Automatic Transcription of the interview with Sonia Bussu, it may contain errors.

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast, and our guest today is Sonia Bussu. Thank you for your time, Sonia.

Sonia Bussu: Thank you for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you.

Alessandro Oppo: And you are an associate professor at the University of Birmingham in public policy. So as a first question, I would like to ask you: what are you researching?

Sonia Bussu: I'm interested in participatory democracy, and I study democratic innovations—those spaces of participation that allow citizens to have a say on the policies that affect them. I also use participatory research in my work, in my empirical work. So I try to work with participants to co-create policies, but also to evaluate the process and the experience of participation with them.

Recently, in my new project called INSPIRE, which is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, we are also testing arts-based and creative methods to strengthen inclusion within these participatory spaces that often tend to attract the most resourceful citizens. The groups whose voices and experiences are often at the margins of political, public, and social life often navigate many barriers even to access these new spaces of participation. So we are trying to rethink participation from their perspective, co-designing these spaces with them and using a number of different creative methods that can perhaps help address some barriers along education, culture, and language. We're using arts to also embody experiences and bring emotions into democratic spaces.

That's what I'm working on at the moment specifically, but generally for the past 15 years, I've been really focusing on participatory democracy spaces of various kinds. I'm also very interested in social movements and how social movements use these spaces to advocate for deeper social change. I think that gives you a bit of an overview of what I'm doing right now.

Alessandro Oppo: Absolutely. Do you have an example about the co-creation of policies or the co-design process?

Sonia Bussu: Yeah, so I've just concluded a participatory process under the INSPIRE project in the West Midlands, working with young people in Birmingham. We focused on youth employment policies, and we used something called legislative theater, which comes from the tradition of the theater of the oppressed.

We recruited 15 young people, very young—between 14 and 17 years old—from diverse communities and from across the West Midlands. We used our local networks of youth groups and something called the Young Combined Authority, which is an advisory body of young people to the West Midlands Combined Authority. With the help of legislative theater facilitators, these young people created a play through improvisations and games that reflects their experience of trying to access equitable work experience, work placements, and getting the support they need to develop their careers and enter the labor market.

With legislative theater, you really focus a lot on power and intersectional exclusions. A lot of these young people come from very diverse communities, and they might experience intersectional exclusions along race, gender, and class. The play, which is very much based on improvisation, reflects their experience.

Then for the event, we invite an audience of community members and a team of policymakers—people that have, in this case, influence on youth employment policies and that can help address some of the problems that the play identifies. The play, by the way, although it's about very serious issues, is also very funny. It really mocks the system. The title is "Your Fried," which is a play on words on "you're fired" and refers to the fact that the protagonist ends up working for a fast food restaurant, experiencing really poor working conditions and low pay.

What happens after the presentation—the performance of the play—is that the theater facilitators and I worked with two fantastic young people that had been involved with me in another project and then trained to become facilitators themselves. They invite the audience to identify problems and then step onto the stage in the scene to try and change the scenario. Members of the audience, but also the policymakers in the room, are effectively entering the lives of these young people and trying to change the scene to address the problem.

Then there is a dialogue between the audience, the policymakers, and the young people in trying to fine-tune these changes. This sort of opens the way to a dialogue that ends up with actual policy proposals—actually, various policy proposals. Then the policymakers in the room have to think: okay, how can I translate these proposals into tangible change? And they have to make some commitments in front of everyone.

Then there is a follow-up where we bring together the young people and the policymakers. We look at what has been agreed on the night, and then a program of actions is agreed, and we follow up with them. Now, obviously, policymaking is very complex and things don't always happen in a linear way, but the play, which is very visual and brings in emotion, generates these feelings of empathy and solidarity in a more immediate way than just by reading a report or some numbers or just the exchange of rational arguments, which can be very esoteric.

Here, through play, game, improvisation, and theater, you're also challenging power dynamics between the young people and the policymakers, and it's the young people and their experience that frames the whole debate and the whole deliberation. That's the starting point. And then this becomes a catalyst of ongoing dialogue, ideally.

