https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127211033990
Social Studies of Science
2022, Vol. 52(1) 106 –126
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/03063127211033990
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Politics at a distance:
Infrastructuring knowledge
flows for democratic innovation
Jan-Peter Voß1, Jannik Schritt1
and Volkan Sayman1
Abstract
We study efforts at promoting deliberative mini-publics as a model of democracy. Our focus
is on practices supporting the circulation of know-how for doing mini-publics. In this paper
we center on the building of infrastructures for knowledge exchange in and around a network
known as Democracy R&D. This is a network of mini-publics practitioners from around the
world with the declared goal of adding momentum to democratic innovation by enhancing
translocal connections, community building, and knowledge. We look at how the network is
organized, how online communication platforms are installed, and how observatory devices
draw dispersed practices together into a shared frame of mutual learning and collective action.
How do such practices configure the ways in which knowledge can flow across sites? How do
they constitute an instrument space, a translocal assemblage of knowing and doing democracy by
means of deliberative mini-publics? Using concepts like scopic media and centers of calculation, we
discuss these practices for how they enable and constrain the circulation of know-how, configure
processes of mutual learning, shape the translocal innovation process, and thus, at a distance, also
prefigure local ways of knowing and doing politics.
Keywords
political practice, democracy, circulation, translation, infrastructure, political imaginary,
ontological politics
1Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Correspondence to:
Jan-Peter Voß, Department of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin, FH 9-1, Fraunhofer Str. 33-36,
Berlin 10587, Germany.
Email: [email protected]
1033990SSS0010.1177/03063127211033990Social Studies of ScienceVoß et al.
research-article2021
Article
Voß et al. 107
Introduction
Recent debates about the globalization and transnationalization of politics focus on pro-
cesses in which spaces of regulatory power are shifting, as transnational governance
networks supplant nation states as arenas for the making and implementation of rules
(Bache and Flinders, 2004; Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006). Meanwhile, issue
spaces are also undergoing change: instead of taking shape within national spheres, top-
ics of public concern are increasingly raised by transnational movements and become
articulated in transnational publics forming around specific issues (Castells, 2008; Della
Porta and Tarrow, 2005; Marres, 2007). This paper focuses on yet another, but less often
treated dimension of spatial change in politics. We investigate the formation of instru-
ment spaces within which the know-how of doing politics is shared and developed.
We show how practices of facilitating knowledge exchange and learning shape a trans-
local space of doing politics. Channeling and formatting knowledge flows for easy connec-
tion and tamper-proof translations, they frame and structure translocal assemblages (Collier
and Ong, 2005). This transforms fluid knowledge spaces into network spaces (Mol and
Law, 1994) or technological zones (Barry, 2006). Using concepts like centers of calculation
(Latour, 1987), scopic media (Knorr Cetina, 2009), and infrastructuring (Star and Ruhleder,
1996) we observe the ontological politics that are unavoidably involved in the design of
infrastructures for translocal knowledge exchange and learning.
In earlier works, we have discussed transnationally expanding expert cultures that
cater to specific functional models of doing politics as ‘instrument constituencies’
(Simons and Voß, 2018; Voß and Simons, 2014). This article focuses on specific forms
of spatiality connected with the circulation of instrumental knowledge across different
sites of political practice (cf. Voß and Freeman, 2016: 22–23). These instrument spaces
co-extend with specific technologized forms of political discourse and practice. As such
they perforate territorially bound political cultures and policy styles (see also Shore and
Wright, 2011).
The case we investigate here is the promotion of deliberative mini-publics as a spe-
cific model of doing democracy (Grönlund et al., 2014). We have a closer look at the
practical work undertaken within the Democracy R&D network founded in 2018 to con-
nect geographically distributed ways of doing mini-publics and to support mutual learn-
ing and collective action. What is being done to circulate mini-publics knowledge – and
how does it constitute a translocal space of knowing and doing democracy?
Knowing, doing, and innovating democracy translocally
In studying practices of innovating democracy, we build on a praxeological understand-
ing. We abstain from defining politics and democracy, acknowledging that both are
‘essentially contested concepts’ (Connolly, 1983). Instead, the knowing of politics itself
is an object of study (see Mannheim, 1995 [1929]). We thus investigate the practical
ways in which specific versions of political and democratic reality are conceptualized
and enacted.
Studying the ‘doing’ of democracy entails a focus on specific ways of making repre-
sentative claims (Saward, 2006) on behalf of ‘the will of the people’ (or on behalf of
108 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
other collective subjectivities, such as the public, the nation, humanity, workers, women,
the 99%). Such claims become performative, if constituencies adopt them as a valid
descriptions of their collective self: they then bring this collective subjectivity into exist-
ence (Bourdieu, 1985; Disch, 2008, 2010, 2019; Latour, 2003; Seitz, 1995).
Against this background, democracy is a practical arrangement of representative
claim-making that enables a demos to self-realize its power of agency (its kratos) by
constructing the representations of its subjectivity on its own. Democratic forms of poli-
tics must therefore engage a diverse multitude in the process of articulating and adopting
representative claims and collective subjects. Any specific ways this can be done, for
example, through elections, surveying, negotiation, deliberation or esthetic affection,
entail questionable modes of translating diversity into unity. Democracy thus hinges on
a cultural belief in specific procedures to conduct this translation truthfully. ‘Political
imaginaries’ play a key role here (Ezrahi, 2012). Liberal, corporatist, communitarian, or
hegemony-oriented views of political reality, for example, entail different requirements
for such truthful translations. As they are deeply embedded in practices, however, politi-
cal imaginaries are seldom explicit and they are difficult to change.
