For the Editor's Choice of our Newsletter, we wrote a teaser on Prof. Dr. Karen Celis and Prof. Dr. Sarah Childs' piece on democratic practices through a feminist lens.
Feminist Democratic Design (FDD): Why do we need it, What is it and How does it work?
Despite what the mainstream narrative may suggest, political representation has not been "solved" by the mere presence of women in politics. In their piece Feminist Democratic Design and the Redress of Intersectional Representational Problematics, Karen Celis and Sarah Childs' analysis makes this painfully obvious.
Democratic representation is not a level playing field. Nothing new under the sun, you might think, we have known this to be the case for quite some time now. But what to do about it? Karen Celis and Sarah Childs propose to engage in Feminist Democratic Design (FDD). FDD reconceptualizes Saward's Democratic Design (DD) project of identifying practices that solve systemic incomplete democratization through a feminist lens.
According to Celis and Childs, this feminist perspective is necessary to meet the specific challenges that intersectional representation poses in contemporary politics.To effect this, they propose to draw attention to the specific needs of majority, minority and marginalized women in three phases of design:
1. Design thinking, 2. Designing and 3. Building. This means that to succeed intersectionally, a practice for solving incomplete democratization needs to be both conceptually, planning-wise and practically tailored to accommodate women in all their diversity.
Intersectional, feminist and democratic: FDD surely is ambitious, but deeply interesting!