What we're trying to do is not to think about these projects as one event, but really anchor them in the local civil society and link them to live policy agendas so that you can... and this has happened. So now we're finding synergies at different levels—the municipal level, the regional level—to enact some of these proposals. Groups of young people from the Young Combined Authority I've just mentioned are also taking ownership of what happens next, so the young people that have been involved in the project are also involved in the actions that have been agreed. So yeah, this is all generating new ways of working, and it all started with a play.

We need to inspire other participatory processes by using things like pictures or performance lectures and games and play as a way of bringing in different groups to look at specific policy issues.

Alessandro Oppo: I can imagine—but maybe I'm wrong, I don't know—that in an event like the one that you described, there could be maybe less polarization, because sometimes, often, there is, I don't know, one is left, the other one is right, and so they do not talk to each other. Well, maybe in such an event it's different.

Sonia Bussu: I think it's a way of imagining. Like, now we talk a lot about immigration, right? And there is a lot of polarization about immigration. It would be really like bringing on stage the experience of an immigrant trying to integrate in a new country, and that experience frames the deliberation. Community members, irrespective of their background, are able, in a way, to relate to these different experiences—like seeing the world from different perspectives—but in a more visual way. It's really about bringing in emotion and feelings and finding connections also through actual feelings of solidarity and empathy, which are perhaps... connection is perhaps more difficult to develop if you're just reading numbers or if you're just living in a bubble online where you're not really understanding the experience of the groups that, for different reasons, you might be antagonizing.

And so yes, it's a way of creating spaces of dialogue and connection, but not just using words. There's a lot of talk about mini-publics and citizens' assemblies that are very much based on talk and exchange of rational arguments. And that works very well for some groups, but not for all.

What we're trying to do with bringing in the arts is really just not thinking about rational exchanges, but also emotions and the role that emotions play in democratic settings, the importance of empathizing with different experiences of life and of the world. And specifically, we want to really center the experience of those groups that are often the ones kept at the margins and are often victimized.

Through this process, the idea is that they also develop a better sense of agency and collective agency. So you move from individual—what might be perceived as individual weaknesses—to actually systemic oppressions, and then building collective agency to address these oppressions. That's all, that's what the theater of the oppressed is based on. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed. I really recommend it if you haven't encountered it today, but it's really about democracy as emancipatory education. And so that's the work we're doing—centering experiences that are often marginalized and using those experiences as a catalyst for dialogues with the wider community to co-create policies that can help us foster social justice. I think that's the intent of the project.

Alessandro Oppo: It's beautiful. I really like the approach. Yeah, a lot of times we forget about emotions. While we try to analyze the text, I don't know, logic, fallacies, and so on, but there are emotions.

Sonia Bussu: Yeah, and I think perhaps a mistake of liberal democracies is that it can feel very technocratic. And I think that also ushered in populist reactions. Populism, particularly far-right populism, is very good at using emotions, although negative emotions—fear. And so I think we might need to engage more with emotion, but the positive emotions like hope and empathy and solidarity and all those feelings that connect us as human beings.

Alessandro Oppo: How do you think a social movement can use technologies or maybe other kinds of governance in a way that they can be heard?

Sonia Bussu: I think social movements are already reclaiming a lot of these new democratic innovations. And there is also, like, in the digital world, there has been a social movement-led reaction to the commercial social media, social networks, and social media platforms with civic tech. So there is a lot of exploration of how we can use digital democracy also to support this work.

I don't think that participation and democracy can only happen online. I think what I'm finding in my work is that in-person, physical connection is really important to create a sense of belonging. And I think because societies are increasingly atomized and particularly young people have been living online all their lives, having these spaces where we actually connect are incredibly important.

The young people I work with possibly recognize the importance of connection and feeling heard by their peers has even greater value than seeing the policy change and having the policymakers listening to them, which is also important. But it's like this connection, this sense of belonging, and that is where they really develop their democratic skills as well. And I think online you can never fully create that.