For the ambition to expand specific forms of democracy translocally, this poses fun-
damental challenges. The instrumental belief in specific procedural models to translate
truthfully a diversity of experiences into one collective will is anchored in different local
political cultures that have taken shape over centuries. Successfully expanding func-
tional models of doing democracy therefore requires a transformation of local political
cultures. Merely installing ready-made procedures, like a simple transfer of technology,
does not work.
But even transferring technology is never simple. Science and technology studies has
amply investigated the challenges of moving, expanding, and replicating scientific
knowledge and technological functions (e.g. Akrich, 2000; De Laet and Mol, 2000;
Latour, 1990 [1986]; Law, 1986; Law and Mol, 2001). Studies of organizational change,
development work, and transnational governance have articulated similar challenges for
transferring institutional designs, organizational knowledge, and policy concepts (Berger
and Esguerra, 2017a; Clarke et al., 2015; Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Gherardi and
Nicolini, 2000; Rottenburg, 2009).
Such studies highlight the transformation of knowledge as it travels. Deeply embed-
ded in practice, bodies of knowledge cannot simply move by diffusion, but must be
translated. This involves three steps (e.g. Behrends et al., 2014): the isolation and de-
contextualization of a few transportable elements of knowing in practice (e.g. a material
artefact, a text manual, a skilled expert), their packaging into an abstract model of how
they work together (e.g. a flow diagram, a set of instructions, the sketch of an experimen-
tal set-up), and the re-contextualization of traveling elements and models at their destina-
tion (e.g. re-connecting with locally available bodies, texts and materials for realizing
instructions, interpreting texts, enacting skills, using tools, etc.). Thus any transferred
knowledge and technology is a situated re-construction.
For innovators of democracy, leaving their models fully open to transformation may
undermine them. Severely restricting their transformation, which amounts to standard-
izing models across sites, entails even larger challenges. For success, it might mean
transferring practices and their contexts as self-contained sets (the spaceship approach),
Voß et al. 109
or it might mean adapting contexts so that traveling elements plug into pre-configured
local settings (the airport approach). Apart from immense challenges, these two
approaches produce alien constructions at least somewhat detached from their local sur-
roundings. They may have little connection with actual local life and they may be resisted
as colonial strategies or caricatured as having a naïve faith in ‘instant democracy’
(Sloterdijk and Mueller von der Haegen, 2005).
The practices of innovating democracy that we study here mark a third path between
letting democratic knowledge flow wildly and translate freely, and pre-emptively stand-
ardizing contexts for functional control. We study experts supporting processes of recip-
rocal knowledge exchange and learning across different sites of democratic practice, to
facilitate the convergence of practices and to let standards emerge organically, from the
bottom up.
Innovating democracy with deliberative mini-publics
Our empirical case is the promotion of deliberative mini-publics (Grönlund et al., 2014).
Along with terms such as ‘citizen panels’ or ‘deliberative forums’, the term has been
used since about 2000 as an umbrella for more specific methods such as citizens’ juries,
planning cells, consensus conferences, deliberative polls®, citizen reference panels, citi-
zen assemblies, or World Wide Views. Since the 1970s, these methods have been devel-
oped for different issues and in different contexts of local, national, and transnational
governance (Voß and Amelung, 2016).
All these methods share a basic procedure for representing the collective ‘will of the
people’. Organizers define the issue beforehand. They recruit by lot a representative
sample of ordinary citizens within selected strata of the population affected by the issue.
They facilitate communications with a view to accommodating different concerns and to
coming up with a consensual statement. They provide participants with information
materials or expert statements, establishing the facts to take into account. The procedure
produces a document to be published as a considered and informed view of the public (a
collective policy recommendation or, in some cases, a post-deliberation poll).
In terms of actors, there is considerable diversity in this field (Amelung and Grabner,
2017). There are practitioners who organize mini-publics and there are academics study-
ing them. They come from different traditions of thought and different professional
fields, such as civic education, social movement activism, critical pedagogy, public
administration and planning, technology assessment, change management, consulting,
and public relations. These actors contest what the core functions of mini-publics are and
how processes should be designed and steered. Issues of discussion include: methods of
sampling and recruiting participants (random, stratified, or empowering marginalized
groups), methods of moderating the debate and reaching closure (consensus, allowance
of minority votes, or concluding poll), and methods of working up information about
facts about the issue under debate (comprehensive expert assessment, competing expert
testimony, or inquiry by participants themselves) (Amelung, 2015; Mann et al., 2014;
Voß, 2016). Behind seemingly technical design questions are different nuances in how
actors envision mini-publics and their roles, some leaning toward challenges of securing
governability, others toward empowering marginalized concerns, for example.
110 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
Since the local development of mini-publics practices in the 1970s and 1980s, pio-
neers of this way of doing democracy have gradually expanded their activities to neigh-
boring regions, administrational contexts, and issue domains. In the 1990s, a broader
boom for public participation spurred the proliferation of the mini-publics model. It
brought many new actors into the field and brought the limited reliability of methods and
lacking protection against manipulation into critique. In response, increased efforts were
undertaken to theoretically specify functions and comparatively measure the perfor-
mance of mini-publics (Voß and Amelung, 2016). Linking up with theories of delibera-
tive democracy, functional claims were explicated as the promise to actualize ‘public
reason’ through ‘domination-free discourse’ (Habermas, 1971). The mini-publics proce-
dure thus is claimed to achieve ‘non-hierarchical, egalitarian’ deliberation for articulat-
ing the will that a wider public would have, if it was well informed and oriented toward
mutual understanding and the public good (Escobar-Rodríguez and Elstub, 2017: 3).
