Technology, Democracy, and Material Politics: at the Intersection of STS and Democratic Innovations

Abstract

This panel invites scholars to interrogate the entanglements of technology, democracy, and materiality through interdisciplinary lenses, drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), new materialism, material politics, posthumanism, sociology of science, media studies, and allied theoretical currents. We seek contributions that treat democratic innovations as technologies, designed, tested, assembled, and experimented with, and that scrutinise the technologies of democracy, revealing how material artefacts underpin citizen-led governance. The panel also welcomes projects of democratising technology, in which the production of technoscience itself is reorganised along democratic lines. What happens when we analyse deliberative forums as engineered artefacts? How do civic technologies and other political infrastructures stabilise or destabilise democratic orders? And how might interdisciplinary lenses help us imagine democratic futures beyond the solutionist logics of “more participation”? Democracy is not only an abstract normative ideal but also a sociotechnical process. It is fabricated, designed, and maintained through infrastructures, devices, and material practices that shape how publics are assembled and how political power circulates ‘legitimately’. Materially, democratic practices employ a diverse set of technologies, ranging from know-how handbooks, sticky notes, tables, digital ‘civic techs’, to AI and to sophisticated algorithms of sortition. At the same time, digital infrastructures, AI systems, and algorithmic architectures are transforming the conditions under which democratic life unfolds, raising urgent questions about the democratisation of technology itself. Taking STS and democratic innovations seriously means recognising that democracy is co-produced with technoscience: the ontologies of “the people” and “their government” are not given but enacted through material arrangements and epistemic practices. Conversely, democratic theory must grapple with the infrastructures and devices through which democratic life is mediated. In response to the premature separation of science and politics, this panel calls for an integrated research approach that broadens the scope of political science to include the study of democratic innovations. Potential topics include: • Democracy as technology: Democratic innovations as sociotechnical systems. Using technology studies as a lens to study democratic innovations and their development and use. • Technologies of democracy: Civic tech, AI, and other concrete material infrastructures shaping representation and deliberation. • Democratising technology: Governance of emerging technologies and participatory design. • Material politics: Everyday practices that stabilise or subvert democratic orders. • Interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between technology and democracy: Bringing insights from the philosophy of technology, design studies, STS, posthumanism, new materialism, sociology of science, critical data studies, media studies, and other related fields to the study of democratic innovations.

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