Panel 6. Paper: Care as Democratic Experiment: Disability Justice, Digital Assemblies, and the Problem of Scale

Across contemporary democracies, digital participation is increasingly promoted as a remedy to democratic threats such as declining trust, unequal representation, and disengagement. Yet many digital democratic innovations reproduce ableist assumptions about participation, time, communication, and capacity, thereby exacerbating exclusion rather than addressing it. This paper approaches these dynamics from the lens of critical disability studies, arguing that disability justice–led digital assemblies constitute under-recognized democratic innovations that directly respond to such democratic threats. Drawing on the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on care work, mutual aid, and collective survival, the paper analyzes disability-led digital assemblies as sites where democratic participation is organized around access needs, care relations, and flexible temporalities. These practices challenge dominant models of digital democracy grounded in efficiency, scalability, and procedural uniformity. Rather than treating care as a supplementary or pre-political concern, disability justice assemblies position care as a constitutive democratic practice. The theoretical framework is grounded in John Dewey’s conception of democracy as a mode of social inquiry and experimental problem-solving. From this perspective, disability justice digital assemblies are not alternative “models” to be scaled up, but experimental responses to concrete democratic problems—namely, the systematic exclusion produced by standardized participatory infrastructures. Their often small, fragile, and situational character is not a limitation but an insight into how democratic practices emerge where dominant institutions fail. The paper addresses a central question for democratic innovation research: must democratic experiments scale to the level of the nation-state to count as relevant, or can they instead inform democratic renewal by reshaping how legitimacy, inclusion, and effectiveness are understood across plural and overlapping publics? By foregrounding care-centered digital assemblies, the paper contributes to Section 65 by linking diagnoses of democratic exclusion to experimental practices that reimagine democracy from its margins.