Infrastructures for translocal democratic innovation
Against the current background of rising populism and authoritarianism, mini-publics
practitioners seek to combine their knowledge and resources to promote their models as
a solution for the deficits of liberal-representative democracy. This involves simultane-
ously orchestrating local strategies and addressing issues of transnational governance.
A key strategy is to enhance the circulation of know-how beyond the publication of
reports and sporadic bilateral meetings. Arrangements for mutual learning across differ-
ent local sites are expected to establish a shared understanding of practical challenges
and the alignment of strategies for translocal projects of innovating democracy. The net-
work Democracy Research & Development (DR&D) was founded early in 2018 to bring
together practitioner initiatives, service organizations, consulting businesses, and experts
who do mini-publics in different parts of the world. The title of the network insinuates a
technology and innovation platform. In the following we focus on efforts at enhancing
translocal learning pursued within the DR&D network.
In January 2018, about 40 people from 15 organizations met in Madrid to officially
found the network. A network manager initiated and coordinated the meeting who was
working as Associate Director for Research and Development for the Australian newDe-
mocracy Foundation. The newDemocracy Foundation was set up in 2004 by Luca
Belgiorno-Nettis, heir of a mighty industrial concern, who wanted ‘to find out if innova-
tion in democracy was possible … [to] find better ways to let leaders lead and for trusted
public decisions to be made’ (newDemocracy, 2020). Together with Ned Crosby and his
wife Pat Benn, Belgiorno-Nettis’ newDemocracy Foundation remains one of the key
financial sponsors of Democracy R&D, closely followed by finance tycoon George
Soros’ Open Society Foundations (Democracy R&D, 2020a). Ned Crosby and Pat Benn
had already used their private fortune to raise the US-based Jefferson Center in 1974,
which developed the citizens’ jury, one of the two oldest mini-publics methods.
DR&D’s goal is to build up momentum by forging an innovation network out of a
dispersed field of innovation practices. Mini-publics initiatives are widely distrib-
uted across the globe. Locally embedded practitioners have developed their own
Voß et al. 111
understandings and skills within specific cultural and institutional niches, so communi-
cation is important and challenging.
In December 2020, the network had as members 85 organizations and individuals
from 30 countries on six continents (Democracy R&D, 2020). An internal note on ‘how
to define DRD progress?’ suggests the following criteria:
•• First, ‘network development’ meaning ‘more connections between members, and
between members and allies outside the network’ and ‘more members, in more
places, with more diverse perspectives and assets.’
•• Second, ‘learning, improving practice’ with ‘existing knowledge gathered, organ-
ized, and shared,’ … ‘methods and tools improved; new ones developed,’ and
‘development and adoption of standards for good practice.’
•• Third, ‘reforming democracy’ by ‘strategies collected, synthesized, documented,
tested, revised.’
The approach is to make connections, circulate knowledge, and support mutual learning
within the organizational realm of the network. Emblematic of the wider orientations
guiding these efforts is a statement by the network manager (our emphasis):
I facilitate exchange and want others in the network to know about it. It is important to share
excitement. It is important that they see others collaborating and cooperating, like the ‘time
banks’ where it is visible to all members, if just two get together to collaborate. Every time
someone helps another, you see it. This also gives you data on what is going on. … The ambition
is that everybody wakes up in the morning and sees the network.
Connecting and making perceivable: Creating translocal social dynamics
through scopic media
A key step for invigorating the network was the launch of a virtual forum at the 2020
annual network meeting in Manchester. To create a more intimate atmosphere for inter-
actions via the digital platform, members were urged to sign up with a photo. Automatic
alert and notification features kept members on track with the virtual life of the commu-
nity. Like other social media, the platform entices users to stay updated, to follow up on
and add to interactions. It displays summaries of activities, popular topics, and peers who
are online. Like a cockpit to oversee and navigate the innovation space, it presents latest
contributions, new topics, and unread messages. The virtual forum creates shared atten-
tion, builds up a special cosmos of relevance, and involves members in interactions on
the shared project of innovating democracy. It demonstrates that there is an alive translo-
cal mini-publics world and it effectively creates a feeling of being engaged with a world-
wide dynamic (forum statistics show a total of 575 topics, 2800 posts, 230 users, and 671
likes by 16 February 2021).
Once or twice a month, the manager announces a ‘collaborative learning call.’ Via the
network’s mailing list, he solicits proposals for topics and speakers. Via a scheduling
poll, temporal resources of members are aligned, often separately for Atlantic and Pacific
clusters of time zones. Via videoconferencing software, participants are put in a
112 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
somewhat thick social situation, interacting with voices, gazes, and movements, even at
distance.
Another gaze on the mini-publics world is afforded by geographical mappings of
activities, projects, and organizations as they are spread out around the globe. In 2013,
Participedia started as a crowd-sourced monitoring and mapping project for all kinds of
participatory politics (Smith et al., 2015). Following up on this, the DR&D network has
started its own mapping of relevant people and organizations specifically for doing mini-
publics. Its website welcomes visitors with a world map demonstrating the global reach
of the network (Figure 1).
All of these activities enable translocal knowledge flows by establishing connections
and creating representations of the network itself. They list and map relevant individuals,
activities and organizations, provide communication platforms, and organize meetings.
