Power in Participatory Processes Through an Intersectional Assemblage Lens

To date, there has been limited engagement with intersectionality in democratic scholarship in general and participatory deliberative democracy in particular (Wojciechowska, 2019). Intersectionality emphasises that human lives cannot be reduced to single characteristics and that social categories are socially constructed and dynamic. As such, the use of intersectionality enables a more complex understanding of people’s subjective experiences of inequality and the impact on social justice in the context of participatory deliberative processes. Intersectionality is thus a tool for social transformation, which, at its core, is about power relations and about how these relations determine how particular identities are positioned in society, and how power is used to maintain those positions (Collins, 2019; Yuval-Davis, 2016). However, it is not always straightforward to implement intersectional perspective in democratic practices. To overcome this problem, this paper turns to assemblage theory. Assemblage is a concept developed by Deleuze & Guattari (1988) that helps capture the interconnectedness and dynamism of participatory processes (Bussu et al., forthcoming). We describe participatory spaces as assemblages that coexist, interact and change, placing emphasis on the relationships that these spaces are imbued with. The concept of relationality bridges assemblage theory and intersectionality by emphasising the interconnectedness and dynamic interactions between various elements of identity and social structures. In particular. we are interested in the concept of intersectional assemblage, which offers an approach to intersectionality that harnesses its transformative capacities (Puar, 2006). It emphasises the need to understand 'how' various systems and identities intersect to produce specific forms of discrimination and marginalisation. By considering how identities are dynamically shaped by their interactions with each other and with broader social, political, and economic contexts, it can provide a lens to trace how new publics emerge through participation, how they are embedded within existing structures of power relations, as well as their abilities to form new connections that can open space for social change. In this way, the paper develops an intersectional assemblage framework to examine how power operates within participatory processes, exploring openings to challenge and change the status quo in ways that redistribute power by centring the experiential knowledge of marginalised groups in non-exploitative and non-extractive ways. To do so, we build on emerging findings from the Inspire project that rethinks approaches to citizen participation in policymaking to strengthen intersectional inclusion.