The democratic public and the practices of the oppressed

Abstract

Democratic theory, especially deliberative democracy, centrally focuses on verbal communication. In contrast, social movements, especially those fighting against oppression, often use practices such as dance, theatre, or other practical activities. In recent years, theorists have also turned to practices beyond words, for example, artistic expressions and the contributions they can make to democratic life. We expand this line of argument by exploring experimental and transformative practices and their connection to the democratic imperative to overcome oppression. Drawing on practical examples and on the literature on the epistemology and pedagogy of the oppressed, we explore the mechanisms through which experimental and transformative practices can help citizens to improve their epistemic position and to develop their political agency. We argue that even though such practices can also be used by non-democratic forces, democratic societies need to create space for, and take seriously, the contributions that such practices make to democratic life.

Introduction

Democratic participation is fundamentally about talking to each other – or so one might think when reading contemporary theories of democracy, especially deliberative democracy (e.g. Bohman, 1998; Cohen, 1989; Dryzek, 2000; Fraser, 1990; Gutmann and Thompson, 2004; Habermas, 1992; Lafont, 2020; Young, 2002). Social movements and activist groups, in contrast, often also engage in other practices: they use bodily exercises, dance, art performances, or other forms of shared action. This discrepancy is puzzling: why, for example, would a women’s group organise a dance project instead of engaging in political discussion? It may be valuable, for various reasons, to perform participatory theatre projects in poor neighbourhoods, but this does nothing to change the political situation, for example in terms of power relations or electoral results. Even worse, might not such activities crowd out genuinely political action?

In this article, we take the opposite view and argue for the democratic value of activities in which citizens come together and jointly engage with materials, bodies, and spaces in experimental and transformative ways. Our central argument is that through such practices, citizens – and especially the members of oppressed groups – can generate new forms of knowledge and acquire experiences that shape their democratic (self-)understanding and their relations with their fellow citizens. These practices do not replace deliberation but can enable, prepare, and potentially transform it.

Take community gardening – it might be seen as a paradigmatic ‘non-political’ activity, cultiver son jardin instead of engaging in politics. But as ethnographic research shows, it can have a deeply political dimension. In a qualitative study of three community garden projects in Scotland, McVey et al. (2018) show that the ties that are woven between the participants can lead them to consider afresh social and political issues of their local communities. In one of the cases, questions about the use of communal land and the decision power about it arose, leading to intense political discussions (McVey et al., 2018: 52–53). As this example shows, community gardening can create conditions in which individuals are better able to engage in politics if this becomes necessary, for example if they want to protest a decision taken by the local council. ¹ In this sense, cultiver notre (!) jardin can contribute to the democratic health of a community. ²

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in practices ‘beyond words’ from the perspective of democratic theory (e.g. Curato et al., 2019: 7; Felicetti and Holdo, 2024; Hammond, 2019; Hendriks et al., 2020; Machin, 2022; Mendonça et al., 2022; Rollo, 2017). The aim of this article is to contribute to this emerging literature, arguing that democratic politics should turn its attention to how citizens directly engage with different elements – their bodies, physical objects, images, situations, and so on – which are experienced as materials for creative experimentation and transformation. We take inspiration from the practices of social movements, especially those working with oppressed groups. ³ For example, the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ shows the epistemic and political value of joint engagement with one’s material and symbolic world (Freire, 2017). ⁴ Of course, oppression is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon (Young, 1990), but these approaches typically engage with groups that have historically been marginalised in ways that are captured by different conceptions of oppression. ⁵ And as will become clear below, one of aims of these practices is precisely to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms of oppression they are subjected to.

The experimental and transformative practices we are interested in can be understood as lying on a spectrum with more conventional communicative practices at one end, many hybrid or combined forms in the middle, and practices in which experimental and transformative engagement is central at the other end. The contrast between conventional communicative practices and the practices we focus on can be illustrated by the difference between participating in a local assembly to discuss and decide about certain collective issues and community gardening: while in the first case, joint world-transformation is not directly involved in the practice, community gardening requires direct cooperation in tasks in which the world is directly experienced as material to be acted upon. Through these activities, the relations of participants to their bodies, to materials, and to other subjects become more salient, or salient in different ways, than in verbal communication alone. As we will make clear, this is also the case in many other practices used by social movements and activists, such as dance or role-playing, which also involves a creative engagement with bodies, materials, and spaces. Although the lines between these different practices can be blurry, our aim is to develop some arguments that show the political relevance of practices that lie more at the practical end of the spectrum. This will also throw new light on traditional forms of political engagement, for example local assemblies, which have often been interpreted first and foremost through the lens of verbal communication, but which can be understood in a broader sense if our arguments are taken into account.

More concretely, we argue that joint, creative engagements with the world are essential for democratic life for two main sets of reasons. First, they play an epistemic role: they can generate new knowledge or activate knowledge that is otherwise merely theoretical, and help citizens articulate political claims in ways that ‘mere talking’ would not achieve. They thereby create spaces in which new meanings can be articulated, tested, and refined, especially by oppressed groups. Second, they contribute to developing a sense of political efficacy (Pateman, 1970: 45–66) and motivate citizens to engage in broader transformative action. An important element for both aspects is that these practices often bring people’s bodies to the fore of politics, in ways that practices oriented mostly towards verbal communication do not (see also Beausoleil, 2017; Machin, 2015, 2022).