Dedicated facilitation efforts and the material infrastructures generate and moderate
knowledge flows. They bring mini-publics practices from different parts of the world
into a shared space of interaction and embed them into a translocal dynamic that consti-
tutes a translocal discourse and establishes mini-publics as a worldwide innovation.
How are interactions mediated to allow knowledge flows across geographical dis-
tances and to constitute a translocal space of innovation? How is the meeting place fur-
bished? What is the infrastructure that constitutes the virtual college and that allows
social dynamics and learning to unfold at a distance? With a view to the mediatization
and the designed artificiality of the translocal encounters in DR&D we find it helpful to
reflect on our observations with the help of the concept of ‘scopic media’ and how they
Figure 1. Mapping mini-publics initiatives (Democracy R&D Forum, 2020b).
Voß et al. 113
create ‘synthetic global situations.’ The concept was originally developed in studies of
finance trading (Knorr Cetina, 2003; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002), and was
extended to study different kinds of geographically dispersed social worlds and dynam-
ics (Knorr Cetina, 2005). The concept captures arrangements that allow social dynamics
to unfold based on shared perceptions and alignments in practical orientations, even
without any direct face-to-face interactions being involved. Empirically, the focus is on
networked communication technologies and audio-visual media that ‘enable translocal
imports from the outer world to be collected, projected, and augmented on-screen’ (Knorr
Cetina, 2009: 69). A key analytical contribution is that such media can constitute a ‘syn-
thetic situation’ equivalent to what social theory calls a ‘situation’: a coming together in
interaction giving rise to particular social realities. ‘The audience may start to react to the
features of the reflected, represented reality rather than to the embodied, pre-reflexive
occurrences. … [T]he screen content instantly places those observing it … into an identi-
cal world’ (Knorr Cetina, 2014: 43). Attention to scopic media highlights the effect of
specific forms of mediated communication, enabling the emergence of a translocal con-
text as a primary frame of interaction. Orientations, identities and feelings of participat-
ing subjects are then shaped by relating with a world that is constituted in translocal
interactions infrastructured by scopic media. Scopic media thus allow the formation of
translocal forms of sociality decoupled from specific places and direct encounters:
‘When scopic systems are systematically used they may have ‘world-making’ effects
that lead to the creation of parallel realities … thick context[s] that situates individual
activities, emotional commitments, and interpretive frameworks’ (Knorr Cetina, 2014:
44).
As scopic media create settings in which actors define situations on bases of techno-
logically mediated interactions, the concept draws attention to the affordances of the
infrastructures that make these translocal interactions possible. Scopic media do not neu-
trally represent worldwide movements, but selectively make some elements part of a
synthetic situation. They therefore configure translocal social dynamics and the collec-
tive understanding that may emerge from them. Screening and mapping technologies
allow for observation and interaction at distance, but they necessarily have a specific
selectivity built into their design. While they ‘stitch together an analytically constituted
world made up of ‘everything’ potentially relevant to the interaction’ (Knorr Cetina,
2014: 48), it is exactly those decisions on ‘potential relevance’ that have to be made for
configuring scopic media and making them work. Specific ideas about what kind of
interaction they should enable and to what purpose, ideas about what should be observed
and shown and interacted with are inscribed into the design of such technologies’
affordances. This pushes us to reflect on how they infrastructure knowledge flows and
thus not only enable but also channel and shape translocal learning. We will come back
to this later.
Collecting and synthesizing: Ordering heterogeneous practices through
centers of calculation
In addition to bringing mini-publics practices together and inciting social dynamics
across geographical distances, DR&D also pursues more ambitious goals. Several
114 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
strands of activity aim at systematically collecting information, comparing practices and
ordering the knowledge that is to be shared. This starts with a survey among members on
their expectations of DR&D. Translating answers into five categories, the network man-
ager formulated collective goals as (a) information and learning, (b) relationships and
support, (c) credibility and publicity, (d) funding, and (e) collaboration. Dedicated work-
ing groups were set up for realizing the goals, each guided by an agenda distilled from
the survey responses. Diverse expectations embedded in the contexts and histories of
network members were thus translated into abstract categories so that they could be inte-
grated for a shared strategy.
The working group on ‘information and learning’ was pivotal for the overall project
of creating a translocal innovation network. It called itself the ‘toolkit group’ when it was
constituted on 14 February 2020. It described its role within the network ‘as potentially
being the ‘research team’ – the folks who would actually go and try to compare, for
example, what exactly different organizations do on demographic representation … and
then provide that information back to the network.’ Its first self-set task was to establish
a repository of relevant information, a virtual library for all network members in form of
a Google Drive. Before relevant materials were gathered and stored, the group had to
decide on how to select and organize them. Wanting to systematically collect and synthe-
size circulating texts on different aspects of doing mini-publics, the group faced the chal-
lenge of constructing a system of categories. One could collect and sort materials, for
example, by how they addressed fundamental legitimation problems (such as defining
the problem, claiming representativeness, moderating for consensus, distinguishing facts
and values) or by how they addressed practical tasks (such as acquiring funding and
sponsors, deciding on panel size and duration, recruiting participants, preparing materi-
als, setting up the venue, facilitating the process, evaluating outcomes, working with
media). Any specific order would foreground some concerns and knowledge interests for
doing mini-publics and background others.
