Search Results

< Back PROMOTING DEMOCRACY IN THE DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE Democratic debate has undergone a structural transformation due to the rise of the Internet, social media and online communities. About this event Democratic debate has undergone a structural transformation due to the rise of the Internet, social media and online communities. Scholars of political communication have sought to diagnose the threat these changes pose, but empirical evidence often makes it unclear exactly what response should be made to concerning practices. In this paper we argue that debates around the regulation of the public sphere can benefit from engaging more directly with democratic theory. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s “coffeehouse model,” we establish theoretical markers for desirable practice online and consider the conditions under which these ideals can be advanced. Focusing on the significance of both digital design and user behaviour, we suggest initiatives that can promote favoured democratic ideals, arguing for a more proactive as opposed to reactive response to trends online. Dr Kate Dommett is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on digital campaigning, political advertising, data and democracy. Dr Dommett recently served as Special Advisor to the House of Lords Committee on Democracy and Digital Technology. She was awarded the 2020 Richard Rose Prize by the Political Studies Association for an early-career scholar who has made a distinctive contribution to British politics. Her Book, The Reimagined Party was published in 2020. Seminar series convenors Hans Asenbaum and Sahana Sehgal . Please register via Eventbrite . Previous Next

< Back Molly Scudder Associate About Molly Scudder specializes in democratic theory, especially practices of citizenship and the conditions of meaningfully democratic deliberation in contexts of deep difference. She is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Purdue University.

< Back Kimmo Gronlund Associate About Kimmo Grönlund is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Social Science Research Institute at Åbo Akademi University. He is also Director of The Future of Democracy – a Center of Excellence in public opinion research.

< Back Catherine Settle Associate About Catherine’s doctoral research into the citizen’s experience of epistemic practices when deliberative mini-publics are applied in Australian health policy settings focused her attention on the benefits of closing the gap between the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.

Nicole Curato and April Porteria < Back Building Back Better: Participatory Governance In A Post-Haiyan World Investigator(s): Nicole Curato and April Porteria Funding through Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE150101866) ($324,557) The project Team includes Nicole Curato (Chief Investigator) and April Porteria (Research Assistant) Project Description 'Building back better' has become a global mantra for countries recovering from disasters. This project aims to examine how this principle can be extended from rebuilding disaster-resilient physical infrastructure to rehabilitating institutions of participatory governance to ensure the inclusive and empowering character of recovery efforts. Through a multi-sited ethnography in cities worst hit by the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, a theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded analytical toolkit that gauges the democratic quality of post-disaster reconstruction will be developed. The project aims to generate insights into the precise ways in which participatory governance can also be 'built better' in a post-Haiyan world. Project Outputs Curato, Nicole (in press) Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curato, Nicole (2016) Politics of Anxiety, Politics of Hope: Penal Populism and Duterte’s Rise to Power. Journal of Contemporary Southeast Asian Affairs 35(3): 91-109 . Curato, N. (2017) Flirting with Authoritarian Fantasies? Rodrigo Duterte and the New Terms of Philippine Populism. Journal of Contemporary Asia 47(1): 142-153. Webb, Adele and Curato, Nicole (2018) ‘Populism in the Philippines’ in Populism Around the World , D. Stockemer (ed). Berlin: Springer. pp. 49-65. Curato, Nicole and Ong, Jonathan C. (2018) ‘Who laughs at a rape joke? Crass politics and ethical responsiveness in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines,’ in Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference , T. Dreher and A. Mondal (eds.) New York: Palgrave. pp. 117-132. Curato, Nicole, Ong, Jonathan C. and Longboan, Liezel (2016) ‘Protest as Interruption of the Disaster Imaginary: Overcoming Voice-Denying Rationalities in Post-Haiyan Philippines,’ in Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space , M. Rovisco and J. Ong (eds.) London: Rowman and Littlefield. Curato, Nicole and Calamba, Septrin (online first) ‘Surviving disasters by suppressing political storms: Participation as knowledge-transfer in community-based disaster governance.’ Critical Sociology . Curato, Nicole (2018) From Authoritarian Enclaves to Deliberative Utopia? Governance logics in post-disaster reconstruction. Disasters 42(4): 635-654. Curato, Nicole (2018) Beyond the Spectacle: Slow-Moving Disasters in post-Haiyan Philippines.’ Critical Asian Studies 50(1): 58-66. (Special Issue Editor) Curato, Nicole (2017) We haven’t even buried the dead yet: The ethics of discursive contestation in a crisis situation. Current Sociology 65(7): 1010-1030. Public Engagement (select list) In the Philippines, All the President’s People , Commissioned piece for The New York Times The Power and Limits of Populism in the Philippines , Commissioned piece for Current History The Philippines Beyond the Dark Spell , Commissioned piece for AsiaGlobal Online The presidency in the age of misery , Rappler.com Social injustice in the age of Instagram , Rappler.com The Mayors of Tacloban , short film co-produced with Patricia Evangelista for Rappler.com

