| Description |
The project brings together a micro-sociology of democracy with a politics of multilingual deliberation in arenas of protest and decision-making. Designed as a pilot study, the project will explore the relevance that activists’ practices of face-to-face translation, developed for transnational discursive democracy experiments in social movements, can have for activists and officials also at domestic level in multilingual group settings. Having conducted two comparative studies on supranational discursive arenas in the European Social Forum (ESF) and the World Social Forum, I could show that surprisingly, activists’ practice of voluntary translation at the European level helps better including traditionally disadvantaged groups in deliberation compared to monolingual national social forum network assemblies studied. I would like the Marie Curie mobility to propose a case study that will increase the systematic relevance of my result, by studying multilingual democracy experiments also at the national and local levels, as envisaged by the EC’s research perspective (EC 2008). I propose a multi-disciplinary case study on the diffusion of European ideas and experiences of multilingual democracy to activist groups and local authorities in the United States who introduced translation, learning from Europeans as organizers of self-organized translation in the ESF. This is an original case for exploring the diffusion of European experiences and ideas on linguistic diversity and inclusivity, not by EU policy makers or institutions, but by European activists who spread their distinct practices of translation across transnational discursive arenas. I will clarify whether alternative multilingual organized democracy experiments, and translation, may enhance inclusive dialogue compared to English-only settings in the US national social forum process, and in local democracy experiments by social justice groups and decision-makers working with immigrants.
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