The toolkit group recognized this in a post on ‘the organizational structure for the info
we gather.’ A week after the inaugural meeting the coordinator raised issues ‘on how we
organize the actual information we collect. Spreadsheets, wiki, tag, categories.’ He rec-
ognized that ‘it’s a bit of a balancing act. Like, organic is great. But … structure can also
be motivating. … I think the organization of this information is possibly even more
important than the information itself – because the problem that exists at the moment
isn’t that there isn’t content; the problem is that content is horribly disorganized and in a
million of PDFs scattered all around the internet. So this is as much an architecture prob-
lem as anything else.’
The design of a knowledge repository for doing mini-publics touches on basic under-
standings of mini-publics and what the doing of them needs to prosper. This is relevant,
because there are different orientations at work. Mini-publics practices are driven by
political ends, epistemic curiosity, or business opportunities. Some tend to foreground
concerns for governability and others for empowerment, some pursue democratic inno-
vation against the background of autocratic regimes and some against liberal regimes.
These different orientations make specific kinds of knowledge more relevant than others.
A general system of categories for gathering and sorting materials can only reflect one
specific conception of relevance. This will also affect the ability to find and access
Voß et al. 115
respective information. Any systematic order of archiving, by channeling communica-
tions, will also influence the way by which the collective knowledge base of doing mini-
publics develops.
Several proposals for an organizational structure of the knowledge repository were
discussed, then the toolkit group settled on a version that reflects the mini-publics pro-
cess as a sequence of phases (Figure 2). This categorical system establishes the doing of
mini-publics as a technical challenge decomposed into specific design tasks.
Apart from gathering and sorting ready-made materials, the toolkit group also sought
to produce original data on the doing of mini-publics ‘to help us all better understand the
diversity of our mini-public deliberations – so that we can all understand, research, dis-
cuss, and design deliberative processes better. … The more data we collect, the more
comprehensive a picture we’ll all have.’ The aspiration was a systematic overview by
asking network members to give a pre-structured account of ‘general practices – and the
rationales behind them’ so that ‘the results – summarized by the Collaborative Learning
Group – will form the basis of a new internal Democracy R&D Wiki and will help us
0 – General Materials
0a Basic Principles
0b The Pitch (presentations, brochures)
1 – Pre-Deliberation Materials
1a Commissioning & Planning (project timelines, MoUs)
1b Staffing (facilitator recruitment & training)
1c Governance (steering cmtes, advisory boards)
1d Participant Selection (mailings, software, selection procedures)
1e Evidence & Witnesses (briefing docs, experts, stakeholders)
1f Media Relations & Event Marketing (press releases, media kits)
2 – In-Deliberation Materials
2a Logistics (info for attendees, room layout, tech specs)
2b Process Materials (toolkits, manuals) (see also 3a)
2c Online Tools & Materials
3 – Post-Deliberation Materials
3a Final Reports & Case Studies (may contain process details)
3b Evaluation (participant surveys, staff debrief procedures)
3c Outcomes Research (impact on policy, participants, or public)
Other Materials
Figure 2. Categorizing mini-publics knowledge according to technical challenges (Democracy
R&D Forum, 2020).
116 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
1. Basic information: Organization, location(s), year of first practice
2. Why and what: purpose, why important, does cost play role
3. Prior commitment by decision-makers
4. Selection and definition of issue
5. Final product and distribution
6. What are steps for random selection process
7. Methods of demographic stratification
8. Number of participants
9. Decisions on who presents information and how
10. Payments to participants
11. Facilitation
12. Duration and sequencing of meetings
13. Venue and room layout
14. Preparatory materials
15. Standardization and custom design
16. Online engagement features
17. Impact
18. Evaluation
[Items 3-18 ask for description and then an answer on ‘why important?’
and ‘do budget considerations play a role?’]
Figure 3. Surveying and comparing mini-publics practices according to a general model of their
components (Democracy R&D Forum, 2020).
choose future discussion topics for collaborative learning calls.’ A draft questionnaire for
the ‘DR&D Mini-Public Practices Survey 1’ asked for descriptions of basic constituting
elements of mini-publics practices (Figure 3). For each question an exemplary answer
was listed, connected to the specific kind of mini-publics practice with which the author
of the questionnaire was engaged.
The survey design demonstrates an ambition to systematically compare mini-publics
practices, but the final questionnaire was not distributed. Instead, the toolkit group went
for an online wiki. Systematicity was relinquished for user-centerdness: ‘[W]e’ll be pro-
viding a practitioner-oriented resource of methodologies – technologies, techniques, and
specific best practices.’ The challenge of digitalizing mini-publics was regarded a key
challenge to start with, as Covid-19 measures precluded physical meetings. The wiki was
set up on an internal part of the website for all members to add content. About a dozen
articles were added on topics such as ‘comfort and information interaction,’ ‘online facil-
itation,’ and ‘political legitimacy.’ They contained keywords, short comments, links to
video tutorials, or other online sources. Initially, the wiki format worked well as an open
platform for crowdsourcing information among members. As it allowed them to intro-
duce and use own categories and formats, however, redundant subtopics were opened
and content was added in different formats. The wiki quickly frayed, got messy and
participation went down. The plan was that two interns would take care of editing and
Voß et al. 117
completing the wiki over the course of the year, as a measure to reintroduce ‘structure’
into the ‘organic.’
Latour’s (1987) concept of ‘centers of calculation’ seeks to capture how translocal
knowledge gets composed as a synthetic re-presentation of distant, distributed, and
diversely embedded forms of existence. It suggests (p. 223) that this is the result of
three operations: (1) the mobilization of knowledge by producing abstract, reduced and
de-contextualized accounts of embedded phenomena, by reporting forms and measure-
ments (producing data), (2) the stabilization of circulating knowledge by regulating,
materially fixing, and interrelating de-contextualized accounts (compiling databases),
and (3) the extension of knowledge by combining, aggregating, classifying, comparing
and systematizing accounts in diagrams, tables, maps, texts, and equations (analysing
data for patterns).
