Materializing democracy: Participation in environmental and energy transitions in times of crisis and polarization
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Socio-material transformations have been set in motion by global crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss and rampant urbanization. These transformations cross administrative and regional borders and manifest on multiple scales, thus intimately touching the lives of citizens and posing new questions for democracies. The transformations require complex expert knowledge, often leading to technocratic policy processes and solutions. The complexity and long timeframes of these transformations tend to result in disengagement by citizens ex-ante, and frustration and alienation ex-post, when the social consequences become evident, raising anxieties over distributive and procedural fairness. Populist tendencies and reactivity are partly fueled by technocratic and socially distant policy processes. The complexity of the problems, the unequal ways in which solutions are developed, and the social distance between group identities involved all contribute to divisive polarization, thus undermining democratic institutions’ capacities to comprehend and act on the transformations.
The Materializing Democracy seminar investigates the key participatory and democratizing practices that lay the ground for and operate alongside policy development, political decision making and implementation in the governance of socio-materially transformative change. Moving beyond traditional notions of democracy, the seminar foregrounds the material aspects of participation that range from formal institutional settings to how citizens engage in politics through everyday activities. The material approach addresses the enactment of democratic practices and the concrete material conditions influencing them as varyingly distributed processes. The perspective sheds new light on current challenges to democracies as research on polarization in democracies has largely focused on affective and ideological divides neglecting the socio-material aspects that contribute to polarization.
The seminar is organized by the Material Democracy project together with the Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies. It features talks by internationally renowned scholars who have worked on issues of participation in environmental and energy transitions.
Day one, 12th May: Material engagements with energy
9:00 - 9:15: Welcome and introduction
9:15 - 10:00: Prof. Adrian Smith, University of Sussex: Domestic labour in smart local energy systems
10:00 - 10:45: Prof. Harald Rohracher, University of Linköping: Democratic engagement and the contentious politics of sustainability transitions
10:45 - 11:00: BREAK
11:00 - 11:45: Prof. Eva Heiskanen, University of Helsinki: Engaging ‘unlikely’ participants in hands-on climate action to develop more inclusive and resilient climate policy
11:45 - 12:30: Dr. Jörg Radtke, Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ Potsdam: Material Democracy: Theoretical Reflections, Research Concepts, and Empirical Insights from Germany
Day two, 13th May: Participation and coproduction of knowledge
9:15 - 10:00: Prof. Jason Chilvers, University of East Anglia: Remaking participations and democracies
10:00 - 10:45: Dr. Marianne Ryghaug, Sintef: Infrastructures of Imagination: How Epistemic Lock‑Ins Produce Legitimacy Crises in Mobility Transition.
10:45 - 11:00: BREAK
11:00 - 11:45: Prof. Sampsa Hyysalo and Sonja Nielsen, Aalto University: Co-production trajectories: rethinking impact formation in knowledge co-production
11:45 - 12:30: Prof. Tamara Metze, TUDelft: Post-human governance as a catalyst for eco-friendly futures
--- Connected event ---
11th May: Talk by Prof. Noortje Marres at ‘Design Interrupted’ (hybrid event Aalto University and online)
17:00–19:00: Prof. Noortje Marres, University of Warwick: The struggle for interdependence: On the impossibility of co-existence in postnormal societies.
Please note the separate info page and registration for the Design Interrupted event.