Methodology as Democracy: Live Action Roleplay and the Democratic Practice of Political Theory

This paper argues that under conditions of pluralism and persistent disagreement, particularly in contexts often described as wicked political problems, the democratic commitments of political theorists extend to methodology itself. In such circumstances, the authority structures embedded in verdict-driven and epistemically hierarchical approaches become normatively contestable. The paper develops an account of democratic methodology characterised by three features: distributed epistemic authority, shared normative risk, and interpretive rather than verdictive outcomes. It then examines live action roleplay (larp) as a methodological case through which these features can be enacted. Unlike conventional approaches that concentrate interpretive authority in the figure of the theorist, larp structures normative inquiry as a collective, physically embodied, and socially negotiated practice in which participants co-produce political meaning through action, contestation, and reflection. The paper therefore develops a framework for democratic methodology and examines how such a methodology can be realised in practice through the case of live action roleplay.