For this process, diverse forms of existence are framed as part of an ordered whole.
The frame that makes them commensurable, however, is a frame imposed by the center,
with a view to drawing things together and making them observable and manipulable at
a distance (Latour, 1990 [1986]). When such centrally ordered accounts feed back into
locally embedded processes, they may come to substitute for local accounts and framings
of what is going on (Latour, 1987: 245). Abstract systematics may thus shape the orienta-
tions by which mini-publics are done. This is how centers of calculation not only observe
and re-present, but also shape and control diverse and distant forms of existence. The
concept thus sensitizes us to observe how centrally devised frames, categories, compara-
tive descriptors, indicators, and other standards for producing combinable accounts may
become performative, over time configuring and shaping local practices according to
categories by which practitioners are urged to report on themselves and be accountable
to the center.
Infrastructuring knowledge flows: The politics of an
emerging instrument space
Our look at practices exposes hands-on challenges of making knowledge flow. It shows
creative design work and the ongoing trialing of socio-technical devices. All this contrib-
utes to facilitating connections between, and constructing compatibility and commensu-
rability of, different forms of practical knowledge of how to do mini-publics and
democratic innovation. It gradually adds up to form a translocal infrastructure allowing
knowledge to flow smoothly across distantly located practices.
We usually think of infrastructure as provisions enabling some focal activity (e.g.
transport, communication, cultural life, politics). The infra refers to such material-cul-
tural provisions being sunken below ground. This may literally be the case, but key is
that they are sunken out of attention, becoming taken for granted as part of the landscape
within which options are devised and pondered, and paths of action are taken. This is
how infrastructures configure ongoing processes of social interaction. They enable and
subtly order the continuous production of social realities. This specific power of ‘con-
ducting conduct’ (Foucault, 1982) is appreciated by ‘infrastructural inversion’ (Bowker,
1994), by bringing infrastructures back above ground by means of focusing attention on
118 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
their construction and ordering effects (Barlösius, 2019; Bowker et al., 2009; Bueger,
2015; Opitz and Tellmann, 2015; Shove and Trentmann, 2018).
Infrastructures for research and innovation, like integrated data systems, serve ‘to
bring together communities of practice with very different approaches.’ They constitute
‘a kind of super-laboratory stretched over the entire scientific community’ and facilitate
communication ‘despite very different practices, technologies and skills’ (Star and
Ruhleder, 1996: 112). As ‘epistemic infrastructures,’ they enable and configure ‘the
global flow of knowledge and the epistemic practices that sustain it’ (Bueger, 2015: 2).
For studying the innovation of democracy, this means shifting attention from specific
products and events, like concepts and practices of doing mini-publics, to the infrastruc-
tures enabling their translocal articulation. In a parallel context Knorr Cetina suggests ‘a
shift of sociological attention: from the construction of products and events to the con-
struction of construction machineries and the construction designs that contribute to the
creation of these very products and events’ (Knorr Cetina, 2008: 46).
Here, a key process of social and cultural ordering is going on. Reconstructing how
ontological assumptions and theoretical definitions and classifications are inscribed
into infrastructures of translocal learning means ‘recognizing the depths of interdepend-
ence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real world of politics
and knowledge production on the other’ (Bowker and Star, 1999: 34). Establishing
translocally employed categories, meta-codes and metrices makes locally embedded
practices commensurable; it enrolls them into an overarching frame (Deville et al.,
2016; Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Heintz, 2016; Rottenburg, 2009; Rottenburg et al.,
2015). Inscribed into organizational routines, communication systems, and observa-
tional devices, the framing is not only symbolically and cognitively effective, but also
materially and practically.
Observing practices of infrastructuring and standardization raises attention to ongo-
ing efforts at directing and ordering knowledge flows. It provides a specific angle for
studying the making of ‘translocal assemblages’ (Clarke et al., 2015; Collier and Ong,
2005). Assemblages research often foregrounds heterogeneity and dynamics, pointing
out how circulation involves translation. The focus on practices of infrastructuring
instead foregrounds the practical-cultural ordering of knowledge flows and show how
translocal assemblages may gradually and precariously transform into ‘technological
zones’ as ‘a space within which differences between technical practices, procedures and
forms have been reduced, or common standards have been established’ (Barry, 2006:
239).
Infrastructuring for the doing of mini-publics contributes to a translocal instrument
space: a discursive and mental ‘synthesis’ of differently located experts, texts, and mate-
rials into a shared conceptual space, a practical and material ‘spacing’ by mobilizing
these elements and bringing them into circulation across different sites of practice, and
the installation of channels for systematically ordering communication and interaction
(Löw, 2008). This recursively establishes a translocal cultural and material arrangement
to connect, translate and align locally embedded democratic innovation practices within
the frame of an overarching techno-logic of doing politics: a specific theory (i.e. logic)
of the capacity to produce (i.e. techne) legitimate and performatively effective represen-
tations of the will of the people (i.e. politics).