< Back Revitalising intra-party democracy through digital democratic innovations: The case of Danish political party Alternativet Nikolai Gad, Newcastle University Tue 3 July 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract The Danish political party Alternativet constitutes a recent example of an emerging political party that claims to promote and practice new and inclusive ways of doing politics, experimenting with digital technologies for this purpose. In this respect, they share many characteristics with other emerging, European political parties, including the Pirate Parties in Germany, Iceland and elsewhere, Podemos in Spain, and M5S in Italy. Similarly, to these parties, Alternativet also experienced electoral success relatively quickly and has been represented in parliament since 2015. Thus, Alternativet, like similar emerging parties, is an attempt to combine democratic innovations with party politics and traditional political institutions in liberal representative democracies. This is interesting considering how democratic innovations are often conceptualised in contrast to classic representative political institutions, and these parties’ potential ability to provide consequentiality to citizen participation. In my PhD, I explore how digital democratic innovations are used in Alternativet, to involve members and supporters directly in intra-party policy formation and decision-making. Based on semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in Alternativet, I identify four different models of intra-party democracy promoted by the party elite; each with their own justifications for and aims of involving people in party politics. These include an aggregative crowd sourcing model, a participatory DIY model, a deliberative model, and a more traditional delegation model. I theorise that different digital technologies utilised by the party, each cater for different models of intra-party democracy, and test this through a membership survey. About the speaker Nikolai Gad is a RCUK (Research Council UK) funded PhD candidate at Newcastle University, where he studies the role of digital technologies in emerging European political parties, that claim to re-invent how to “do politics” from the bottom up. Here, he is based at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics based at the university’s Open Lab, from where he also earned a Master degree in preparation for the PhD. Additionally, he is part of the School of Geography, Sociology and Politics at Newcastle University, and he holds a BSc degree in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen, and an MSc degree in Digital Design and Communication from the IT-University of Copenhagen. Previous Next

< Back Owning the Street: The everyday life of property Amelia Thorpe, UNSW Law Tue 18 May 2021 11:15am - 12:15pm Building 24, University of Canberra / Virtual Seminar Seminar recording is available on our YouTube channel. Abstract Drawing on a recently-published monograph, Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property (MIT Press, 2020), this paper examines everyday experiences of and feelings about property and belonging in contemporary cities. It is grounded in an empirical study of PARK(ing) Day, an annual event that reclaims street space from cars. A highly recognizable example of DIY urbanism, PARK(ing) Day has attracted considerable media attention, but not close scholarly examination. Focusing on the event's trajectories in San Francisco, Sydney, and Montréal, Owning the Street addresses this gap, making use of extensive fieldwork to explore these tiny, temporary, and yet often transformative urban interventions. PARK(ing) Day is based on a creative interpretation of the property producible by paying a parking meter. Paying a meter, the event's organizers explained, amounts to taking out a lease on the space; while most “lessees” use that property to store a car, the space could be put to other uses—engaging politics (a free health clinic for migrant workers, a same sex wedding, a protest against fossil fuels) and play (a dance floor, giant Jenga, a pocket park). Through this novel rereading of everyday regulation, PARK(ing) Day provides an example of the connection between belief and action—a connection at the heart of the book’s argument. Owning the Street examines ways in which local, personal, and materially grounded understandings about belonging, ownership, and agency intersect with law to shape the city. The analysis offers insights into the ways in which citizens can shape the governance of urban space, particularly in contested environments. About the speaker Amelia Thorpe is Associate Professor in Law at the University of New South Wales. Previous Next

< Back Ferdinand Sanchez Research Assistant About Ferdinand Sanchez II is a research assistant at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. He recently completed his bachelor's degree in Sociology at the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2022.

