The project DEMINSEE examines how pro-democratic social movement actors harness emotions and affect to mobilize citizens and advance their political goals. It focuses on democratic innovations, or new arenas and modes of engagement pioneered by social movements, that seek to deepen democracy through experimenting with new ideas, generating new knowledge, and prefiguring of alternative forms of democratic politics. The project’s aim is to contribute to the field of democratic innovations by integrating it with feminist scholarship, which emphasizes intersectional participation, the politics of care, the empowering of the minorities, and brings forward the affective aspects of politics.
Designed as a multi-site ethnography, the research investigates several activist initiatives across the post Yugoslav space, including organizations in Zagreb, Prishtina, Pula, and Sarajevo. The data are collected through digital ethnography, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, and analysed using affective frame analysis, while the research approaches emotions and affect as social relations that reveal power dynamics, connect people, and mobilize collective action. By engaging with social movement scholarship that conceptualises movements as hubs of alternative knowledge, analysis, and responses, the research challenges conventional approaches to democratic innovations and foregrounds, through feminist political thought, affects, emotions, and care as essential to collective democratic practice.
Dr. Milorad Kapetanović (Supervisor)
Dr. Leda Sutlović (Project Leader)
2 May 2024 – 31 August 2025
Disruptive Innovation Funding Programme of the ÖAW and FWF (grant agreement No. DI_2023-037)