These insights should be integrated into democratic innovations, as they currently flourish at local, national, and transnational levels (Dean et al., 2020; Smith, 2009), but often with a focus on pure deliberation. Critics have asked whether such democratic innovations manage to address the many problems that democratic institutions and practices currently face – and specifically, whether they effectively address social oppression and the epistemic injustices that come with it (e.g. Geissel and Newton, 2012). We think that including experimental and transformative practices might contribute to making such democratic innovations more effective. But there are also some questions about the possibility of such practices being used for non-democratic aims, which we will also discuss.

Recently, democratic theorists have returned to arguments about democratic participation in spaces beyond traditional politics, for example the workplace (e.g. Christiano, 2019; Ferreras, 2017), to make democracy a true ‘way of life’ (Dewey, 1988 [1939]) and to understand its various practices in a problem-based way (Saward, 2021; Warren, 2017). Moreover, there is the tradition of ‘common work’ (Barber, 1984; see also Boyte, 2003, 2020) that emphasises that citizens should do things together. While we wholeheartedly endorse the call for democratising (paid and unpaid ⁶ ) work, the practices on which we focus in this article have an additional, specific contribution to make. Not all individuals, and especially not all members of oppressed groups, stand in formal employment relations; at this point, few workplaces are in fact democratic; not everyone can easily engage in ‘common work’. Therefore, social practices of joint world-transformation and experimentation, as we discuss them here, should be considered in addition. ⁷ It is one way in which the importance of social movements for democracy can be emphasised (see also, in general, Woodley, 2021).

We present our arguments in the following steps. First, we show that democratic theory has, until recently, not focused very much on joint practices of world-transformation and experimentation, but also that there is a renewed interest in such practices, and what our arguments add to this discussion. Second, we present several examples of creative practices used by activists in the fight against oppression. ⁸ Third, we draw on a discussion with Freire and others to explicate the democratic role of such practices, focusing on their epistemic effects and on their capacity to foster a sense of political efficacy. Before concluding, we discuss to what extent such practices are at risk of being co-opted or abused by non-democratic forces.

Words, words, words . . . – and what more?

As noted above, deliberative democratic theory has a strong focus on talking. A recent book puts it like this: ‘We view deliberative democracy as an aspiration that places reasoned discussion at the centre of political life’ (Curato et al., 2019: 4, emphasis in the original). The literature on deliberative systems has deepened this focus on communication into a more general understanding of democratic deliberation as spread through different social spheres (Mansbridge et al., 2012), including everyday conversation (Tanasoca, 2020).

This focus on verbal communication can also be found in many epistemic approaches to democracy (e.g. Estlund, 2007; Landemore, 2013, 2020), for which the value of democratic deliberation can be measured according to its capacity to produce good decisions. Arguably, also many republican (e.g. Arendt, 1958) and agonistic (e.g. Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2000; Mouffe and Laclau, 1985) approaches, despite having a broader and somewhat different understanding of speech, continue to give a particular emphasis to words, and especially to their rhetorical power.

However, not all deliberative and participatory approaches to democracy are silent about the political relevance of practical activities. First, in addition to arguments about workplace democracy as mentioned above, authors in the participatory democracy tradition, and particularly those in close contact with pragmatism (e.g. Boyte, 2003), have emphasised the role of cooperative work. For example, in Strong Democracy, Barber (1984: 209) talks about ‘Common Action as Common Work and Common Doing’. Barber understands common work as a set of obligatory civic activities in which citizens are equal participants. It is important for several reasons: it ‘exerts a powerful integrative influence on the doers even as they are achieving common goals’ (Barber, 1984: 209), and it cultivates ‘civic ideals of service and direct[s] attention away from fractious private interests’ (Barber, 1984: 211). In sum, ‘completing the cycle of citizenship begun with common deliberation and common legislation, these projects provide a complete institutional framework for civic action and civic responsibility at the national level’ (Barber, 1984: 211).

In his turn, Forester (1999: 111, 2012) focuses on the democratic role of cooperative planning activities, for example those of citizens engaging in ‘city building in practice’. Forester shows the democratic relevance of practices through which citizens transform the world. This turns citizens from ‘done-to into doers’ (Forester, 1999: 116). Following Forester, Harry C. Boyte (2011: 633) presents a broader notion of ‘public work’ as ‘a politics of productive action by diverse agents to create a democratic way of life’. Citizens should be seen as ‘co-creators’ of the world (Boyte, 2011: 634). Accordingly, politics must include public work, which is valuable for its ‘self-organized governance’, ‘relatively egalitarian and cooperative efforts across divisions’, ‘practical concerns for creating shared collective resources’, ‘adaptability’, and ‘incentives based on appeal to immediate interests combined with cultivation of concern for long-term community well-being’ (Boyte, 2011: 637–638). Such public work is intrinsically connected to the tradition of the commons, and centrally involves taking care of common resources.

