Democratic Futures

A group of people standing around each other.

How is democracy experienced, shaped and challenged in everyday life? In this project, we explore these questions through ethnographic, artistic and Indigenous methods. The aim is to make visible experiences from different minority communities whose perspectives are not always visible or accounted for in dominant narratives of democracy.

Our starting position in the project is that knowledge on democratic societies emerges through the core idea that democracy is strengthened inter-generationally through practices and encounters of citizens in everyday life.

From this view of democracy as an active condition, Swedish democracy is the object of study. This key stance of the research contributes to novel new knowledge that emerges from communities whose views, perspectives and practices of democracy are not always visible and accounted for in the dominant political narratives and practices.

The research works with transdisciplinary methods, including ethnographic, artistic and Indigenous methods. The new knowledge from this research aims to show the ways in which democracy is made and unmade in the public sphere: through forms of speech, acts of listening, and moments of deliberation around complex and contested everyday realities.

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Yarning Circles

An indigenous method, a specific form of story-telling, that helps us to recive an unique knowledge of democratic participation as acts of active citizenship.

Our question

What do communities want/expect from the idea of democracy and the institutions that are designed to uphold what a society decides together is meant by democracy?

"The People"

Democratic societies have a vision of who are "the people" – that will be addressed by the policies, decisions, laws and more informal processes that make up a society.

What we aim to do

To understand how communities experience democracy

Does your community feel part of this vision of ‘the people’?

The project will be peeling back the layers of taken for granted meaning about what democracy is, and to make it tangible through practices (policy, law, access to resources, public debate and so on) that allow communities to participate in society.

We don’t assume a pre-determined map or formula of how democracy works or is experienced. Our aim is to listen to communities about their knowledge and experiences. Together we work on activities that are useful to the communities we work with and to build information about how all groups and communities are incorporated and listed to in democratic societies.

REMESO

This research is a part of the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society - REMESO. That is a meeting place at IKOS for researchers who want to develop a multilevel approach to the understanding of migration, ethnicity and society.

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