Venue: Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: 23 November, 2017
Politics has been conceptualized in incredibly broad terms in STS (Brown 2015). At the same time, the more specific question of democratic politics has often been left under-explored, allowing notions such as public participation to be imported as “off the shelf” ideals in STS (Marres 2012:ix).
In this workshop, we ask what it would mean to work with democracy not as an implicit repository of ideals, but as an explicit object of study in STS. We ask how democratic politics can be understood and studied based on the practice-oriented empirical commitments and conceptual repertoires of STS. Such an effort might require a redescription of democratic political institutions and concepts, paying close attention to the situated practices and entanglements that their operations require. Despite a number of notable contributions in recent years, we believe that the vast majority of the work on what STS has to offer democracy is yet to be done.