Conference Agenda

We live in difficult times. Knowing and Acting becomes a complicated relationship, where political repression globally is on the rise, people are threatened, when expressing their democratic opinions or when they try to protect their neighbours. In times of fascism rising, in times of socio-political polarization, ecological crisis, and rapid technological transformation, this symposia trilogy brings together scholars to reflect on the potentials of knowing and acting in the setting of education for democracy, democracy learning and democratic experience as well as cultural democracy.

In our triple symposia, democracy and organisational democracy is understood as an embodied, contested, and continuously unfolding social practice (Butler 2015; Dewey 1916; hooks 1994; Negt 1971, 2004; Papadopoulos 2013) integrating knowing and acting. Emphasizing becoming over being means that actors like youth, educators, policymakers, and researchers, participate in democratic becoming, co-produce knowledge and transform educational settings and institutions into a space of resistance, possibility, and hope.

Like this, our symposia trilogy intends to reimagine how democracy can be cultivated as a lived, relational, and continuously evolving practice—one that actively shapes the complex challenges of our era. Centered on the concept of democracy-as-becoming, the contributions explore how the organization of education can function both as a site and a process for co-creating democratic futures. Drawing from the three Horizon Europe sister projects—AECED, CCLAB and DEMOCRAT—the triple symposia examine and analyse how democracy-as-becoming can be analysed, understood and fostered across institutional levels.

Examining how citizenship education is organized and provided, the governance structures and national curricula to school and classroom practices are discussed and the multiple relationships between knowing and Acting will be reflected here: As described in the special call of organisational education, we will ask, whether we identify the relational patterns outlined there: Is knowing and acting in a productive relation in the organisational settings and institutional strategies, we try to open and support culture change? In which way organisations and governance shape and organize the potential transformation by democratic approaches and citizenship education?

The papers of the first symposium reflect on the contextual embeddings, on the ways, how organisations, regional networks and multilayer governance systems refer to the intention to live democratically and educate towards democracy-as-becoming. This first symposium reflects on the ways of learning in, of and between organization becoming relevant here.

The second symposium of our trilogy reflects on the second pattern addressed in the special call: here, the relational pattern of knowledge in action is addressed. What takes place in those encounters, what happens in aesthetic and embodied interventions and encounters, in which way may they open institutionalized settings? What are the results of these learning intentions in and maybe even of organisations? The symposium refers to empirical studies on exemplary aesthetic and embodied interventions in institutionalized settings.

The third symposium of this trilogy addresses the notion of openings. It reflects and discusses on organisational democracy and it´s enabling spaces as a question of de-institutionalisation. It offers new perspectives on resistance, on accepting difference, on transgressing the given and on opening up and “lifting the roof” of our educational institution. So which relational patterns of knowing and acting we might find here? Clearly seeing the “knowing doing gap” in institutional life, the apartness of knowing and acting in so many ways, we start from there and discuss the fourth relational pattern as knowledgable acting and transforming our educational institutions from within. Deep aesthetic experience then supports knowledgable action of de-institutionalizing any given educational institutionalized settings. In this trilogy – AECED; Democrat and Critical Change Lab - may contribute to support such openings.

This presentation examines aesthetic and embodied (un)learning in higher education. It traces democratic practices that emerge through entanglements of bodies, discourses, technologies, institutional architectures, and affective atmospheres (Asenbaum et all, 2023). It proposes curious pedagogies as a way of imagining relational futures in education for democracy, thus contributing to organizational education debates on how knowledge is enacted, resisted, and transformed in educational organizations. Empirically, this entry draws on research undertaken within the AECED (Transforming education for democracy through aesthetic and embodied learning for democracy, responsive pedagogies and democracy-as-becoming) project, concentrating on a five-month long teaching trial conducted by the author. Doing higher education democratically calls for attentive, experimental, open-ended frameworks that combine curiosity with care (Valtonen & Salmela, 2023). In the trial, aesthetic and embodied learning interventions were carried throughout an undergraduate seminar with the aim of enhancing more democratic educational practises and fostering lived experiences of democratic learning. This presentation dissects the trial, recounting not only the seemingly successful interventions but rather focusing on its ‘fails’. Everyday acts of resistance in the learning events such as avoidance, non-cooperation, even protest, can be seen as creating, building, and experimenting with democratic power relations (Lilja, 2022). The presentation suggests that following the cues of participants’ unruly bodies, their dismissive gestures, uncomfortable silences, emotional out-burst, and disruptions is foundational to understanding democracy as becoming. Such “unruly” moments are interpreted as organizational enactments of knowledge and action, illustrating how learners negotiate, challenge, or refuse the norms and expectations of democratic subjectivity within organizational settings. Furthermore, such an approach allows critically examining the concept of democracy itself, learning and unlearning the expectations underlying democratic subjectivities, relationships, and practices, and offering an embodied, aesthetic, and relational perspective on organizational education.

Asenbaum, Hans., Machin, Amanda, Gagnon, Jean Paul, Leong, Diana, Orlie Melissa & Smith, James Louis (2023) The nonhuman condition: Radical democracy through new materialist lenses. Contemporary Political Theory 22, 584–615. DOI: 10.1057/s41296-023-00635-3 Lilja, Mona (2022) The definition of resistance, Journal of Political Power, 15:2, 202-220, DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2022.2061127 Salmela, Tarja & Valtonen, Anu. (2023). Exploring Earthly relations through curiography. In Marta Calás & Linda Smircich (eds.) A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms, Elgar Research Agendas, 141–159, DOI: 10.4337/9781800881273.00012.

