Futures of Democracy

Project Summary

The Futures of Democracy project is motivated by the following empirical question: In times of democratic backsliding and a crisis of political decision making, how do people in England’s North East think about and experiment with different democratic practices, and what can the world learn from that? As in many post-industrial communities, people in County Durham struggle to see what the established political mechanisms do for them. It is exactly in these kinds of places that democracy is put to the test, and its future forms need to be fundamentally reconsidered.   This project aims to do that in both theoretical and applied terms, with a strong interdisciplinary team from Durham University, working in collaboration with local partners from post-industrial communities. Focused historical and ethnographic research projects will be at the core of a broader comparison of past and present forms of democracy and political participation, in the North East and worldwide. This empirical work will be shaped by a genuinely interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical framework, coproduced at the intersection of a wide disciplinary variety of expert knowledge and local experience.

Ambition:

• to contribute to timely scholarly debates about the histories, current failures and future prospects of democracy by bringing together different disciplinary research strengths across all four faculties. Democracy is a concept with multiple meanings and usually studied within distinct disciplinary traditions. Exploring how a normative typology of democratic types relates to the messiness of democracy as practice and culture, or how a social psychology take on political behaviour can inform a different approach to historical analyses of collective decision-making exactly provides the stimulating interdisciplinary space to reconsider democracy.
• to use the outcomes of these theoretical and analytical discussions in the empirical context of the North East and support community development in a region that has long-standing democratic traditions worth remembering and a thirst for new ways of doing democracy at a time of political, societal and economic decline. A strong research network will generate longstanding collaborations between Durham University, fellow academics from other universities in the North East, international scholars and local communities.
• to reposition Durham University as a partner in democracy and political innovation within the region, and a global leader in democracy research and innovation.

Term:

Michaelmas 2027

Activities and Events:

Will be add in due course