Our contribution aims at complementing these participatory approaches, but it differs from them in three main aspects. First, our arguments do not only concern common or public work; instead, they look at activities mostly found in the realms of activism and grass-root politics. Second, we aim at spelling out, in particular, the ways in which oppressed social groups can benefit from this expanded understanding of democratic practices. Finally, our approach focuses on the epistemic advantages of participation in cooperative practices, because such practices open up paths to achieve important epistemic goals. These goals are related to the articulation and communication of injustices and the struggle against them, which relates to a second focus of our approach: the enhancement of citizens’ sense of efficacy.

Reclaiming the political value of experimental and transformative practices involves reclaiming the political relevance of the human body. We thereby join forces with authors who have, recently, emphasised the embodied condition of political practices even from within the deliberative paradigm. A first point, emphasised in particular by feminist authors, is the acknowledgement of bodies in democratic processes – all speakers are, after all, embodied beings, ‘living, breathing, desiring, suffering, ageing human beings’ (Machin, 2022: 13). ⁹ Iris Marion Young (1996) had noted, early on, that factors such as tone of voice, gestures, and bodily postures matter for deliberation, while Butler (2015) has drawn attention to the role of bodies in movements such as Black Lives Matters. In recent years, Amanda Machin (2015, 2022: chap. 4) has used a phenomenological approach for understanding the role of bodies in deliberation, but also in democratic politics more broadly speaking, for example when activists use their bodies in hunger strikes. In line with these authors, our aim is to vindicate the embodied condition of citizens: practices in which citizens join for collective world-transformation reinforce the political salience of this embodied condition.

Another direction in the literature is to acknowledge that activities other than words can contribute to deliberative processes. One important point is to also acknowledge the role of actively chosen silence or non-engagement (e.g. Gray, 2023; Green, 2010; MacKenzie and Moore, 2020; Rollo, 2017: 596–599). Authors also emphasise the way in which artistic utterances, for example dance, can play a role for deliberation. For example, Bächtiger and Parkinson (2019: 25) write that events such as theatre plays or dance performances, while not directly ‘reason-giving’, can ‘symbolize inclusion, or legitimize proceedings or agreements by anchoring them to a widely accepted symbol of membership or collective endorsement, or to indicate respect for and deliberative standing of others in a venue before the deliberation begins’. Rollo (2017) uses the term ‘democratic deeds’ for describing activities such as protesting, or refusing to participate in a conversation, which can play an important role in deliberative systems. Mendonça et al. (2022) go further in arguing that non-verbal communication should be seen as part of deliberation if it plays a role in the reason-giving process, supports inclusivity, and induces reflective processes. They discuss examples such as the use of pictures (e.g. photographs), sounds (e.g. songs), and ‘embodied presence’ (e.g. in protests) that can fulfil these criteria.

Niemeyer et al. (2023) show the value of group-building practices that build trust among participants for enhancing the deliberative quality of mini publics. Hendriks et al. (2020: 2) focus on what they call ‘democratic mending’ or ‘everyday democratic repair work’, that is activities that bring citizens together and create new bonds of solidarity and trust between them, for example by organising knitting protests against gas extraction in Australia (Hendriks et al., 2020: chap. 4). As they argue, such activities help to ‘repair’ the democratic social fabric and to reconnect citizens in ways that ‘cannot be achieved by novel deliberative designs alone’ (Hendriks et al., 2020: 10). In line with this literature, we emphasise that practices in which citizens come together to creatively engage with the world can contribute to deliberation. However, as we will show, the point is not only to do that, but also to enable new epistemic openings and enhance citizens’ sense of agency.

We should finally note that the practices we focus on aim at making a contribution for the audience, ¹⁰ but first and foremost for the participants, which are often groups that are marginalised or oppressed. We take inspiration from activist practices that have long been used in the fight against oppression, and the literature on the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and related approaches (Freire, 1976, 2017). In the next section, we turn to some examples of such practices.

World-transformation and experimentation in the fight against oppression

In this section, we present a range of examples of joint practices of world-transformation and experimentation from contexts in which citizens struggle against oppression. The range of relevant activities is broad, and their boundaries are sometimes blurry. We have selected these examples by considering how the body of participants gets activated (together with words, or instead of them), and by paying attention to how ‘scripted’, ‘pedagogical’ set-ups are used to encourage the participants to go beyond the scripts and to become active themselves, both within the practice and potentially beyond it. In other words, even though there is often a kind of script, the point is not to be bound by it, but to encourage individuals to deviate from it – this is a tension, but one that these practices use productively. By providing a script that allows the use of one’s body, or of materials, or of contexts, instructors invite participants to open up, to become spontaneous, and to bring in their own ideas and perspectives. ¹¹

We start with a simple case – on the more ‘scripted’ end of the spectrum – of the use of bodies to raise awareness of structures of oppression, then we move on to Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ that aims at developing a sense of efficacy in pedagogical settings. Finally, we consider examples in which oppressed groups use their bodies, in dance and theatre. ¹² While they involve different forms of communication, verbal and non-verbal, what is common to all is that participants engaging in them jointly deal with different elements – bodies, words, objects – in experimental and transformative ways.