Selen A. Ercan, Jordan McSwiney, John S. Dryzek, and Peter Balint < Back Building Democratic Resilience: Public Sphere Responses to Extremism Investigator(s): Selen A. Ercan, Jordan McSwiney, John S. Dryzek, and Peter Balint Project Description How should the public sphere institutions and actors respond to the threats posed by the violent extremism? Drawing on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, this project seeks to develop a framework for assessing and improving the public sphere responses to violent extremism in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. It seeks to explain how ‘democratic resilience’ differs from and supplements ‘community resilience’, which is the current resilience framework used by the NSW Government. The project will provide practical recommendations for public servants, policy makers and the journalists working to develop strategies for tackling violent extremism. While the primary focus of the project is NSW Government CVE practice, the project takes a broader approach and engages with both national and international practice in tackling violent extremism. The project is funded by the NSW Government, Premier and Cabinet, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Program 2022. Project Outputs Ercan, S. A., McSwiney, J., Balint, P., and Dryzek, J. S. (2022). Building Democratic Resilience: Public Sphere Responses to Violent Extremism . Technical Report for Department of Premier and Cabinet, NSW, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Program. Public Engagement Ercan, S.A, McSwiney, J., and Balint, P. (2022) Learning Democratic Resilience. Preliminary Findings and Recommendations , NSW Government, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Connected Communities, 23 March (virtual). Ercan, S.A. (2022) Deliberative Democracy: Theory and Practice, NSW Government, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Connected Communities, 19 May (virtual). Ercan, S.A., McSwiney, J., Balint, P., and Dryzek, J. (2022) Learning Democratic Resilience , NSW Government Stakeholders, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Connected Communities, 8 June (virtual). Balint, P., McSwiney, J. and Ercan, S.A. (2022) Learning Democratic Resilience , Resilient Democracy for Resilient Communities, Charles Sturt University, Sydney, 23 August. Ercan, S.A., McSwiney, J., Balint, P. (2022) Contemporary Threats to the Public Sphere , Panel at the Australian Political Studies Association General Conference, Australian National University, Canberra, 26-28 September. McSwiney, J., Ercan, S.A. and Balint, P. (2022) Report Launch and Panel Discussion: Building Democratic Resilience , Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry , Australian National University, Canberra, 13 October. Recording available here . McSwiney, J. (2022) Future Flux , Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canberra, 17 October. McSwiney, J. (2022) Democratic Resilience: Public Sphere Responses to Violent Extremism , Threat Briefing Webinar #14 , Charles Sturt University, 27 October (virtual). McSwiney, J., Ercan, S.A, Balint, P., and Dryzek, J. (2022) Building Democratic Resilience: How the Public Sphere Responses to Violent Extremism . AVERT Research Symposium , Deakin University, Melbourne, 21-22 November. Ercan, S.A. and McSwiney, J. (2023) Building Democratic Resilience, Connected Communities—Strengthening Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience , NSW Government, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Sydney, 16 March (virtual).

Selen A. Ercan, Ricardo F. Mendonca, Umut Ozguc < Back Protests and Political Engagement Investigator(s): Selen A. Ercan, Ricardo F. Mendonca, Umut Ozguc Funded, by Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, the Project Team includes Selen A. Ercan, Ricardo F. Mendonca and Umut Ozguc Project Description One particularly important event of the beginning of the 21st century has been undoubtedly the cycle of protests crossing frontiers throughout the globe. From Iceland to Hong Kong, and including Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, the USA, Turkey and Brazil, the recent protest movements were widely noticed due to their size, their transnational dimension and organizational logic. This project aims to study these protest movements with a particular focus on the way they were organized and carried out in Turkey and Brazil in 2013. By drawing on various streams of contemporary democratic theory, the project will investigate: i) the deliberative capacity of these protests; ii) the interplay between conflict and consensus both in theory and practice ; iii) the role of social media and online engagement in the context of recent protests; iv) the symbolic disputes triggered by these protests and the discursive repertoires mobilized in protest performances; v) the type of collective and ‘connective’ action protests generate and their implications in terms of the constitution of political communities.

