Democratic Situations

Democratic Situations places the making and doing of democratic politics at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American democracy - elections, bureaucracies, public debates and citizen participation - into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are contested and warped in practice.

The empirical cases demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical schemes of conflict, institutions or deliberation. Instead, they offer an urgently needed renewal of our understanding of democratic politics at a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.

Andreas Birkbak is associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen and a co-founding member of the Techno-Anthropology Laboratory (TANTLab). Andreas' research focuses on public participation and digital methods. His recent publications include 'Participatory Data Design' (book chapter in Making and Doing, MIT Press 2021, with Jensen, Madsen and Munk). Andreas has been a visiting scholar at multiple universities, including at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (Warwick) and the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (École des Mines de Paris).

rina Papazu is associate professor in the Technologies in Practice research group at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has published a book in Danish on Actor-Network Theory in Practice with colleague Brit Ross Winthereik. She heads the Agile State working group in the Center for Digital Welfare, and she splits her research time between public sector digitalisation and public participation in climate change and energy transitions.