The ‘privilege walk’

Our first example lies at the boundaries between communicative practices (‘talking’) and the kind of transformative and experimental activities that we focus on, by using a bodily experience to raise awareness about structures of oppression. This widely practised exercise comes under the name of ‘privilege walk’ and exists in numerous variations. ¹³ The core idea is that participants stand in a row in the middle of a room or open space. They are read a series of prompts, and for each, are asked to move forwards or backwards, as many steps as they find appropriate for symbolising the event or fact in the prompt. ¹⁴ These prompts have to do with socio-economic, gender, and racial disparities in life circumstances. The aim is to illustrate differences in social positions, which are then discussed in a debriefing session, in which the participants jointly consider what it ‘feels like’ to go through this exercise, articulate their thoughts, and reflect on the wider meanings of different positions in society. Versions of the exercise in which individuals step backwards or forwards based on their own identities have been criticised for ‘rely[ing] on the experiences of people with marginalised identities to create a powerful learning experience for people with privilege’ (Bolger, 2018). This problem can be attenuated if individuals are not asked to answer the prompts according to their own identity but are given short descriptions of certain social types and are asked to imagine what the answers would be for them. This is a highly scripted exercise, in which the space for creativity and spontaneity is rather low. However, it is still valuable as a contrast to purely verbal practices in which the same issues could also be addressed.

Alphabetisation methods in the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’

Next, let us turn to a practice in which the experiences of oppressed groups themselves are central: the way in Paulo Freire’s (1976, 2017) ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ embeds mundane learning process – alphabetisation campaigns for peasant communities in Latin America – into an emancipatory process of coming to understand one’s position in the world and developing a sense of efficacy. ¹⁵ Freire’s point of departure is the question of how the oppressed can become actors of their own emancipation. This is a necessary condition for real liberation from oppression, since a struggle for emancipation in which the oppressed play only a passive role will tend to perpetuate oppression (Freire, 2017: 28). The core idea – which we will develop in more detail in the next section – is that oppressed social groups can learn that they live under conditions of injustice and develop their own (practical) knowledge of oppression in a particularly adequate way if they directly engage in collaborative problem-solving, that is practical activities in which they actively engage with a problem, a social norm, a situation, or a linguistic expression (Roberts, 2022, 2023). ¹⁶

Carried out by activists, these pedagogic practices consisted of several steps. First, introductory sessions would be organised in which the notion of culture would be introduced, by discussing the meaning of pictures of everyday situations. Pedagogues aimed at conveying the idea that culture is something that is produced and belongs to everyone, including the illiterate peasants. After that, several preparatory activities would be carried out in and with the communities, to obtain an understanding of their situation, the symbols they used, the aesthetic interests they had, and so on to select the universe of vocabulary that would be studied (Roberts, 2022: 49).

After these preparations, the practical implementation started (Roberts, 2022: 52–53). The sessions would be organised in groups of ‘teachers’ (activists) and ‘students’ (those in need of alphabetisation). The former would start by presenting a first, ‘generative’ word, for example ‘tijolo’ (‘brick’). The word would be presented by using a slide depicting a situation of construction. Once the situation had been discussed in its different dimensions, the word was linked with the object it designates. Attention would be directed to the word itself and its components (syllables): Ti-jo-lo. Students would be then encouraged to connect each syllable with its phonetic family, for example, ta-te-ti-to-tu. At some point, different phonetic families would be presented and compared. Students would have the opportunity to create new combinations of syllables. After the first session, they would be asked to do some homework for the next day, namely, to bring as many word combinations as possible by drawing on the syllables they had learned.

In his depiction of those sessions, Freire shows how the peasants would quickly learn the experimental creation of new words, and at the same time develop deeper forms of practical empowerment (Roberts, 2022: 53–54). The method involves a multi-level practical engagement with materials and situations: it involves connecting words to the everyday world of the ‘students’, and this involves actively engaging with people’s form of life on the side of ‘teachers’. Most fundamentally, it also involves creating materials that can be easily linked to people’s everyday problems and engaging creatively with their own language. Language is seen, from the start, not only as a medium for communication, but also as material for joint creative experimentation.

Dance as a form of political expression

Another example in which participants directly engage in creative experimentation and world-transformation is the role of dance in political activism. Political theorist Dana Mills (2016, 2021), herself a dancer, has explored this role, drawing on pioneers of modern dance and social movements that use public dancing as a form of expressions. Her examples range from modern dance as an expressive art form to Gumboot dancing and dancing flash mobs; for our purposes, the latter are more relevant because they involve ordinary citizens. ¹⁷