< Back DELIBERATION IN TRANSITIONS: A PRACTITIONER'S REFLECTIONS FROM NEPAL AND AFGHANISTAN George Varughese, Niti Foundation Tue 5 March 2019 11:00am - 12:00pm The Dryzek Room, Building 22, University of Canberra Abstract In the last two decades Nepal and Afghanistan have undergone significant governance transitions, drafting and implementing ambitious new constitutions in the wake of civil conflict. In this talk, George Varughese will reflect on 25 years of personal involvement as a development practitioner in these countries, with an emphasis on recent Nepal experiences. While in both contexts, deliberative spaces were created to facilitate transitions in governance regimes, the subsequent constitutional and legal/regulatory scaffolding for state restructuring reflect minimal deliberation and public engagement. The formal and informal elite interests that captured these spaces continue to constrain the countries’ constitutional and democratic development in order to maintain impunity and extract rent. In this light, the talk will highlight challenges in supporting the publicness of policy making in Nepal, focusing on the need for the practical choices in transforming the country’s political and legal institutions, which is necessary for durable deliberative discourse to inhere in public life. About the speaker George Varughese is Senior Advisor for Niti Foundation and convenes its Strategic Advisory Group that makes broadly available analysis, guidance, and recommendations for implementing federalism in Nepal. George has 24 years of experience in international development and academia, with expertise in thought leadership/facilitation in governance with a political economy & conflict specialization and skills in strategic analysis & advice, fundraising, program design & delivery, and policy development & navigation. Most recently, George represented The Asia Foundation in Nepal (2009-2018) and Afghanistan (2005-2009), managing programs on transitional political processes and constitutional development; capacity-building initiatives in the center of government; subnational governance; conflict-transformation and peace building; women’s advancement & security; and public education and discourse on democratic political processes and rule of law. He has also provided technical assistance in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Timor Leste. George is interested and involved in the institutional design of partnerships between local communities, private sector, and government officials, particularly on post-conflict development management, peacebuilding, local governance, and civic engagement. Most recently, George delivered the 2017 Howard Baker Distinguished Lecture in International Security and Development at the University of Tennessee and published “Development aid architecture and the conditions for peacebuilding and human rights in conflict-affected areas: Does the framework fit the purpose?” in Journal of Human Rights Practice (Special Issue on Human Rights and Peacebuilding, 2017, pp. 1-12). He was 2015-16 Excellence Chair and Professor in Global and Area Studies at the University of Wyoming, 2010 Senior Visiting Fellow of The Australian National University's Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, and 2008 Senior International Fellow of the City University of New York's Graduate Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. He holds a Joint Ph.D. in Political Science & Public Administration from Indiana University, Bloomington. Previous Next

Claudia Benham, Simon Niemeyer and Hannah Barrowman < Back Great Barrier Reef Futures Citizens’ Jury Investigator(s): Claudia Benham, Simon Niemeyer and Hannah Barrowman Funded through James Cook University, the Project Team includes: Claudia Benham Simon Niemeyer Hannah Barrowman Project Description Simon Niemeyer and Hannah Barrowman are collaborating with Claudia Benham (James Cook University) in a project trialling deliberative engagement on the future of the Great Barrier Reef. The three-day Citizens’ Jury examines issues of reef management and regional economic development in the context of climate change.

< Back Representing the disadvantaged? Conceptions of representation in a citizens' jury in Switzerland Alexander Geisler, University of Geneva Tue 18 February 2020 11:00am - 12:00pm Crackenback, NSW Abstract While referendums and initiatives are part and parcel of Swiss direct democracy, democratic innovations based on random selection remain underexplored. One such example are Citizens’ Juries assessing popular votes and informing fellow voters via a summary statement, as in the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). Fishkin (2018, 2013) has suggested that citizens bring mostly their own interests to the table in larger types of such deliberative gatherings. Challenging this finding, evidence collected from a Swiss pilot CIR in the municipality of Sion involving twenty randomly selected voters’ points to more complex perceptions of whom panelists perceive to represent. The participants reported that they had also represented disadvantaged groups inside and outside their political jurisdiction when discussing an upcoming popular initiative on affordable housing. This suggests that conceptions of representation on part of the panelists in a minipublic and particularly in the CIR may be more complex than previously assumed. Crucially, panelists taking stances of other groups may affect existing shortcomings of inclusion and representation occurring in minipublics of small size. About the speaker Since November 2018, Alexander worked as a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva in the project “A non-populist theory of direct democracy”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under supervision of Professor Nenad Stojanovic. The project involves conducting two CIR-like mini-public pilots in Switzerland. He earned his Master of Arts in Empirical Political and Social Research (2018) at the University of Stuttgart. After graduation, he worked at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart as a research and teaching assistant. During this period, he was involved in two projects: creating a database to track participatory processes in the municipalities of South-West Germany and managing an online network of universities that engage in research on civic participation. His research interests are in the fields of deliberative democracy, political behaviour, the theory and practice of democratic innovations, and social cognition. Previous Next

