The Hospital Scene: Deepening Democracy with Theatre-led Inquiry

This chapter proposes one way of building democracy through theatre. The empirical content is drawn from a workshop conducted in Greece 2019, at a conference dedicated to performance activism worldwide (“Play Perform Learn Grow,” 2019). Performance activism draws upon the human capacity to play, create and perform, the premise being that people – even if their economic, social and/or political interests are in conflict – can create new relationships, new activities and new ways of moving forward together. The aim of the workshop was to allow a creative conversation that would unpack multiple ways of creating understanding from a real-life incident from rural Uganda, in which a pregnant woman was refused help to give birth at a clinic. Theoretically framed within Brechtian thinking and the concept of deep democracy as introduced by Amy and Arnold Mindell (Amy Mindell, 2008), the chapter argues that the theatre-led inquiry contributed to destabilise customised thinking and provide potential for multifaceted thinking and awareness. In this way, the workshop design enabled complex and embodied ways of reflecting, providing an example of how to build and deepen democracy through theatre.

Inclusive recycling movements: a green deep democracy from below

This paper examines the multiple strategies articulated by grassroots recycler networks to bring about socioenvironmental change. The paper shows how these networks are an emblematic case of grassroots governmentality, whereby urban poor communities contribute to building more inclusive environmental regimes by developing technologies of power more typical of the powerful. These technologies include enumeration, with its resulting self-knowledge; the production of discourses and rationalities of social inclusion and environmental sustainability; and engagement in open and diverse alliances, at times with actors holding apparently antagonistic interests. The paper also reveals how recycling networks are a representative case of deep and green democracy. It is deep democracy, as grassroots networks strive to gain deep and true representativeness in their territories. It is green democracy, as it illustrates alternative pathways to environmental governance that is not limited to state and global organizations, but that also includes a range of control techniques emanating from the communities themselves.

Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics

This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organisations in Mumbai to address poverty—the NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s savings groups.* It highlights key features of their work which include putting the knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting precedents (for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed policies (a strategy that develops new ‘legal’ solutions on the poor’s own terms); a horizontal structure as the Alliance is underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community exchange visits that root innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own data about ‘slums’ which official policies lack and need) to help build partnerships with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support their own organisations. The paper notes that these are features shared with urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are internationalising themselves, creating networks of globalisation from below. Individually and collectively, they seek to demonstrate to governments (local, regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more capable than they in poverty reduction, and they also provide these agencies with strong community-based partners through which to do so. They are, or can be, instruments of deep democracy, rooted in local context and able to mediate globalising forces in ways that benefit the poor. In so doing, both within nations and globally, they are seeking to redefine what governance and governability mean.