Assemblies: Modern Rituals

Through the ages, assemblies have embodied the ideas of popular sovereignty and democratic equality. Some of these forms of representation, such as parliamentary assemblies, are the foundations of our political systems, while an impressive movement of popular assemblies across the world has recently revived the ways we form collective subjects. Among many new democratic experiments, citizens' assemblies offer a compelling exemple of imagining a political community.

Assembly making has regained interest in democratic theory and generated a nascent "industry" of participative formats. However, many important aspects of a successful assembly remain under-researched, especially on larger scales. Moreover, in depth transdisciplinary approaches seem to be rare.

Forms of collective intelligence, assemblies are instrumental to explore how our differences, some of them irreconcilable, can enable discussion and generate collective action. Focusing on the conditions for inclusive and egalitarian deliberations, the project aims to deepen the understanding of how we negotiate, debate or deliberate, and sometimes come to a political compromise between people with widely divergent views.

More specifically, our inquiry questions the epistemic and civic effects of assemblies, the role of emotions and collective affects, as well as the place of conflict and dissensus in deliberative processes. A particular attention is given to the forms of assemblies exploring the relation between the spaces, architectures, choreographies of the bodies and the knowledge and effects they produce.

While there is a growing ambition to improve and standardise the deliberative procedures, we are committed to support experimentation, vital for advancing knowledge. The project invites contributors from a variety of fields such as social science, activism, art, design, and architecture, as well as interested citizens to collaborate and reinvent the forms of thinking and acting together at the core of assembling.

A series of public events will accompany the process in order to open the discussion on the conceptual, methodological and political aspects of assembly making. Our goal is to transform the topic into a matter of public concern and call to invest into experimentation of these promising forms of collective policymaking.

This task has become a democratic challenge, encouraging us to rethink the forms of civic dialogue and contribute to the renewal of emancipatory politics.