Gumboot dancing is a form of group dancing in which dancers wear the name-giving gumboots and perform sequences of rhythmic stamping, clapping, and slapping their boots with their hands, which creates characteristic sounds. It changes between group and soloist (‘single’) routines, with the audience often clapping along. Gumboot dancing is said to have been developed by black miners in South Africa who, while working in the mines under colonialism, were not allowed to speak to each other; other accounts cite the influence of ‘White’ tap dancing, to which black Africans developed their own dances in response (Mills, 2016: chap. 4). If the first account is true, Gumboot dancing was invented in a situation in which individuals literally had no voice and were not allowed to communicate; through the rhythms of stamping their feet and clapping their boots, they found ways to do it nonetheless. They communicated with each other, but also raised their voice towards those ‘who established the system of racial segregation that perceived that mining community as unequal’ (Mills, 2016: 66). Gumboot dance ‘was both entrenched in the relationship between the white bosses and the black miners and subverted it’ (Mills, 2016: 69); however, bosses also tried to co-opt and use it as an instrument to boost morale among workers. Both emancipatory forms (which celebrate the agency and community of Black workers) and oppressive forms (which are used to signal their inferiority) continue to exist (Mills, 2016: 70–80).

Another example of political dance is the One Billion Rising movement, a feminist movement that wants to draw attention to the ubiquity of sexual harassment and sexual violence. The name stems from the estimation that one billion women undergo such experiences in their lives (Mills, 2016: chap. 5). It was started by activist Eve Ensler, a survivor of sexual violence, who experienced dancing as a transformative reappropriation of her violated body. The movement spread worldwide thanks to online communication: dancers gathered for flash mobs on Valentine’s Day, in shopping centres, parks, or other public spaces where they performed a dance routine. While following the same music and containing the same basic elements, this routine would take on different forms in different cultural contexts and social settings. The dancers appropriate the public spaces, drawing attention to the problem of violence against girls and women, challenging the silence and denial that often surround this topic (Mills, 2016: 85–88).

Mills reads dance as a form of communication through bodily language. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, she argues that in dancing human bodies, both the similarity and the differences of persons become visible (Mills, 2016: 23–24, 72). This gives dance the potential to subvert people’s views of themselves, the groups they belong to, and the spaces in which they move (Mills, 2016: 2). Dance can allow individuals, and especially disadvantaged groups, to ‘share spaces in their bodies and [it] provides choreographic characteristics that allow those spaces to unravel’ (Mills, 2016: 6). This is particularly relevant when groups are being marginalised ‘by depriving them of access to spoken language’ (Mills, 2016: 24). Dance can be an alternative way of articulating demands and making bodies visible in public space. As Mills (2016: 122) writes:

Dance is a way to dissent from politics practised in words. It is a way to reclaim spaces where those are not always granted; it is a way to investigate a world experienced by a single embodied subject and in its relationship to others. It allows for systems of inscription to bring it into being as manifold embodied languages; in so doing, it allows its subjects to occupy spaces not always available to them otherwise.

The examples show how the unfolding of the epistemic and agential potentials of non-verbal communication is in part derived from engaging with one’s body and physical environment as loci for creative experimentation and transformation. We also see that, in contrast to the previous examples, scripts can be reinterpreted and adapted to local contexts, by the participants themselves, which can be a first form of agency that they experience.

Theatre of the oppressed

A last example of joint, experimental, and transformative engagement with materials and situations is the ‘theatre of the oppressed’, which was developed by Boal (2008) and his collaborators in Latin America in the 1970s. As an element of campaigns to support the poor and to increase literacy, they used artistic forms of expression to help individuals articulate their concerns and perspectives. Boal (2008: xxi–xxiii) starts from the assumption that theatre is, and always has been, political, but that it can be so in different ways. Often, theatre has been used by the ruling classes to symbolically reinforce the existing social order, turning the audience into passive spectators (e.g. Boal, 2008: 44). The ‘theatre of the oppressed’, in contrast, breaks up the divide between spectators and actors. Individuals are invited to join the action on stage and to develop their own storyline. They are thereby changed ‘into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action’ (Boal, 2008: 97).

In workshops, individuals would first be invited to get to know their body and to learn to use it as a means of expression through a series of exercises (Boal, 2008: 102–103). Then, they are invited to get more and more involved in the plays, for example by telling the actors how to resolve a crisis in the plot, or by intervening directly on stage. Boal (2008: 115) argues that by playing out – rather than verbally describing – different solutions, individuals are forced to give a specific meaning to words, for example ‘revolution’, that can remain too ambiguous to facilitate communication. He describes the example of a drama in which a young woman described her relationship problems (Boal, 2008: 116):

. . . she always started with more or less the same phrase: ‘He came in, embraced me, and then . . .’. Each time we heard this opening phrase we understood that they did in fact embrace; that is, we understood what the word embrace denotes. Then one day she showed by acting how their meetings were: he approached, she crossed her arms over her breasts as if protecting herself, he took hold of her and hugged her tightly, while she continued to keep her hands closed, defending herself. That was clearly a particular connotation for the word embrace. When we understood her ‘embrace’ we were finally able to understand her problems with her boyfriend.

