Public Lecture – Big Ideas for Democracy: Amanda Machin

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Democracy and the More-Than-Human Carnivalesque

Abstract

From corporate zombies to mermaids to dead bees, political protests have frequently featured comic, ironic, grotesque, absurd and profane moments of the carnivalesque. Carnivalesque activities are said to open heterotopic spaces in which dominant values are subverted, conventions are transgressed, and civil disobedience is catalysed. The carnivalesque is interesting for scholars of democracy not only because it entails the production of the common and the enactment of critical citizenship, but also because it involves the active cultivation of difference. To participate in the carnivalesque is not only to witness otherness but to become other. By dressing up as fantasy figures, absurd halflings or extinct species, activists ostensibly perform the more-than-human. In this lecture I consider the appearance of the carnivalesque in protests and its democratic capacity and implications. Do carnivalesque protests challenge political boundaries and promote hybrid identities? Or, since carnivals are restricted to certain times and places, do they on the contrary remind us of the rules, and reinforce the existing order? I point to the dangers of both dismissing and romanticizing the carnivalesque.

Bio

Amanda Machin is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. She is interested in the dynamics, theories, discourses, imaginaries, protests, identifications, performances and bodies of ecological and radical democratic transformation and has researched these topics in various positions at universities in UK and Germany before she moved to Norway in 2022. She has published five books including Bodies of Democracy: Modes of Embodied Politics (Transcript 2022) and Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (Zed Books, 2013). With Marcel Wissenburg she has recently completed editing the collection Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene for Edward Elgar. Amanda is also an editor for the journal Environmental Politics and the co-ordinator of a project on the governance of twin transition (RECODE MLG, funded by Horizon Europe). She also participates in projects on populism in the Nordics (POL-AID, funded by the Norwegian Research Council) and the project Democracy and Controversy in the green transition (funded by the MWW Foundation).