Un/common grounds: Tracing politics across worlds

Abstract

In this paper, we explore possibilities for reconceptualizing cosmopolitics by focusing on sites and situations where the problem of un/commonality plays a central role. Stemming from ethnographic research carried out as part of an ongoing collaboration on ‘Landscapes of Democracy’, we outline a study of democratic politics that extends beyond the politics of a single world and attends to landscapes of political practice that embed, and sometimes deny multiplicity. We follow the chronological unfolding of our fieldwork in Germany and Australia, and trace politics across worlds by telling alternating stories about how commonality and uncommonality are achieved in specific parliamentary settings in Frankfurt, Berlin, Darwin and Miliŋimbi – a Yolŋu community in the Northern Territory. We interrogate the relationship between commonality and uncommonality, not as an opposition, but as a series of situated efforts to find out and articulate what needs to be made un/common, for what purposes, and on what terms. Bringing into focus such explicit and implicit framings of cosmopolitics suggests that there is potential for partial and situated practices on the ground to rework un/common futures through the continual reimagining of pasts and the configurations of people and places to which these futures are tied.

Búskomor politics: Practising critique in the ruins of liberal democracy

“…Finally, the third mode of doing I encountered during fieldwork in a Yolngu community in the Northern Territory in Australia in 2016 (Dányi & Spencer, 2020). This Indigenous community, like many others in the Northern Territory, was badly affected when the Australian government decided to solve various problems – including drug use and domestic violence – by sending in medical staff escorted by the military.…”

Cultural Cosmologies of the Internet: Situating Digital Networked Technologies in Diverse Moral Universes

“…As such, cosmopolitics denotes a politics across worlds that lacks -or even more strongly, denies the necessity of -a common ground as a precursor to performative action (Dányi & Spencer 2019). Looking back to the archive examples of online learning and tools for managing digital objects helps to make visible ways of working technologies as social and material assemblages, and to reveal a relational ethic of digital design.…”

The modified issue: Turning around parliaments, politics as usual and how to extend issue-politics with a little help from Max Weber

“…Instead of delineating a separate political sphere, Latour argues that five different meanings of 'the political' could be mapped onto five different stages of issues. In 'political-1', new non-human entities bring with them new associations and modifications of the collective; describing this as political, in terms of cosmopolitics, was one of STS's most important contributions (Dányi and Spencer, 2020). 'Political-2' refers to the possibility of unanticipated consequences and entanglements of different actors, making the issue into a problem for a public generated by it; in other words, it is political in the sense pointed out by Dewey's and Lippmann's pragmatist takes on politics.…”