The Junk Playground As Agora: Experimenting With Playful Democratic Assemblages

While recent contributions to the field of deliberative democracy have generated new and exciting opportunities, participation remains somewhat exclusionary and predominantly focused on rational discourse. Such a focus makes it difficult to achieve wider participation and risks limiting democratic imaginaries and the possibilities for radically new alternatives to emerge. Considering these limitations, I propose the “junk playground as agora”—a space for bodily, material inquiries into matters of common concern. These playgrounds can create spaces for showing and transforming conceptions of the self, enrich a more distributed sense of agency, strengthen our imaginaries, and bring people together by cultivating a sense of collective joy. The playgrounds might also demonstrate a different democratic ethos that encourages us to challenge our conceptions of democracy and allow alternative democratic worlds to emerge. My findings call for further research, but they also point to new and immediate possibilities when designing for democratic participation.