Research Intern < Back Atosha Birongo Research Intern About Atosha Birongo is doing research on citizen participation in the world's first Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency. She is a third-year student majoring in Government and Policy at the Faculty of Business, Government and Law. She joined the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance as research intern in 2022.

< Back UPCOMING: DOES FOOD DEMOCRACY MATTER? LINKING THE DELIBERATIVE QUALITY OF SOY AND COFFEE VALUE CHAINS TO ECOLOGICAL 'FOODPRINTS' The global food system is facing a multiple sustainability crisis. Agri-food value chains are among the main drivers of humanity’s overstepping the planetary boundaries related to climate change, loss of biodiversity (genes, species, and habitats) deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution, and nutrient imbalances. At the same time, key food producers like small- and medium-scale farmers are being driven from their land as a result of expanding extractivist resource use and highly asymmetric market access. Among the root causes of the global food system’s sustainability crisis are the multidimensional and increasingly asymmetric power relations – defined as the uneven capacity to influence goals, processes, and outcomes of governance – between the actors involved. Peasant communities, family farmers, rural workers, women, small-scale traders, artisanal food processors, and resource-poor consumers remain widely excluded from the decision-making processes through which agri-food value chains are governed. Deliberation – citizens’ political conversation and collective decision-making – has been described as a “partial antidote” to unequal power relations and as an important lever for rendering decision-making less power-driven. Democracy research argues that deliberation brings to the fore public goods and society’s ecological interests. However, empirical knowledge supporting these claims in the context of food and agriculture is scarce. This research aims at understanding whether and how deliberation affects ecological outcomes (“foodprints”) of soy and coffee value chains and power asymmetries among their key actors. Specific aims are to (1) determine the deliberative quality of selected agri-food value chains; (2) understand the implications of varying degrees of deliberation for power relations among key actors; (3) assess the selected agri-food value chains’ ecological foodprints; and (4) determine how deliberative quality relates to power asymmetries and ecological foodprints. We take a mixed-methods approach in four interlinked research streams: (1) Deliberative quality, comprising analysis of soy and coffee value chains and their key actors, institutional analysis, and discourse analysis to determine deliberative spaces and deliberative quality, and (2) Power asymmetries, focusing on whether and how the deliberative quality of agri-food value chains affects power asymmetries from key actors’ perspective – with semi-structured interviews, participant observation, focus groups, and document review applied in both streams; (3) Ecological foodprints, comprising life cycle inventories to measure the selected value chains’ resource use intensity, land use, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste/nutrient management, using semi-structured interviews, participant observation, as well as document and database review; and (4) Integration, applying process tracing to infer causal relationships between deliberative quality, power asymmetries, and ecological foodprints. BIO Dr. Johanna Jacobi is an Assistant Professor for Agroecological Transitions at ETH Zürich. She studied Geography, Biology and Social Anthropology. Her master thesis investigated wastewater-irrigated agrobiodiversity in peri-urban agriculture in Hyderabad, India. For her PhD studies at the University of Bern, she conducted research on the resilience of cocoa farms in Bolivia to climate change. In a post-doctoral project at UC Berkeley, she focused on agroforestry in Bolivia, where she then lived and worked in a transdisciplinary action- research project for several years. Her research focuses on agroecology as a transformative science, a practice and a social movement, and on power relations in food systems with approaches and methods from political ecology. Johanna Jacobi is also a member of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA). Previous Next