So I use a lot of civic tech, and I don't know if you are familiar with the platform Decidim. Yes, so we use Decidim for our work to support the work that happens in person. So, for instance, the policy proposals that we co-create through this theater improvisation and sort of theater-led dialogue are then added to Decidim as a policy tracker, where we can track implementation of these proposals.

The idea is to make the whole process more visibly accountable, because the whole community and the young people can check this policy tracker, and each commitment is linked to specific organizations. The idea is that things don't get lost or don't get lost as easily as they could otherwise. But it's very difficult to create critical mass in these civic tech platforms, because no matter how great they are in terms of helping more interactive participation of people, there's not many people there.

What's happening is that the public sphere—whether social movements or individual citizens—we're all in commercial platforms. And it's very difficult to create a sort of response to these commercial platforms where we have no control over the algorithms and what we see and what we don't see. There's such little transparency about how these communities are formed and engineered sometimes. This bubble created by algorithms is so problematic. And I think it's very difficult to create a sort of publicly accountable platform that can build the same critical mass as the commercial platforms. I don't know what your experience is in this respect and if you use civic tech, and you probably, yeah.

Alessandro Oppo: I saw that there is... I mean, building a platform nowadays, it's quite easy. Having the people using the platform is hard.

Sonia Bussu: Exactly. And I think everyone is building their platforms, but we can't really create that critical mass that can make a difference, right?

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. Maybe instead of building everyone his own or her own individual platform, a collective effort to build, I don't know, one platform or something that can really compete with commercial social networks that, as you said, are sort of a black box in terms of algorithms. And also, I mean, the aim of social networks is to keep you stuck in front of the screen.

Sonia Bussu: Exactly, exactly. And I think there is a place for civic tech and technology, but I don't see democracy only happening there. It's more like supporting and helping us continue the conversation, but I think we need to connect more in person. I think that's what I find—that's where the magic happens, you know, and things develop through these new connections.

Alessandro Oppo: But do you mean just like in person or in person like with the help of some AI or civic tech tool? Because I also, when you were talking, I also believe that in person is really like where you can feel emotions. Also, like, in a video call you can feel more than just chatting. And I was thinking that maybe the future of civic tech tools should go in this direction, so where people interact with other people, but at the same time there is like a system, a software that can help those people. I don't know, maybe what is at the moment what could be like a normal political conversation between two people, then it also becomes like a sort of public conversation because that data is extracted and contributes to something bigger.

Sonia Bussu: That's really interesting. You'd have to happen in a transparent way though, because, yeah, through platforms that have some sort of public accountability, because otherwise, of course, there is some room for manipulation of conversation or how they're edited or how they're... But yes, definitely. I think there's a lot to explore, but the key is to create transparency around these processes.

And so even the role of AI is very problematic right now, but simply because there is no democratic governance of AI, how it works, how it's developing. It's all in the hands of private companies. Even the developmental models of AI—it's beyond even the reach of universities because they don't have the money to compete with the private sector and attract the best brains or even put in the money for the sort of computing power that is needed for AI to function and to develop. And so that is very problematic.

I think all this technological development is fantastic and can support democracy only if there is also a democratic governance of this technology and accountability and transparency when they are developing. And at the moment we're so far away from that. I don't know if it's too late, but...

Alessandro Oppo: I hope not. And it makes me think that it's a sort of circle, because to have new ways of governance, AI can be helpful, but at the same time, AI as it is now is a sort of black box. And so it's a sort of circle.

Sonia Bussu: Exactly, exactly. The fact that companies like OpenAI have got so much power over the development of technologies that have profound effects on all societies is so problematic. And now I think, for instance, in the UK there is an agreement between the UK government and OpenAI for AI to enter all public services. And again, what impact will they have on the way the police works or on the way local government works? Because we have such little understanding of how AI actually works and such little power on controlling how it develops. And we know already that there are so many entrenched biases because these models are designed by a very narrow demographic of people that enjoy certain intersectional privileges as well. So yeah, it's very, very problematic.

