Towards New Democratic Imaginaries – A Photovoice-Project on Meanings of Democracy

Democracy is widely discussed as being “in crisis,” yet much of this debate relies on narrow, institution-centered definitions focusing on elections, representation, and governance structures. While indispensable, these approaches often overlook how democracy is understood, experienced, and imagined in everyday life. This paper argues that understanding contemporary threats to democracy also requires attention to how citizens make sense of democracy beyond formal institutions. It introduces photovoice as a participatory and visually grounded method to explore plural meanings of democracy and to access democratic imaginaries that remain difficult to capture through conventional qualitative or survey-based approaches. The paper builds on recent reflections on democratic education that emphasize the affective and experiential dimensions of democracy. In If democracy is hard to love, how can we teach it?, Nishiyama (2021) introduces the idea of asking students to “take a picture on the theme of democracy” as a didactic device aimed at rendering an abstract concept more tangible and emotionally accessible. This paper takes that pedagogical impulse one step further by translating it into a research design. Rather than treating photography primarily as a teaching tool, it adopts a photovoice-inspired approach (Breny and McMorrow 2023) as a method for systematically eliciting and analyzing peoples’ meanings of democracy. Conceptually, this shift is informed by work on democratic imaginaries. From this perspective, democracy is not only a set of institutions or procedures, but a historically situated and socially embedded field of meanings, symbols, affects, and expectations through which political order is imagined and legitimized. Applying photovoice to the study of democracy allows these imaginaries to be accessed empirically: through visual metaphors, narrative framings, and everyday references that articulate how democracy is perceived, valued, and situated in lived experience. By operationalizing democratic imaginaries through participatory visual data, the paper contributes to bridging theoretical debates on democracy’s symbolic and imaginative dimensions with empirical research practice. (Panel 8 or 10)