L.M. (Lisa) Herzog, Prof

VICI Project "Working Democracy": see website under this link.

The political philosophy of work – expanding our vision (funded by the Ammodo Award). For a project description, see this file. Tatiana Llaguno Nieves was the postdoc in this project from 2023-24, followed by Darlene Demandante. For the call for expressions of interest for a short research visit (September 2024) see here. For the CfP for the summer 2025 conference see here.

In the SCOOP Project , I co-supervise Sayoni Santara's PhD in this project, Hannah Lee in this project, and Ilya Lavrov in this project.

In 2025, the SOCION program will get off the ground: link.

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PAST PROJECTS

The SCISO project - Science with Society - that I co-funded and lead at the Global Young Academy.

Funded by Volkswagen Foundation, 2019-22. Details at https://globalyoungacademy.net/sciso/

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Democracy and its futures – between governance and counter-publics (with Jan Spurk, Paris)

Funded by DFG and ANR, 2019-2022

DemoFutures will analyze current trends and possible futures of democracy in the mid- and long-term, bringing together perspectives from sociological theory and political philosophy in a critical perspective. It will focus on the contrast between, on the one hand, the instrumental logic of governance that dominates most “official” democratic politics, and, on the other, the expressive and subjective logic of public criticisms and protest.

Citizens experience an “erosion crisis” of democratic practices and institutions. One of the factors behind it is the increasingly powerful logic of governance, which reaches from the local to the global level, and which is superimposed upon, and often replaces, democratic forms of decision-making. It leads to a sense of inauthenticity and an experienced “lack of alternatives.” Nonetheless, we can also observe public mobilization, criticism and protest, which often crystalize around specific issues, e.g. local infrastructure projects. They lead to the development of critical publics off the beaten tracks of the dominant public space. The deliberation that take places within these spaces offers the potential to turn into counter- publics, in which alternative futures can be imagined. It is worth noting, however, that the dynamics of these protests and movements in France and Germany take on rather different dynamics, a fact that requires further analysis.

In order to understand possible futures of democracy, two dimensions of these movements need to be understood: their subjective logic and their perceived expressive meanings – which are explored by critical sociology – and the practices and institutions of deliberation – which are explored by theories of deliberative democracy. Hence, DemoFutures aims at bringing together a team of French and German researchers from these two disciplines. Junior and senior researchers from the Université Paris Descartes – Université Paris Sorbonne Cité and from the University of Groningen will collaborate in a series of parallel and intertwined lines of research, and organize a number of events in order to create a French-German network of scholars who work on the future of democracy.

The project will develop an interdisciplinary account in which these two perspectives are intertwined, and it will analyze “exemplary cases” from France and Germany in a comparative perspective. Attention will be paid in particular to the background conditions of the digital public space, and the relations between experts and agents of protest. Thus, French-German synergies will be brought about both on the level of methods and approaches, and on the level of the objects of analysis.

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Forschungsverbund "For Democracy", project on deliberative practices in the workplace, see here:  https://www.fordemocracy.de/projekte/projekt-07/

Funded by the Bavarian Ministry for Research, 2019-2022

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Münchner Kolleg für Ethik in der Praxis (of which I'm a co-PI, and involved in the supervision of two PhD students), see here: https://www.kompetenzzentrumethik.uni-muenchen.de/_mkep/index.html  

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, 2019-2022