Theoria

Over the past two decades, the scholarly community interested in participatory and deliberative democracy has focused their attention on democratic innovations. Designs such as participatory budgets and citizens assemblies have been conceptualised as the actualisation of democratic ideals in a micro setting, in relative isolation from each other and the wider society (Bussu et al. 2022). In recent years the attention of democracy scholarship turned toward the connectivity between various democratic innovations and raised questions about their political and societal impact (Dean et al. 2019; Jaquet et al. 2023; Parry et al. 2021). The deliberative systems approach (Mansbridge et al. 2012) makes important steps towards understanding connectivity by exploring the transmission between public space, where democratic innovations are located, and empowered space, where governments reside (Dryzek 2009). However, both democratic innovations and deliberative systems are too often conceptualised in relatively static terms. Systems imply clear structures, and democratic innovations tend to apply expert-generated design that intends to guide human interaction. This view pays limited attention to the role of materiality and more-than-human world – including physical space, objects, technology, nonhuman animals, weather phenomena, etc. – in democratic participation.

Democracy as an assemblage highlights the complexity, contingency and non-linear becomings of a democratic society which is never static but constantly transforming. This article contends that there is a need for an explicit engagement with power in democratic assemblages. It is argued that power is not an individual possession but a function of assemblages, operating through territorialisation and deterritorialisation. These processes, through the flow of power as discipline, production, and disruption, shape democracy. Analysing liberal democracy as a territorialised democratic assemblage, the article states that it faces deterritorialisation by nature's dynamism and ecological thought. However, rather than collapsing in the face of these lines of flight, democracy carries the potential to reterritorialise as ecological democracy by adapting new configurations of power, nature and governance.

This article explores the concepts of political participation through the lens of new materialism and critical democratic theory. It argues that the concept of political participation must be expanded beyond rational and reflective actions by human beings in order to better encompass the agency of nonhuman entities. Drawing on the work of Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Noortje Marres, and others, the article offers a new theoretical vocabulary for talking about political participation in ways that transcends human-centric boundaries and can help bring an increased ecological awareness to democratic theory.

The theory of assemblage has been increasingly influential in contemporary political theory and the democratic innovations debate. This perspective has propelled greater attention to extra-human entities in politics and a sensitivity to capture complex and non-linear relationships between these entities. The article seeks to expand the conceptual debates within the assemblage perspective, by exploring three Latin American conceptual contributions. We refer here to the concepts of gambiarra, quilombo, and Pachamama, which bring contributions that can enrich investigations conducted from assemblage perspectives. Gambiarra allows for considering the creative and risky potentials of contingent and unplanned practices. Quilombo contributes to thinking about the intersection between care and resistance in practices of articulation that recreate common possibilities of existence. Finally, Pachamama helps to redefine the centrality of extra-human entities in understanding politics.

Indigenous research frameworks, such as heart-led practices from the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe perspectives, demonstrate how theory can be derived from the place and purpose of a real, non-human, entity or event. This article develops theory for democracy out of snow – both in terms of how it manifests and what happens when it falls over where people live. From this snow-led intervention into democratic theory comes the argument that democratic moments, like elections, mini-publics, snow and protests, should be critically engaged for the ways in which they can generate sporadic events and for how they can relax or harden every-day social, political, economic, and legal structures which can lead to democratic possibilities. When snow falls to earth, especially in large volume, it temporarily presents itself to people who must interact with it and these people can, by consequence, become temporarily democratized by relation.

The recent emergence of participatory and deliberative processes aimed at addressing the complexity of the ecological crisis has raised the questions of how to include the more-than-human in democracy and how new political relationships with the more-than-human can be established. To contribute to this discussion – focusing specifically on relationships with plants – this text explores potential dialogues between assemblage thinking and Critical Plant Studies. This dialogue is explored through the artistic installation The Plants Sense by Maria Castellanos and Alberto Valverde. The analysis of this installation demonstrates that assemblage thinking and Critical Plant Studies offer fruitful approaches for envisioning a democracy with plants. This approach is grounded in alternative ways of knowing and feeling that acknowledge the agency of plants and the capacities that emerge from assemblages.

Although they often go unnoticed, the statues that stand in town squares and city parks around the world remain significant in contemporary societies. Statues are highly political artefacts that reflect and reproduce dominant sociopolitical narratives of the past and urban imaginaries of the present and can become the focus of celebration or controversy. This article argues that a statue forms part of an ‘urban assemblage’, comprised of a heterogeneous multiplicity of material objects, inscribed text, historical narratives, living bodies and emotional performances, that emerges through processes of depoliticisation and re-politicisation. Urban assemblages are stabilised to entrench particular social relations but can always be destabilised. Illustrating my arguments with the examples of the Emmeline Pankhurst statue in Manchester and the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, I discuss the movements around urban assemblages and the possibilities of democratic interventions in the city.

Objects, their material affordances, and agentic potentials are neglected by research on democratic participation. This article draws on new materialist assemblage theory to make sense of objects in participatory settings and explores the claim that objects may act as participants. It conceptualises participatory processes, commonly framed as democratic innovations, as democratic assemblages, which draws attention to the affective role of nonhumans, including material objects. These assemblages function as a democratic microverse that prefigures democratic futures. To deepen and substantiate these theoretical claims, the article infuses new materialist thinking with ethnographic observations from junk playgrounds, in which human participants interact with discarded materials in response to a political question. We observe how objects resist, invite, and transform humans and make the case for more playful and joyful democratic engagements.