The opportunity to use body language allowed this young woman to convey a message that she was unable to articulate in verbal language. In other formats, individuals are invited to try out and rehearse, in a play, possible solutions to situations of social conflict or oppression that they experience, for example resistance to an exploitative boss in a factory (Boal, 2008: 117–119). This can strengthen their agency in the real-life situation, not only by understanding possible consequences of different courses of action, but also because it supports their motivation: ‘The practice of these theatrical forms creates a sort of uneasy sense of incompleteness that seeks fulfilment through real action’ (Boal, 2008: 199). Through such forms of interactive theatre, Boal (2008: lx) writes, ‘we are discovering that we can change ourselves, and change the world’. Various formats that have been inspired by Boal’s original ideas are now practised worldwide, to articulate grief and the experience of violence and oppression, and to support individuals in finding ways forward.

In this section, we have provided several examples of the kinds of practices whose political value we emphasise in this article. We have presented them to illuminate our main claim, namely, that their epistemic and agential power derives from the fact that they involve direct forms of joint, creative engagement with the world, experienced as material for experimentation and transformation. By presenting them from more to less scripted, we have intended to disclose also how fundamental creativity and spontaneity are for unfolding this potential. In the next section, we explore the political potential of such practices in more detail.

What contributions can experimental and transformative practices make?

In this section, we develop the arguments about the contributions that such practices make to democratic life, in particular in the fight against oppression. Broadly, these contributions can be divided into two broad areas: epistemic and enhancing citizens’ sense of efficacy.

Enhancing the epistemic quality of democratic life

Experimental and transformative practices make specific contributions to political life by enhancing its epistemic quality. To illustrate these, it is helpful to contrast them with a scenario in which the participants read a text with relevant information about the topic and then discuss it together. Of course, nothing guarantees that participants (or, derivatively, audience members) make the relevant experiences through the practices in question, and nothing excludes the possibility that merely discussion can also have such effects. We take it, however, that the likelihood of such epistemic contributions is greater if not only verbal communication is used.

The first argument for this claim is that such practices open up new forms of articulation. The reasons for why verbal articulation is not as accessible to individuals can vary – from external obstacles such as taboos on specific topics to past trauma or other psychological challenges, or sheer lack of words (e.g. for non-native speakers). In such cases, the language of the body may be more readily available to individuals, helping to create new forms of articulation and communication. The girl in the example from Boal above, who could not communicate the troubles with her boyfriend by words alone, is a case in point. We can also imagine that many women taking part in One Billion Rising dances might find it difficult to talk about their experiences of sexual violence, not least because of stigma. Taking part in a dance can be a way of expressing one’s anger, but also one’s will to resist. Freire also described the articulation of insights as one of the features of the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’: ‘As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena’ (Freire, 2017: 55). ¹⁸

The second argument that underlines the importance of experimental and transformative practices is their role in overcoming epistemic blockades. Using bodily expression, emotions, and shared experiences makes it possible to take up evidence that contradicts one’s own worldview or sense of identity, or psychological states such as dogmatism. Psychological research has gathered much evidence about the ability of human beings to practise ‘denial’ through strategies such as selective uptake of information or arbitrary weighting of evidence (e.g. Bardon, 2019; Cohen, 2001). Here, we see a relation to the role that art can play in democratic public discourse. Art historian and philosopher Vid Simoniti (2021), for example, argues that even if we stick to the ideal of rational public discourses as articulated by Rawls and Habermas, we should acknowledge that artistic work, for example, satires, novels, or TV series, can help overcome such epistemic obstacles, by challenging individuals’ cherished belief systems and by showing the world from the perspective of other groups (see also Mendonça et al. (2022) on visual and sonic contributions to deliberation).

The third argument is that the practices in question allow individuals to relate to cognitive content in different ways, which in turn contributes to new knowledge or a new awareness of existing knowledge. For example, it can create awareness for background assumptions one has unconsciously held. For Freire and his colleagues, for example, it was very important to transmit to their students a sense that ‘culture’ is not something for literate people only, to which illiterate people have to bow. In other words, Freire attributes to the practical methods of his pedagogy an anti-ideological function that breaks away from the conceptualisations of the world from the perspective of the oppressors. Experimental and transformative practices can also make knowledge salient in ways that purely verbal exchanges are unlikely to achieve. A practice such as the ‘privilege walk’ is meant to ‘bring home’ the reality of unequal opportunities in a way that is more intense and memorable than a mere verbal discussion. As such, it is more likely to make theoretical content relevant to individuals’ own lives.

These new forms of awareness are particularly important for understanding social relations and one’s own position within them. Role-taking, in theatre and other forms of performances, can make individuals rethink the role(s) they hold in real life and positions they embody. The contrast between hierarchical social relations in real life and the egalitarian social relations that are practised within these activities contains an important lesson in this respect. Freire (1970: 53) put this point as follows: ‘The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow’. The fact that the participants do something together lets them experience equality and belonging to a group. This may not be easily achieved in purely deliberative settings, especially if the participants have been socialised into thinking about themselves as underlings who have no right to speak. In such contexts, trying to directly engage in deliberation would likely not result in an egalitarian exchange, and thus fail to realise the democratic ideals it is meant to express.

