Situating Democratic Futures

Abstracts

Situating climate activism: Democracy by other means

Sylvia Irene Lysgård, OsloMet; with Frauke Rohden

The right to protest is an essential part of modern democracies. However, spurring digitalization, negative stereotypes, globalization, democracies in decline, and hardheaded beliefs societal challenges can be solved through technocracy are changing the role of protest. In our research, we have examined two different modes of climate activism. Here, we contrast an analysis of the websites of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future (Rohden, 2021) with an investigation of activism against Norwegian involvement in the Canadian oil sands (Lysgård, forthcoming). We explore how activists shape public opinion, how networks develop alongside narratives on climate change and travel from local concerned groups to global online publics.
Tracing their activities through digital fieldwork and digital excavation, we reflect on the activists’ interventions in political situations and public opinion, as well as our own interventions resulting from our investigation of the activists. As democratic tenets, established, yet challenged, and the development of information and communication technologies merge to shape activism, these influences simultaneously shape our work as STS scholars. Challenging our understanding of what hinders social change, Bashir et al. (2013) present negative stereotypes as a possible reason for resistance to social change promoted by activists. Further encouraged by Law’s (2016) proposal of seeing our own work as interfering in existing practices, we reflect upon fruitful ways to make these insights matter in democracy and public discussions. In following activists in our own work, we explore new notions of what shapes social change and public opinion.

This contribution explores the relationships between science, politics, public opinion, and activism.

What is an inclusive city? Reconfiguring public participation with digital geospatial photovoice

by Sofie Burgos-Thorsen, Anders Koed Madsen, and Sabine Niederer, University of Copenhagen

Visual research has historically been productive in foregrounding marginalized voices through photovoice as alternative to the written and oral forms of participation that dominate public participation. Photovoice projects have however been slow to leverage digital and spatial technologies for reworking the method in ways that enable geospatial analysis and collect structured metadata that can be used in workshops to bring different groups together around unpacking urban problems. The Urban Belonging project contributes to this by testing a new application, UB App, in an empirical study of how participants from seven marginalized communities in Copenhagen experience the city. From a dataset of 1459 annotated and geolocated photos interpreted by participants in workshops, the project delivers a two-fold analysis: First, it unpacks community-specific patterns in how the city creates experiences of belonging for different groups. Second, it examines how participants experience certain places and situations differently, producing multilayered representations of conflicting viewpoints between different participants and groups. The project hereby brings GIS and digital methods capabilities into photovoice and opens new epistemological flexibilities in the method, making it possible to move between qualitative and quantitative analysis, bottom-up and top-down lenses on data, as well as demographic and post-demographic ways or organizing participation

Democracy under financialization: articulations of market agencements and political repertoires

Jorge Núñez, University of Oslo

In the wake of the 2009 Eurozone debt crisis, a new brand of nationalism emerged in Catalonia, the second largest autonomous community in population and one of the largest economies within the Spanish state. This novel variation of nationalism framed the struggle for Catalan independence as an investment project for everyday citizens. It initially took the form of a market in public debt transferring 30 percent of government bonds from international investors to Catalan households between 2010 and 2012. Two years later, when the market was decommissioned upon suggestion by EU financial regulators concerned with hidden budget deficits affecting Spain’s austerity program, the transformation of Catalonia into a credit-seeking venture mutated towards a seemingly different yet interconnected process of accreditation: a series of referendums for Catalan independence. This paper examines what I call the financialization of democracy to illuminate how the spheres of public deliberation and collective choice are being transformed by speculation and privatization. This transformation goes beyond traditional economic understandings of speculation and the usual neoliberal privatization of public assets and services. It involves a radical reconfiguration of the concept of nation and the political.

Entangled democracy? How experts and citizens relate in citizen science

Gereon Rahnfeld, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Citizen Science has become an established research field at least since the 1990s (Irwin, 1995: Citizen Science). Two of the field’s issues which are often discussed are the citizen science – policy nexus (Schade, 2021: Citizen Science and Policy) as well as the expert – lay divide (Lidskog, 2008: Scientised citizens and democratized science. Re-assessing the expert-lay divide). But while both of these issues are connected to citizen science’s democratic potential, they are rarely discussed together. Against this background my presentation wants to elaborate on how experts and lay people relate in citizen science projects in order to achieve policy changes. How are different knowledges entangled in order to achieve democratic politics?

In order to answer this question, I want to present a few scenes from my empirical research of the citizen science project ‘Coastwatch’. ‘Coastwatch’ is a project in the ecological realm. Its aim is to conduct an annual survey of the state of the Irish coast. The data which is gathered and analysed in this context is used in order to publish research findings as well as to influence politics. Utilising Marres’ issues-based approach to public involvement (Marres, 2007: The Issues Deserve More Credit) I want to elaborate upon the question of how democratic participation is enabled in this context. Which role do issues, places and experiences play in order to negotiate between experts and citizens and, thus, in creating a democratic politics of citizen science?

Democratization of Quantum Technologies

Zeki Can Seskir, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis; with Steven Umbrello, Christopher Coenen, and Pieter Vermaas

As quantum technologies (QT) advance, their potential impact on and relation with society has been developing into an important issue for exploration. In this paper, we investigate the topic of democratization in the context of QT, particularly quantum computing. The paper contains three sections. First, we briefly introduce different theories of democracy (participatory, representative, and deliberative) and how the concept of democratization can be formulated with respect to whether democracy is taken as an intrinsic or instrumental value. Second, we give an overview of how the concept of democratization is used in the QT field. Democratization is mainly adopted by companies working on quantum computing and used in a very narrow understanding of the concept. Third, we explore various narratives and counter-narratives concerning democratization in QT. Finally, we explore the general efforts of democratization in QT such as different forms of access, formation of grassroot communities and special interest groups, the emerging culture of manifesto writing, and how these can be located within the different theories of democracy. In conclusion, we argue that although the ongoing efforts in the democratization of QT are necessary steps towards the democratization of this set of emerging technologies, they should not be accepted as sufficient to argue that QT is a democratized field. We argue that more reflexivity and responsiveness regarding the narratives and actions adopted by the actors in the QT field and making the underlying assumptions of ongoing efforts on democratization of QT explicit, can result in a better technology for society.

Organizers

Andreas Birkbak and Irina Papazu