< Back Deliberative land use planning Hoi Kong, McGill University Tue 6 May 2014 Fishbowl, Building 24, University of Canberra Abstract Scholars have long argued that land use planning processes do not promote meaningful citizen engagement. The project that I will discuss responds to this concern by creating an innovative design institution: the digitally-mediated community-based urban design studio. The interdisciplinary design studio deploys electronic technology to facilitate deliberative democratic participation in land use planning processes, in a borough of Montreal. A current large scale development project that has the potential to significantly affect the stock of affordable housing in the borough is the studio¹s current object of study. Students in law, urban planning and architecture, under the supervision of professors, will generate computer-modelled proposals. The studio will, on a dedicated website, invite comments about these proposals from the community and the resulting comments will be incorporated in subsequent draft proposals. The final proposal that will result from this iterative process will be brought to the attention of the relevant planning authorities for their comments. Towards the end of the project¹s three-year term, the team-members will consult with borough officials, city planners and local community organizations about whether and how procedures based on the studio¹s work might be incorporated into the official land use planning consultation process. This project is being developed in collaboration with the Cornell e-Regulations Initiative, which has developed online consultations with federal agencies, and in the presentation, I will discuss what mutual lessons have been learned from the two projects¹ experiments with developing technological tools of deliberative citizen engagement. About the speaker Hoi Kong teaches and researches in the areas of Constitutional Law, Comparative Law, Administrative Law, and Municipal Law. From 2002 to 2003, he was law clerk to Justices Marie Deschamps and Claire L¹Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada. From 2003 to 2006, he was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia University, and from 2006 to 2009, he was an Assistant Professor of Law, cross-appointed with the School of Urban and Regional Planning, at Queen¹s University. Hoi Kong joined the Faculty of Law of McGill University in August 2009 and he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada. He was named a Hydro-Québec Scholar in Sustainable Development Law in 2012. Previous Next

Simon Niemeyer < Back Deliberative democracy and climate change: building the foundations of an adaptive system Investigator(s): Simon Niemeyer Funded through Future Fellowship (FT110100871) ($629,090), Simon Niemeyer (Chief Investigator) Project Description This research seeks to develop an appropriate conception of deliberative democracy to identify those elements of democratic systems that impede the ability to identify and respond to the challenges posed by climate change and identify shortcomings in the theory of deliberative democracy and develop solutions. It does so using empirical evidence relating to the operation of deliberation in real world settings, including evidence from a sister ARC funded Discovery project on mechanisms for scaling up deliberation. As well as contributing to the theory of deliberative democracy and earth systems governance, the research will produce practical recommendations and contribute to public debate.

< Back Tamirace Fakhoury Associate About Tamirace Fakhoury's core research and publication areas are power sharing and political transitions in divided societies, and refugee and migration governance. She is is an associate professor in Political Sciences and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow < Back Jensen Sass Postdoctoral Research Fellow About Jensen works at the intersection of normative political theory and the empirical study of corporations, technology, and the public sphere. He is also interested in corporate power and democratic politics, in particular the regulation of new technologies that promise to transform previously settled norms and institutions.

Latest News - Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance < Back Democratic Transformations: A conversation on systemic change 12 Jan 2024 6 February 2024 Juliet Room, Verity Lane Market, Sydney Building, 50 Northbourne Avenue, Canberra ACT Reception: 5:30 pm Panel discussion: 6:00 – 7:15 pm Democracies’ responses to environmental crises, health emergencies, and racial violence have been unsatisfactory, to say the least. Hyper-partisan politics have taken over our representative democracies, rendering our democratic institutions vulnerable to political deadlocks and cheap political point-scoring. While there are many reasons to lose trust in our democracy, there are also many reasons to fight for it. You are invited to join a conversation on how we can transform Australia’s democracy and chart pathways for systemic change. Our discussion will kick off with three international speakers who will share lessons from democratic innovations that have taken off all over the world and demonstrate how randomly selected citizen bodies, decolonising and anti-racist action, and listening to nature and nonhumans can transform democracies today. This will be followed by an open discussion, where audiences can propose their own ideas for democratic transformation. Speakers Hans Asenbaum is the author of The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age. He is senior research fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance at the University of Canberra. Yves Sintomer is the author of The Government of Chance Sortition and Democracy from Athens to the Present. He is a Professor of Political Science at the Institut Universitaire de France. Melissa Williams is the founding director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. This event launches the new blog series on Democratic Transformations led by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance and the European Consortium for Political Research. Read the blog here . Registration is a must — secure your spot now through this link .