In these ways, the experimental and transformative practices we discuss can contribute to the fight against oppression by making both oppressed groups and others more aware of societal structures and social positioning. This is an important epistemic contribution that is urgently needed in the face of the complexities of oppression: individuals or groups can be both oppressed (along certain dimensions) and privileged (along other dimensions); not all claims about who is oppressed by whom can be taken at face value. ¹⁹ By bringing more voices and perspectives into the discussion, a more nuanced and honest understanding of oppression can be developed.

Enhancing citizens’ sense of efficacy

The second set of political contributions are related to citizens’ capacity to develop a sense of efficacy, which is necessary for becoming full political agents. Developing a sense of efficacy on the side of citizens has become a major preoccupation for those who want to revitalise democracy (Calhoun et al., 2022). Purely communicative practices, such as mini publics, may certainly foster a sense of efficacy. However, the effective decision-making power of these practices is often limited, and the effect of a single individual’s contributions may be hard to perceive. In practices of joint experimentation and world-transformation, in contrast, one’s efficacy in the world can be made immediately evident. Participants not only become aware of their own capacity for agency, but also develop this capacity in richer ways, together with others. ²⁰

Through the kinds of practices we have described, individuals can, first, become aware of their individual or collective efficacy. Freire’s method of alphabetisation considers individuals not as passive audience members, but as subjects in their own learning process. It aims at participants developing ‘impatience, vivacity, invention, and revindication’ (Freire, 1976: 100), allowing them to discover that they are able to create and recreate the world. In the alphabetisation sessions, peasants develop a sense of efficacy by learning how to build words right from the first session. This makes them aware of their capacity of actively engaging with symbolic and cultural resources, even with the few means initially at their disposal. Individuals make the experience that they can use their creative capacities in ways that make a difference.

Individuals can, second, develop practical skills through forms of joint engagement with the world. This point is, obviously, central to the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, which is here strongly influenced by Deweyan pragmatism (Wilcock, 2021). For Dewey (1988 [1916]), all pedagogy involves engagement in practical activities. For example, students should take care of a garden to learn about botany, biology, and so on. Inserting children’s learning processes into practical contexts contributes to a different kind of learning than the learning from books, in which knowledge is something that is part of their world and that they can use to solve practical problems (Freire, 2017: 54).

However, Freire’s perspective adds an additional dimension: directly engaging with environmental conditions in practical contexts has a strong political meaning. This is because when oppressed social groups engage in such activities, they acquire the skills and capacities that are necessary not only for building more awareness of the injustices they experience, but also for more transformative approaches to the world. In addition, the social relations in joint practices can also offer opportunities for learning social skills, for example how to diffuse tension in a group or how to resolve misunderstandings during a practical task.

All these dimensions of experimental and transformative practices add up, third, to a strengthening of individuals’ motivation to transform social relations, specifically social relations of oppression. The point is that compared to merely verbal practices, individuals have greater opportunities for trying out what political action could look like, exploring, for example, what it feels like to literally stand up for one’s position. They can thus acquire a deeper sense of their own rights, and even a sense of a moral obligation to stand up for themselves. Again, the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ saw this as a crucial element, because engagement fosters the ethical commitment of participants to transform the world:

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged in to respond to that challenge . . . Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed. (Freire, 2017: 54)

For Freire, denouncing injustices is not possible without this ethical commitment, since injustices can only be articulated when the world is not perceived as unchangeable, and individuals consider it as part of their responsibility to change it. Such an ethical commitment, in turn, requires at least a minimal sense of efficacy, as a condition for agency, which is fostered through methods like those used in the alphabetisation sessions. But it is also developed and cultivated in collective practices in which learning is linked to engaging with materials and situations.

In sum, these different ways in which experimental and transformative practices contribute to the epistemic and motivational situations of individuals, and especially of members of oppressed groups, cannot easily be replicated by practices in which ‘talking’ is the central form of expression and communication. Our point is not to deny that the articulation of insights and the giving of reasons are crucial for democracy. Instead, we claim that democratic societies should also make space for experimental and transformative practices of joint engagement with the world, especially for the members of oppressed groups. These can help prepare deliberation and thereby transform it, but they can also make contributions that deliberation alone is unlikely to make.

What does this mean in more practical terms? Of course, this suggestion can be put into practice in different ways, which depend on concrete contexts. However, we take it that a key imperative is that democratic societies must provide spaces – both in concrete terms, for example in terms of available public spaces, and in a metaphorical sense, for example in terms of available time – in which such practices can take place. For example, if schools and other educational institutions focus only on preparing individuals for the labour market, there is no space for learning democratic practices in ways that would facilitate citizens’ participation in such activities later in life.

Second, our arguments invite democratic institutions, organisations, or social movements to create opportunities for individuals to initiate and engage in such practical activities, for example by allowing citizens to take time off salaried work and receive some income subsidy for the duration of a project. This could go hand in hand with the creation of opportunities for public work, not so much, in our view, as a matter of compulsory service, but as a matter of removing obstacles and creating incentives (e.g. one could think about reduced student fees or scholarships for students who do a year of civil service). It seems that now it is often members of relatively privileged groups who can initiate and engage in such practices because they have the time and resources available to them. Despite all good intentions, this situation risks perpetuating exclusion and oppression because the initiatives for such activities cannot be developed directly from within oppressed communities.

