Pre-figuring Democracy-in-the-Making with/as Moving Matters: Diffracting the Citizens’ Assembly with (Un)articulated Identities, Places and Communities

Today, Citizens’ Assemblies (CA) are being championed as one of the most promising democratic innovations for revitalising existing democracies and producing more meaningful responses to impending polycrises. At the core of the CA are practical implementations of normative ideals of deliberative democracy, still harking back to Habermas and Rawls despite ongoing redefinitions. At the same time normative democratic theory is being challenged by a ‘practice turn’ and recent theoretical ideas addressing the entanglements of multiple democratic ideals such as representative, deliberative, agonistic (Asenbaum, 2025a). These ideas emphasize the dynamic, performative and situated realities of democracy, as democracy-in-the-making (Voss, 2024), and questions around the embodied, affective, relational and more-than-human agencies at play. However, questions around how this wider spectrum of agencies are given meaning or denied in the CA remains unclear, especially in cases where identities, places and communities are not clearly delineated (see e.g. Asenbaum 2025b; Gandy, 2017; Lingis, 1994). In this paper I hypothesize that diffractive methodology/ies (DM), as introduced by feminist physicist-philosopher Karen Barad (2007), can produce generative theory as “affirmative critique” (Braidotti, 2011) for (p)re-figuring democratic innovations as feminist publics. I test this hypothesis by presenting and discussing findings from an ongoing diffractive analysis of the 2020 Klimat Biergerot (KBR) in Luxembourg. I tentatively conclude that (DM) offers a promising avenue for knowing and doing the CA differently by; embracing the dynamic becoming of democracy with the intra-actions of plural agencies, shifting focus from language to a new materialist emphasis on the agency of matter, decentering the category of the human which in turn allows us to intervene in how identities, places and communities are performed, and a move beyond the epistemic to a focus on examining and intervening in underlying ontologies.