Voß et al. 119
Aligning a scattered instrument for collective learning and action is valuable for giv-
ing mini-publics momentum. Realizing benefits from systematically ordering translocal
knowledge flows and standardizing translations comes at a price, however. It entails
disembedding innovations from specific local contexts and reducing diversity within the
innovation ecosystem (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2016; Chilvers et al., 2018). It also entails
a concentration of power at the sites where infrastructural devices are designed. As much
as they help to make knowledge flow and to smooth collaboration through a shared sys-
tematic logic of democratic innovation, they do so at the cost of streamlining for a par-
ticular version of such a logic, as ‘one person’s standard is in fact another’s chaos’ (Star
and Ruhleder, 1996: 112). While homogenization works much more subtly by configur-
ing infrastructures of mutual learning than by directly prescribing a specified design for
doing mini-publics, responsibly dealing with these ordering decisions is even more chal-
lenging, because they are concealed by an overt openness for exchange and learning. At
first glance, maps, networks, platforms, meetings, collections of materials, etc. enable
emergence rather than preclude it. Only on a second look does it become apparent that
this is achieved by applying constraints, by channeling and formatting knowledge flows,
and by centrally installing specific frames for translating differences and making them
compatible.
DR&D realizes synergies by silently adopting a technological orientation toward
problems of governability. While mini-publics ideally serve as mediators between gov-
ernment and society, practical requirements make governments the more powerful stake-
holders in the innovation process. Their support is vital for the business of doing
mini-publics, both as formal authorities to adopt recommendations and as financial spon-
sors. Civic activist or social movements, with their view of the crisis of representation,
cannot bring to bear similar resources to influence the framing of innovation challenges.
Thus a bias toward governability, rather than empowerment, gets built into the infra-
structure of the translocal instrument space.
Alternative ontological orientations and functional purposes come up in discussions
about collaborations with civic activists instead of governmental leaders, in proposals
for exploring relations with theories of radical democracy, and in concerns about involv-
ing disinterested citizens for creating artificially tame publics instead of empowering
articulated civic standpoints. Other recurring questions are, for example, whether pow-
erful and resourceful organizers or citizens themselves should define problems to be
deliberated, and whether the boundary between factual information and debatable view-
points is not itself a politically loaded construction. Such questions, however, are like
waves rippling around a pontoon city; they never break over the decks and into the
engine room of the collective learning system. The specific technological orientation
around which DR&D is built effectively filters out such ontological questions and fun-
damental concerns.
Like this, DR&D intensifies interconnectivity and enables organically evolving meta-
phors, frames, and shared knowledge interests at the intersection of dispersed local prac-
tices of democratic innovation. It also subtly selects and directs the ways in which
learning may happen. As a method of translocal learning it is performative: It constitutes
the very object of knowing. Definitions of the purpose and functioning of mini-publics
are built in the design of infrastructures and shape the future course of the democratic
120 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
innovation. Seemingly technical design decisions thus modulate the emergence of future
political realities. By indirectly configuring locally embedded ways of doing politics, the
infrastructuring of knowledge flows for innovating democracy works as a form of poli-
tics at distance (Latour, 1987; Rose and Miller, 1992). Distance here is constituted
through a chain of displacements:
First, politics as a matter of representing the will of the people is technologically articulated as
a method to produce such representations by running deliberative mini-publics (Voß, 2016).
This displaces politics to processes of knowing it, here to the epistemic and technological work
of mini-publics experts (Voß and Freeman, 2016).
Second, the knowledge work among experts of politics again is configured by paradigmatic
commitments, practical approaches and tools as they are developed in specific research
traditions (Knorr Cetina, 1999). This displaces politics once more, now to the development of
specific approaches by which knowledge on politics is produced, here to specific ways of
theorizing and modeling mini-publics and developing methods for observing, experimenting,
describing and evaluating them (Knorr Cetina, 2008: 46).
Third, connections, communications and learning between different local cultures of knowing
politics are configured by infrastructures for exchanging knowledge and relating different
approaches for a translocally integrated understanding and coordinated innovative action (Star
and Ruhleder, 1996). This displaces politics, now in a third turn, to the infrastructuring of
translocal knowledge flows, here the decisions within DR&D for specific approaches of
mapping and recruiting network members, designing platforms for interaction and exchange,
surveying and aggregating mini-publics practices and collecting and storing information.
Conclusion
Studying practices that make knowledge travel brings attention to the ongoing infrastruc-
turing of translocal knowledge flows. The work undertaken to build and expand the
Democracy R&D network as a translocal knowledge exchange and learning platform
sheds light on the making of a specific type of space little recognized in debates about
spatial reconfigurations of politics. Political globalization, transnationalization, etc. are
usually studied with a view to spaces of rule-making and compliance (regulatory spaces)
or to spaces of raising and articulating public problems (issue spaces). By following the
articulation of instrumental knowledge for democratic innovation across different locali-
ties, however, we come across a space in which a specific type of technologized know-
how for doing politics is developed and used. Such instrument spaces incorporate
practices embedded in different localities across the globe. Certain functionally oriented
conceptions of what it is to do politics and how it is to be done effectively perforate
national container spaces of political culture and policy styles. Other than regionally
embedded political cultures and policy styles, such functional conceptions are developed
in translocal networks where they take shape as a specific expert culture (Knorr Cetina,
2007). They compete with historically grown local political cultures in providing imagi-
naries, skills, and evaluative criteria for performing political action (see also Shore and
Wright, 2011). Such expert cultures for technologized forms of political know-how
have been conceptualized as ‘instrument constituencies’ comprising a range of different
Voß et al. 121
practices related to the development and promotion of a specific functional model of
doing politics (Voß and Simons, 2018).