A third practical suggestion that follows from our arguments is that strategies of democratic innovation, for example experiments for citizen engagement, could also involve practical elements. For example, deliberative mini publics on climate politics could involve going to the laboratories of researchers in the relevant fields, visiting premises, or engaging in experimental observation and experimentation in ecosystems. Certainly, there are often limitations in resources to foster this kind of political activity. But as the case of public or common work shows, these activities themselves can contribute to creating the necessary resources, for example in the sense of an increased motivation of citizens to contribute to public goods.

Non-democratic uses of experimental and transformative practices

Before concluding, we want to discuss one important objection that might be raised against our proposal to provide more space for experimental and transformative practices in democratic life. This objection asks whether there might be risks connected to giving up the deliberative core of democratic practices. Non-deliberative practices can, and often are, used by non-democratic, oppressive groups: think, for example, of the artistic practices used in many fascist regimes, or of the marches or survival trainings organised by right-wing groups. What, it might be asked, prevents a group of white men who reject feminism and racial equality from using the very same practices? ²¹ The question thus is: is there something inherently democratic and emancipatory in the kind of experimental and transformative practices we have discussed?

At first glance, the answer seems to be ‘no’. Like many other democratic practices, they can be, and are sometimes, used also by non-democratic forces. One might try to argue that an art project celebrating a right-wing politician is somehow different in spirit from the participatory art projects we have discussed above, but this merely begs the question. As we have mentioned with regard to certain uses of Gumboot dancing, sometimes such practices – or at least very similarly looking ones – can be used not to fight, but to reinforce, oppressive structures.

We acknowledge this point, but it does not undermine our argument about the importance of taking such practices seriously. We support this claim with two arguments.

The first is a ‘tu quoque’ argument: the same objection can be raised also against many other democratic practices, including deliberative ones, which can also be used by groups that ultimately pursue non-democratic aims. Deliberative equality can be simulated, with outsiders being subtle excluded or not being taken seriously. There is an inevitable gap between the ideal of deliberation and its real-life instantiations, and this opens up the possibility of staging deliberative practices in ways that contradict the ideal. ²² The same is true for the practices we have discussed in this article. But this does not mean that they could not be of value, if exercised in the right spirit and with the right aims.

The second is a matter-of-fact argument: As a matter of fact, non-democratic uses of such practices can be found. But this does not mean that the democratic use becomes somehow tainted, on the contrary – it makes the question of whether democratic groups should also use such practices all the more urgent. One might even raise the question of whether such practices might be necessary for democratic life to remain stable. This could be held either as a general claim or – maybe more plausibly – as a conditional claim, for example referring to the continued existence of oppressive structures that can only be overcome by also drawing on such practices, or by referring to the use of such practices by anti-democratic forces, which requires a counter-weight by democratic forces. We here remain agnostic on this question, because the answer is likely to depend on many contextual factors, including the cultural traditions of different countries, which need to be evaluated case by case.

We thus cannot claim that experimental and transformative practices can only ever be put to democratic and emancipatory uses. But let us, in a somewhat speculative spirit, offer some reflections on relevant differences between the practices we have in mind and the practices typically used by non-democratic groups. What characterises many of the practices of the oppressed, especially when they move from the ‘scripted’ to the more ‘spontaneous’ stage, is an invitation to open oneself up, to show one’s vulnerability, and to risk failure. The material world, including one’s own body, may not always respond as one wishes; for example, one may stumble when trying a new dance move or fail to get a movement right in theatre playing, running the risk of looking ridiculous. This distinguishes the practices we have discussed from the – often very controlled – practices of non-democratic groups, for example marches. Because they are experimental, they make one vulnerable to experiments going wrong; because they are transformative, they make one vulnerable to the resistance of the matter that is meant to be transformed. One may need the help of others to get out of a situation in which the material world refuses to bend to one’s will, which creates opportunities for experiencing solidarity. This is why there may, in the end, be a certain renitence in the adaptability to these practices to non-democratic ends.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that the focus of many democratic theories on deliberative communication creates a blind spot with regard to the political role of transformative and experimental practices: activities in which citizens actively engage in (re-)producing and dealing with concrete materials and situations, using their bodies, and articulating their social positions and relations. In contrast, participatory approaches to democracy, especially those drawing on the pragmatist tradition, have pointed out the political value of cooperative activities such as ‘public work’. Our aim has been to strengthen the understanding of the political role of joint practical experiences by drawing on insights from the pedagogy of the oppressed, particularly the work of Paulo Freire, on the one hand, and on the analysis of further examples, on the other. The pedagogy of the oppressed shows that engaging in cooperative activities of role-playing or problem-solving, and not only in communicative ones, is fundamental for the kind of epistemic and agency-enhancing work that is needed for oppressed social groups to challenge existing relations of domination and oppression in democratic societies. While communication remains crucial for democratic practices, democratic societies and their citizens can and should broaden their understanding of the repertoire of democratic practices, to also include and cultivate activities focusing on joint world-transformation.