Democracy

Led by Andrew Wallace

local community, urban movements, participation, mobilisation, protest, activism

The populist surges and anti-elite sentiments of the 2010s opened up new and intensified old questions about the capacity of democratic systems to secure rights, freedoms and opportunities for citizens. Our work in this research area probes these dynamics through an examination of, inter alia, community relations, ideas of resilience, urban marginalisations, uneven economic geographies, resurgent nationalisms, biopolitical gambits and oppositional experiments and activisms. We explore how projects of equality, solidarity and liberty are continually foreclosed and prised open and work with a normative orientation that seeks capacious and disruptive political responses to the enclosures and chauvinisms of our time.