Open Democratic Theorizing

Over centuries, democratic theory has developed emancipatory ideals of inclusion, empowerment, and transparency. These ideals, however, have hardly been applied to the process of theorizing itself. Democratic theory is a product of the ivory tower. This paper sets out to confront this problem and formulate a democratic approach to democratic theorizing. It does so by conceptualizing democratic theory production as a participatory space and applying the values of democratic innovations. Open democratic theory needs to include affected people, empower those on the margins, and facilitate transparency. The proposed approach attempts to realize these ideals by building on three sources: grounded normative theory, which develops theory in an ongoing conversation with the data; participatory research, which invites participants as research collaborators; and new materialism, which flattens the hierarchies between researchers, participants, and data. The resulting approach of open democratic theorizing draws on an ongoing investigation of the concept of democracy in the Black Lives Matter movement.