozialismus, Demokratie und Utopie
Osteuropa transformiert: Sozialismus, Demokratie und Utopie
Cyborg activism: Exploring the reconfigurations of democratic subjectivity in Anonymous
This article develops the concept of cyborg activism as novel configuration of democratic subjectivity in the Information Age by exploring the online collectivity Anonymous as a prototype. By fusing elements of human/machine and organic/digital, the cyborg disrupts modern logics of binary thinking. Cyborg activism emerges as the reconfiguration of equality/hierarchy, reason/emotion and nihilism/idealism. Anonymous demonstrates how through the use…
Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere
Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies-not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti-it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawin…
What Is Democratic Theory
What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently posed. Indeed, the last time this precise question appears in the academic archive was exactly forty years ago, in James Alfred Pennock's (1979) book Democratic Political Theory. This is an odd discursive silence not observable in other closely aligned fields of thought such as political theory, political science, social theory, philosophy, economic theory, and public policy/adm…
Rethinking Digital Democracy: From the Disembodied Discursive Self to New Materialist Corporealities
To understand what digital democracy is, this article suggests looking at the individual level of democratic subjectivity. Who is the democratic subject and how is it constituted in digital democracy? It revisits the poststructuralist-inspired debate about cyberdemocracy in the 1990s, which conceptualized the democratic subject as disembodied discursive self, reifying through textuality in cyberspace. In contrast, current debates on new materiali…
Making a Difference: Toward a Feminist Democratic Theory in the Digital Age
This essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by power asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. It revisits debates of difference democracy of the 1990s, which promoted inclusion through a politics of presence of marginalized social groups. This strategy inevitably entails essentializing tendencies, confining the democratic subject within its physically embodied identi…
The Marginalized Democracies of the World
This introductory article to Democratic Theory' s special issue on the marginalized democracies of the world begins by presenting the lexical method for understanding democracy. It is argued that the lexical method is better than the normative and analytical methods at finding democracies in the world. The argument then turns to demonstrating, mainly through computational research conducted within the Google Books catalog, that an empirically dem…
(De)futuring democracy: Labs, playgrounds, and ateliers as democratic innovations
New laboratory formats worldwide, including policy labs, innovation labs, and living labs, invite political engagement of multiple stakeholders. Although this format shares the basic characteristics with democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies, it has yet to be acknowledged by this field of study. This article fills this gap. It finds that labs are torn between the logic of democratic agency and technocratic control, and argues that t…
The politics of becoming: Disidentification as radical democratic practice
Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens' engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and i…
Researching Deliberative Democracy: Methods and Approaches
Research on deliberative democracy has been flourishing over the past decades. We now know more about the conditions that enable or hinder inclusive and consequential deliberation, and how different actors, such as politicians, activists, and citizens, perceive and experience deliberative practices. Yet there are still many unknowns that drive research in deliberative democracy, especially as the field continues to develop in new directions and s…
Democratic Theorizing
This chapter presents democratic theorizing as a participatory approach to developing democratic theory. Democratic theorizing is inspired by the deliberative values of inclusion, diversity, listening, and transparency. In contrast to established approaches to theorizing democracy, democratic theorizing includes human and nonhuman research participants in the theorizing process. Bringing together insights from grounded theory, participatory resea…
Copyright Page
Performing Democracy: Non-verbal protest through a democratic lens
Contemporary protests draw on a rich variety of performances to communicate their messages, attract attention to societal problems and display potential solutions. In addition to verbal and textual expressions, protesters employ various forms of nonverbal expression, such as images, sounds, silence as part of their public performances. This article offers a way of making sense of nonverbal protest performances, relying on insights from contempora…
Beyond Deliberative Systems: Pluralizing the Debate
Normative democratic theory with a focus on civic engagement is increasingly interested in how participatory instances connect into democratic systems (Dean, Rinne, et al. 2019; Elstub et al. 2018). The deliberative perspective has pioneered this debate and proposes a systemic view that observes how everyday talk and media discourses connect deliberative forums including parliaments, mini-publics, and protest formations (Mansbridge 1999; Mansbrid…
Rethinking Democratic Innovations: A Look through the Kaleidoscope of Democratic Theory
The study of democratic innovations has long been situated in the deliberative paradigm. Today, however, a new scholarly generation conceptualizes democratic innovations from various theoretical angles. This article reviews participatory, agonistic and transformative accounts of democratic innovations. This multiperspectival analysis presents democratic innovations in a new light. The term changes its meaning, going beyond institutions designed b…
More than Words: A Multidimensional Approach to Deliberative Democracy
Since its inception, a core aspiration of deliberative democracy has been to enable more and better inclusion within democratic politics. In this article, we argue that deliberative democracy can achieve this aspiration only if it goes beyond verbal forms of communication and acknowledges the crucial role of non-verbal communication in expressing and exchanging arguments. The article develops a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy …
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Doing Democratic Theory Democratically
Over centuries, democratic theory has developed emancipatory ideals of inclusion, agency and transparency. These ideals, however, have scarcely been applied to the process of theorizing itself. Democratic theory is a product of the academic ivory tower. This article sets out to confront this problem and formulates democratic theorizing as an alternative to established approaches to theorizing democracy. It does so by conceptualizing democratic th…
Democratic Self-transformations: Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming
Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but …
The Politics of Becoming: Introduction to the Symposium
Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy
The Politics of Presence Revisited
Almost three decades after its first publication, Anne Phillips reflects on the Politics of Presence in the context of contemporary developments from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Granting the importance of a contingent and intersectional understanding of presence, she reemphasizes the necessity of descriptive representation. Phillips reflects on questions of anonymity, essentialism, the multiple self, unconditional equality, and the current role…
A Democratic Theory of Life: Living Democracy with Black Lives Matter
In response to its current crisis, scholars call for the revitalisation of democracy through democratic innovations. While they make ample use of life metaphors describing democracy as a living organism, no comprehensive understanding of ‘life’ has been established within democratic theory. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement articulates the urgency of refocusing on life and its meaning through radical democratic practice. This article employs …
The nonhuman condition: Radical democracy through new materialist lenses
This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? In our introd…
Politics (29 works) · Political science (28 works) · Democracy (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Law (20 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works)