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Democratic Situations

Fri, August 21, 3:00 to 4:40pm CEST (3:00 to 4:40pm CEST), virPrague, VR 15

Abstract

Our paper explores a curious tension at the heart of democracy. As the sterile confines of the voting box and the polling station demonstrates (Cochoy and Grandclement 2005), democracy is supposed to flatten out differences and make people equal in their capacity as independent citizens. At the same time, it has been argued by STS scholars that the setting matters a great deal in political situations (Barry 2012, Gomart and Hajer 2003, Marres 2012). This raises the question of how to account for the various settings of democracy as a situated practice. In doing so, we suggest, it is important not to revert to a critical mode that upholds the impossible ideal of flattening out all differences. Instead, democracy as a situated practice must be understood in terms of how it makes problematization and participation possible in specific ways. To guide this work, we propose the notion of democratic situations, which is intended to foreground the variety of contexts in which it is made possible to refer to something as (un)democratic without maintaining a general abstract ideal to adjudicate between them (Stengers 2005). We explore this proposition through a range of specific democratic situations, collected in a forthcoming edited volume, including our own empirical work on a newspaper 'debate school' and the participatory organization of a zero emissions community, respectively. We argue that democracy should be situated in and understood as an assemblage of these diverse empirical situations, rather than in general abstract terms.

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