I am also fascinated by participatory democracy practices. Since 2012, I have been working on the Participedia project directed by Mark Warren at UBC and Archon Fung at Harvard University, and currently I am a collaborator. Participedia is an open-source, online database of public engagement processes used around the world and of public opinion associated with such processes. My role involved helping design surveys for experts and participants, and analyzing the data as it accumulates, as well as bringing in my theoretical expertise on political participation. The project received a $3 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada in 2015. Currently, we are working on a paper that theorizes ‘When, Where, and Why Might Elected Political Elites Adopt Democratic Innovations?’ While we have general understandings of democratic deficits and how democratic innovations might address them, we often fail to ask the question: What kinds of democratic innovations would it take for elected politicians to trust the people? The heart of our theoretical contribution is in elaborating deficits of inclusion and collective decision-making from the standpoint of the problems they generate for elected officials. Doing so shows how democratic innovations might address these problems in ways that appeals to elected representatives. Our theory is grounded on the cases in the Participedia dataset (www.participedia.net). This paper is being prepared for submission to a generalist journal.
I also published two papers regarding participatory governance: in Turkey, and in Ghana and South Africa. The first one comes out of the research I conducted on the participatory forums that emerged following the Gezi Park protest movement in Turkey in 2012. The movement inspired people from all walks of life and all ideological affiliations— even apolitical or otherwise indifferent people— to participate in both the protests and the forums. I wrote an article, entitled “Reclaiming the Public Sphere in Turkey: Arendtian and Habermasian Interpretation of Forums,” which was published by Research Turkey. For the second paper, I worked with environmental researchers to study the effect of accessing natural resources on community participation, and we published an article, entitled “Water Materialities and Participatory Governance: Implications of Water Quality, Access, and Conditions for Participatory Engagement in Ghana and South Africa,” in Society and Natural Resources.
Extending from my interest in participatory practices, I published on gender disparities in classroom participation and governance (See CV for publications).