Feminist Democratic Design (a paper with Sarah Childs) Karen Celis (Professeure, Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Feminist democratic design (FDD) builds from Michael Saward’s 2021 book Democratic Design (DD) which asks the following question: ‘how might, or how should, democratic institutions and practices be organized and activated for a given time and place?’ DD is a problem-driven methodology which identifies a range of democratic practices that solve democracies’ incomplete democratization, and is ‘firmly focused on the systemic level’. FDD is a novel methodology to design democratic innovations and interventions to build equal and inclusive polities. It addresses democratic designers who explicitly seek to end oppression and realize equality, but it is also for those who are designing for other particular democratic ends, such as transparency or accountability. Whatever the identified democratic incompleteness in a particular time and place, all democratic designers and their designs, must be oriented to end oppression and realize equality. Democratic designs absent equality can only ever produce sub-optimal democratic polities. Our specific times makes this point sharper still, as we witness the mushrooming of anti-equality and anti-democratic politics.

Discutant·e·s: Prof. Scott Brenton et Ann-Mireille Sautter (UCLouvain)

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