Call for Papers: EASST-Panel “Democracy in the making”

Die Organisatoren des EASST-Panels “Democracy in the making”, Jan-Peter Voß und Jason Chilvers, laden zu Beitragsvorschlägen ein. Die EASST findet 2020 vom 18.-21. August in Prag statt. Einreichungen (auf Englisch) sind ab dem 15.12.2019 bis 20.02.2020 über die Website der Konferenz (https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/) möglich.

Aus dem Call:

What is democracy? It is no news that democracy is an “essentially contested concept” (Connolly). This Open Panel explores how this can be translated into a practice-oriented approach. We start by taking any democratic practice to be centred on a particular way of articulating the demos and how it wants to govern itself. This entails the construction of the people as a collective subjectivity. In practice, this works by making “representative claims” (Saward). If accepted such claims generate political authority and become performative in actually constituting the people as a collective with shared will and agency (Latour, Disch). But how specifically is this done in practice? And which are the broader arrangements or “hinterlands” (Law) that shape “felicity conditions” (Austin)? These questions lead into the machinery of doing liberal-representative democracy through party competition and elections, but they symmetrically bring into view practices of stakeholder negotiation or citizen deliberation, and other radically different forms of representing the people through opinion mining in digital data or performative-aesthetic interventions. Enacting specific “political imaginaries” (Ezrahi) in a wider “ecology of representation” (Rosanvallon) they jointly constitute “the demos multiple” (cf. Mol). A next step for STS is to reconstruct the dynamics of different democratic practices in the making by tracing entanglements with specific “epistemic cultures” of democracy and their practices of theorizing and experimentally engaging with them (Knorr Cetina). Ultimately, the question is how realities of democracy, along with the political authority they generate, are shaped through specific sciences and technologies of democracy.