Our study of knowledge practices within DR&D focused on the development, trial-
ling, and installation of specific devices to build and integrate such an instrument con-
stituency. This sheds light on how translocal instrument spaces are reflexively constituted
and shaped. They do not evolve spontaneously. The translocal knowledge space does not
emerge from a wild circulation of different elements of know-how and their wayward
translation with different local contexts where they are freely adopted. Instead the space
is constituted and shaped through dedicated practices of mapping initiatives, recruiting
members, articulating categories for gathering information materials, connecting mini-
publics practices around the world, setting up communication platforms, convening
working groups, organizing conferences and online meetings, circulating survey forms,
and providing archiving systems and wiki-tools. Together, these practices create a trans-
local space that is conceptually and materially ordered by a functional meta-code which
frames diverse practices within an overarching systematic and makes them commensu-
rable (Rottenburg, 2009).
What is at work here is not simply a busy bazaar of decentral encounters, a scape of
flows, or a bubbling repertoire, but a translocal knowledge order. Even if this is not pur-
sued by directly asserting a specific substantial definition of mini-publics and prescrib-
ing its use, the design and installation of an infrastructure for easing and effecting
knowledge circulation and learning works subtly toward a convergence of conceptual
understandings and an alignment of practices. This ordering by way of infrastructuring
knowledge exchange and learning adds to studies of policy mobilities and translocal
policy assemblages that emphasize lose connections, heterogeneous translations, and a
great degree of fluidity (Berger and Esguerra, 2017b; Clarke et al., 2015; Collier and
Ong, 2005; Peck and Theodore, 2010). It shows that, even if gradually and precariously,
translocal assemblages of discourse and practice may become structured more like a
network (a grid of pipes and channels with standardized conditions of carriage) than like
a fluid (an organically evolving pattern of meandering and mixing streams) (see Mol and
Law, 1994).
This is an effect of implicitly or explicitly making decisions for certain ontological
assumptions and categorical distinctions in the design of infrastructure to connect local
practices and to enable knowledge exchange and to facilitate collective learning. Yet, as
with any technology, there is a ‘tension between local, customized, intimate and flexible
use on the one hand, and the need for standards and continuity on the other.’ The inherent
paradox of technology is that it is ‘both engine and barrier for change’ (Star and Ruhleder,
1996: 112). While DR&D’s achievement is the constitution of an integrated innovation
project, it is at the same time narrowing down the ways in which the innovation of
democracy and the doing of mini-publics may be understood and performed. By filtering
out and excluding articulations of concerns and know-how that do not fit the infrastruc-
tural provisions because they relate with other ontological assumptions and categorical
divisions than those inscribed in it, the instrument constituency and the knowledge space
that it constitutes becomes detached from a variety of concerns and historically emerged
and contextually bound purposes of doing mini-publics. Integration comes at the loss of
diversity and the exclusion of specific forms of know-how. This is the ambivalence of
122 Social Studies of Science 52(1)
infrastructuring that is linked with the inevitable selectivity of any systematic order and
standardization for assuring compatibility. In this sense, infrastructuring translocal
knowledge flows and collective learning for democratic innovation entails a specific
form of politics at distance. It indirectly and from far away shapes the way politics is
done across a range of geographically dispersed and differently embedded sites. With the
gradual displacement of politics from the sites of actually doing it to sites of knowing it
and to sites of collectively learning how to know it, and finally to sites of configuring the
infrastructures for doing this, comes a gradual concentration of power (Everts, 2016: 60).
This political dimension of infrastructuring demands a high degree of reflexivity and
responsibility in promoting translocal learning. Considering how ‘existing infrastruc-
tures for valuing, learning, and governing participation can be reconfigured, sensitized,
and imbued with a more responsible disposition’ (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2020: 363) asks
for opening the black-box of infrastructuring as a supposedly neutral endeavor of func-
tional enhancement and for explicitly deliberating and negotiating ontological inscrip-
tions and ‘collateral realities’ that may emerge from them (Law, 2012). Currently ongoing
work for translocal democratic innovation is a special case within the broader field of
STS inspired infrastructure studies, because it is the knowledge of politics itself that
becomes systematized and concentrated.
Acknowledgements
We thank our interview partners and collaborators in the Democracy R&D network for fruitful and
open discussions on the challenges of innovating democracy. Many thanks also to Sergio Sismondo
for dedicated and prudent editorial work on this paper.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The research for this article was funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project no. 290045248, ‘Doing
mini-publics: The translocalization of politics’ as part of – Collaborative Research Centre 1265,
‘The re-figuration of spaces’.
ORCID iD
Jan-Peter Voß https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2633-1652
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Author biographies
Jan-Peter Voß heads the Chair of Sociology of Politics and Governance at Technische Universität
Berlin as temporary full professor. With a background in sociology, STS, and political science he
studies the intertwining of political, epistemic, and aesthetic practices in the shaping of collective
orders. Publications include Knowing Governance: The Epistemic Construction of Political Order
(2016, edited with R Freeman).
Jannik Schritt, an anthropologist, works as a postdoctoral research associate at Technische
Universität Berlin. He obtained his PhD on oil and politics in Niger from the University of
Göttingen. He has published on governmentality, resource assemblages, and protests in Niger.
Volkan Sayman, a sociologist and ethnographer, works as a pre-doctoral research associate at
Technische Universität Berlin. Using insights from STS, he thinks critically about the shape,
usage, and governance of infrastructures which govern our daily lives. In his doctoral project he
investigates the re-ordering of public and private spaces as a consequence of increasingly auto-
mated mobility systems, such as autonomous cars.