I think it's going to be interesting times ahead. But I suppose that's why it's more important than ever to create spaces for people to connect and develop critical thinking skills and collective agency and democratic capabilities, which at the moment as a society we don't really have.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, you define interesting times—usually it means bad times.

Sonia Bussu: I read a lot of sci-fi, so I think I've got a very dystopian perspective on things.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, because that is the thing—like we could actually have like a very, I would say, just society in the future using this technology to maybe, I don't know, distribute power so that also marginalized communities can also have an impact. Or on the other side, we could also be... I can't think of the dystopian word—I don't know, everyone on TikTok, not able to...

Sonia Bussu: Exactly. It's the difference between the Star Trek world and the Black Mirror world, right? So we'll see. We'll see where we develop. I think there's a lot of people working on positive innovations and democratic innovation. There's some fantastic work that the commons do and also the civic tech commons as well. But there's still not the sort of critical mass, right? We still... yeah, it's difficult to connect.

And perhaps, yeah, we should try and connect these experiences more and create these spaces, create spaces for cross-pollination. And yes, I mean, there have been some exciting experiences of like the municipalist waves and the Fearless Cities. I don't know if you've heard about them, but these are cities that really invest a lot in participatory governance and create connections between institutions and social movements and prioritize social justice.

Barcelona was the sort of leading city of this network of so-called Fearless Cities, but they're all over the world. But then it's very difficult to sustain these networks. And I think there's also very little awareness of what these different cities and experiences are actually doing. There's very little media attention, so yeah, it's difficult to sustain and keep the momentum on these alternative ways of understanding and governing societies. But there's also a lot of work, so yeah.

Alessandro Oppo: A lot of work that can be done also.

Sonia Bussu: Exactly. I think like there's all these more autonomous zones of resistance, and finding ways of connecting them is going to be more and more important, I think. Yeah, I realized that we wanted to talk about assemblage—we haven't got there yet.

Alessandro Oppo: Exactly. I wanted to ask you if this can be connected in some way to your paper.

Sonia Bussu: I really think so, because assemblage gives us that lens to look at democracy in all its dynamism and its fluidity. It really refers—assemblage theory comes from Deleuze and Guattari, two philosophers that in the 1980s published "A Thousand Plateaus," and they explore, they basically define assemblages as these dynamic configurations of people, institutions, technology, spaces, and including non-human and material entities like objects, animals, or even the weather.

And so all these elements come together to shape processes to create these dynamic configurations that are called assemblages. And then if you—I liked this lens to look at democracy because it also gives an opportunity to recognize its messiness and its fluidity. And so traditional views of democracy as a system and often just institutional arrangements don't really reflect the sort of fluidity and relationality of democracy that is always in the making—always in a state of becoming.

Then obviously assemblages are not inherently democratic. They can also reproduce inequality, but what makes an assemblage democratic is its orientation towards freedom, equality, and inclusion and its openness to transformation. And so I find it useful the way Deleuze and Guattari talk about power.

And yes, now that can relate to the work that I do. And recently, I also co-edited a special issue on democratic assemblage with Hans Asenbaum. I really recommend it if you're interested in this lens because there's some fascinating papers that also look at a statue as a catalyst for democratic encounters or even snow. So yeah, it's quite interesting, and I think it broadens our understanding of practices.

And I like the way power is also understood in assemblages as distributed agencies, so as emerging from the interaction among these different components—human and non-human—and for example, within a digital platform or within a public space. And so, yeah, there's a lot of terminology linked to assemblage, but what it can help us really reflect on is this push and pull dynamics, because assemblages are shaped by tensions between, for instance, in democratic assemblages, grassroots activism and institutional control, between openness and closure, between empowerment and co-optation.

And so I think an assemblage lens gives us an opportunity to zoom in and look at where there are spaces for change through these interactions. So I think the sort of assemblage perspective is also what is informing the way we're looking at the participatory processes using co-design and co-creation that we are implementing in the INSPIRE project.

