“Place” as Prepolitical Grounds of Democracy

Abstract

This article argues for democratization as the crafting of democratic public space. Through ethnography of grassroots contestation in Appalachia, the article examines the social substrate of collective mobilization on environmental issues. It proposes shared stewardship of “place” as important grounds for democratization—helping to overcome divisions of class, culture, and ideology and to encourage integrative deliberation and knowledge. Collective labors to steward particular places create understandings of a shared world arising from civic and environmental commons. Place-stewardship can engender integrative forms of knowledge—multicausal, multiscalar, multitemporal—as people deliberate about complex ecological and social phenomena over time. However, citizens typically face an environmental policy system that displaces integrated, community-centered perspectives into specialized government mandates and scholarly expertise. Against this fragmenting political terrain, civil society develops “counterexpertise” based on multiscalar and multi-issue networking. Such networks are not reliably democratizing, however, unless grounded in democratic public space.