4 research outputs found
From Senseless to Sensory Democracy: Insights from Applied and Participatory Theatre
This article seeks to stimulate a fresh and inter-disciplinary debate which revolves
around the need to move from a ‘senseless democracy’ that is insufficiently attuned to the
dilemmas and challenges of fostering meaningful political engagement to a more ‘sensory
democracy’. It achieves this by first exploring and dissecting recent works within democratic
theory that emphasize the role of ‘watching’ and ‘listening’ within socio-political
relationships. It then goes on to develop a set of constructive criticisms by applying insights
drawn from the fields of practical aesthetics and applied theatre. Not only does this exercise
allow us to take the analytical lens far beyond the focus on voice-based forms of expression
that have hitherto dominated political analysis, it demonstrates the value of inter-disciplinary
scholarship in exposing sensory-subtleties that raise distinctive questions for both politics ‘as
theory’ and politics ‘as practice’