Democratic societies face profound challenges, and democracy in schools is likewise under strain. Learning about democracy is often limited to procedural understandings and deliberative traditions (Sant, 2019). Furthermore, educational institutions remain hierarchical, adult-led, and resistant to participatory practices. This creates a contradiction: students are expected to develop democratic competencies, yet institutional structures in their everyday school environment offer them few opportunities for influencing decisions affecting them. This paradox raises critical questions about power relations in formal education and the kinds of democratic learning these environments can genuinely support (Aly et al., 2022; Sant 2019). This presentation addresses these tensions by drawing on feminist participatory approaches to education and design, which position children and young people as knowledgeable actors capable of reimagining democratic practices (Hart, 1992; Pascal & Bertram, 2009). From this perspective, young people possess valuable insights into how democracy is experienced—or constrained—in their everyday lives, and they can actively contribute to reshaping democratic ways of knowing, being, and acting (Bessant et al. 2016, Black et al. 2022). Our work aims to advance knowledge democratization and foster pluriversal approaches (see Mignolo, 2002; Zembylas, 2017) in citizenship education, foregrounding relational practices grounded in care, respect, and recognition of diverse ways of inhabiting the world. To support these aims, we introduce the Critical ChangeLab model, an educational format through which young people collectively identify and interrogate issues creating tensions in their lives while exploring possibilities for alternative futures. Each Lab is grounded in locally meaningful concerns and brings youth together with educators and civil society actors. Change is understood broadly and in layered ways—from reframing how democratic questions are perceived to initiating concrete actions within students’ environments. This process includes rethinking anthropocentric assumptions in Western democratic traditions, cultivating relationships of care with human and more‑than‑human others, and examining how technologies mediate democratic possibilities. Transformations emerging from the Critical ChangeLab may involve shifts in understanding, reconfigured relationships, or modest, situated interventions—each shaping how young people perceive democratic issues and exercise agency within their social, educational, and civic contexts. Drawing on our experiences implementing Critical ChangeLabs across diverse educational settings—formal and non‑formal, and with participants of different age groups—we reflect on the opportunities and tensions involved in advancing epistemic pluralism, interculturality, and a geopolitics of knowledge that revalorizes diverse ways of knowing.

Aly, A., Blackmore, J., Bright, D., Hayes, D., McKay, A., Lingard, B., ... & Youdell, D. (2022). Reflections on how education can be for democracy in the twenty-first century. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 54(3), 357-372. Bessant, J., Farthing, R., & Watts, R. (2016). Co-designing a civics curriculum: Young people, democratic deficit and political renewal in the EU. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48(2), 271-289. Black, R., Walsh, L., Waite, C., Collin, P., Third, A., & Idriss, S. (2022). In their own words: 41 stories of young people’s digital citizenship. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(4), 524-536. Hart, R. A. (1992). Children's participation: From tokenism to citizenship (No. inness92/6). Mignolo, W. (2002). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. The south atlantic quarterly, 101(1), 57-96. Pascal, C., & Bertram, T. (2009). Listening to young citizens: The struggle to make real a participatory paradigm in research with young children. European early childhood education research journal, 17(2), 249-262. https://doi.org/10.1080/13502930902951486 Sant, E. (2019). Democratic education: A theoretical review (2006–2017). Review of educational research, 89(5), 655-696. Zembylas, M. (2017). The quest for cognitive justice: Towards a pluriversal human rights education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 15(4), 397-409.

From a transformational perspective, in their book ‘Free, Fair and Alive’, Helfrich and Bollier (2020) offer a new onto-epistemology of commoning as a creative and neglected way of social life. This approach suggests a onto-change toward the “basic idea of profound relationality” (Helfrich and Bollier, 2020: 43). It addresses the ‘great transformation’ at the level of the “onto-history of the modern West” as it has developed “in the secularising West during the Renaissance and solidified in the 18th and 19th centuries” (Helfrich and Bollier, 2020: 37). Might ‘modern’ institutionalised organisations de-institutionalize based on the onto-epistemology of commoning? As commoning is based on the needs, local conditions, and self-reflexive peer governance (Helfrich and Bollier 2020: 73), it is understood as a way “in which the 'great transformation' can succeed” (Helfrich and Bollier, 2020: 97). As a practice grounded in relationships, collaborative economic activity and an alternative normative order (Helfrich and Bollier, 2020: 98), it intends to bring about a relational ontological frame of reference, which refers to freedom, fairness and liveliness. As the pattern language of commoning aims to contribute to cooperative governance, peer-to-peer relationships, and the care economy, it can contribute to a new concept of value and thereby support a shift in the attentional patterns of humans, organisations, and partnerships. It may also contribute to a shift in discourse. While creating a new ‘language,’ our collective imaginaries and epistemic action may transform toward the common good and onto-change (Helfrich and Bollier, 2020: 33). The presentation discusses the epistemic shift coming along with the commoning perspective. It addresses the epistemic thresholds of de-institutionalising and explains, based on empirical data from the AECED project and pattern-labs realised in organisational change processes, how the episteme of commoning can become an organisational practice and how de-institutionalisation can be supported. Organisational democracy then refers to democracy as becoming, which transforms humans' worldviews and our ways of perceiving, seeing, and thinking. Commoning by the pattern language of commoning, then, can be understood as educating our (Higher) Self – as a practice of de-institutionalisation and organisational unlearning (Chen et al 2024) in solutionary patterns.

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