I think like we're still testing whether it works as an analytical lens, but also as a normative theory of democracy, particularly when it complements critical democracy. So I'm not sure how familiar you are with critical democratic theory, but I think there's a lot of synergy with assemblage. It aligns closely like this emphasis on fluidity, contingency, relationality.

So, for instance, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of fugitive democracy by Sheldon Wolin. So fugitive democracy describes democracy—like real democracy—as episodic, transient, emergent. And so it arises in a moment of, through moments of collective actions and resistance, but often outside formal institutions. But it is also precarious because it's constantly under threat from co-optation.

And so this conceptualization of democracy really values pluralism, disruptions, and radical transformation. And these qualities really resonate with assemblage's emphasis on what Deleuze and Guattari called deterritorialization. So Deleuze and Guattari talk about territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization to understand how change happens.

And so territorialization stabilizes an assemblage, so it will reinforce existing norms, existing hierarchies. Deterritorialization disrupts these norms and opens space for change and democratic possibilities. And reterritorialization then occurs when innovations are absorbed back into the existing power structures, and so this potentially neutralizes that transformative potential. And this push and pull dynamics are at play the whole time.

And so Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor is this heuristic of molar versus molecular desire always in tension. So the molar desire is like that kind of power that supports stability and control—so bureaucratic norms, for instance, or neoliberalism in terms of how we understand the relationship between the economy and politics. And molecular desire is actually what drives creativity and disruption, and that often comes from grassroots movements or social movements.

And so this dynamic between molar and molecular shows that power in democratic assemblages is continuously contested and relational and emergent, so it's never really static or centralized. And so that's why I find it very useful as a lens to understand this relationship and to really think about democratic innovations and how they relate to civil society and social movements, but also to centers of decision-making power in institutions. I don't know if that was overwhelming because it's a lot to take in with assemblage, and I'm still trying to navigate the work of Deleuze and Guattari.

Alessandro Oppo: It's super interesting also the way how power can be conceived in different ways, because the lens we use to conceive power also changes how we use power. And so power can be hierarchical, collective, or like in this case also including animals, plants, and so on. So it's very interesting.

Sonia Bussu: Yeah. Well, I think like there's one thing—I think one of the critiques, the big critiques against assemblage theory is this idea of flat ontology, so treating all entities as equally agentic. And this has been criticized because people say, well, you're obscuring power asymmetries by claiming this flat ontology. Because then you're saying that, I don't know, like a tree will have the same power as a human being. But it's not what assemblage tries to do.

And I think we can highlight that better when we combine assemblage with critical democratic theory. And then you can reorient it towards normative goals like justice, equity, and ecological sensitivity. Because actually what assemblage does is it challenges anthropocentrism, because by recognizing non-human agency, it's challenging the anthropocentric lens that we use to understand the world and to make it. And it encourages what's called "response-ability"—that's a concept that Donna Haraway introduced. And this is the ethical responsiveness to others that we have.

So we do have a responsibility, but not just towards other humans, also towards the non-human. And so that's, yeah, that's the way I think sometimes that the flat ontology and the distributed power has been misunderstood in assemblage. But it's not about taking responsibilities away from humans because we do have responsibility by actually recognizing the agency of the non-human world.

And so making our—the way we even think about democracy and we build democratic institutions—less anthropocentric. And I think anthropocentrism has led to climate change and a lot of other things that have used nature as a backdrop for all human actions, but actually this is not sustainable.

Alessandro Oppo: It made me think, I don't know if you have read it, "The Mushroom at the End of the World" from Anna Tsing. Because the mushroom—the matsutake—that lives in symbiosis with the pine. So I will stay here for another hour talking about this. I think you have to go.

Sonia Bussu: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we should have a podcast number two to continue the conversation. But yes, I think it's been really lovely. Thank you for inviting me. And yeah, I'm always happy to continue to explore these ideas.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you.