Abstract
Through a masterful blend of qualitative research and theoretical reflection, Nicole Doerr has written an inspiring book for any scholar, practitioner or activist interested in advancing deliberative and participatory democracy. On the basis of a fine-grained and extensive empirical investigation, Doerr reflects upon political translation: a democratic practice whose mechanisms she explores systematically and whose radical potential she persuasively argues for. This work represents an important step forward in the effort to understand how language interacts with democracy.
The idea of political translation, which gives the title to this book, is the core concept analyzed in this work. Doerr defines political translation as ‘a broad set of practices designed to address marginalization based on gender, class, race, and other differences’ that hinder deliberation (p. 6). These practices are developed by activists and grassroots community organizers to effectively enable powerful and disempowered groups to work together. In this book, Doerr not only systematically sheds light on the practice of political translation. She also interprets the significance of this phenomenon and its democratic implications in a compelling and original way.
Political translation represents a radical model of democracy whereby activists ‘come together as a group to resist domination in the context of officially inclusive deliberative or participatory democracy’. Indeed, political translators ‘directly intervene within discourse or negotiation to challenge the marginalization’ which dominant actors often impose upon disadvantaged ones (p. 4). Doerr highlights that political translation is very different from conventional forms of linguistic translation or interpretation and that political translators are distinct from neutral facilitators. Actually, the idea of neutral facilitation is criticized at length because of its tendency to make deliberators blind to marginalization resulting from power disparities in forums.
Going against the commonly held view that linguistic and cultural differences hamper deliberation, Doerr argues that they might actually favor it, provided that they are accompanied by political translation. The underlying logic for this proposal is thus: the presence of differences in a forum calls for efforts to address forms of marginalization that might otherwise go unnoticed, or might be intentionally ignored during deliberation. It is thanks to engagement in political translation that participants might be able to acknowledge and tackle marginalization, stemming, for instance, from differences in gender, class, race or other cultural aspects. Once this is attained, it might even be possible to harvest the many benefits that difference brings to democratic deliberation.
Effective political translation does not happen naturally, however. For it to occur, it is necessary to have ‘third parties who both understand and advocate for the disadvantaged’ (p. i). Placing themselves in between facilitators and conflicting parties, political translators are ideally placed to assume a ‘disruptive third position within political deliberation’ (p. 4, emphasis in original), a key concept in the book. Because they are in this position, political translators play a limited yet very significant role in deliberation and are capable of fostering a more egalitarian and inclusive process. In particular, by means of persuasion and by means of disruption, political translators can counter ‘positional misunderstandings’, another fundamental idea in this work. Positional misunderstandings occur when normative values clash with material interests. They result from ‘material differences of interest entangled with inequality’ (p. 7). Positional misunderstandings exist wherever there is a substantially diverse groups of people deliberating, yet it remains usually undetected and distorts deliberation.
According to Doerr, positional misunderstandings lie at the root of a widely observed phenomenon. That is, the marginalized enter deliberation with a lack of trust only to find confirmation for their mistrust, while deliberators from dominant groups often remain deeply unaware of their own privileged position. The role of activists engaging in deliberation as political translators is to detect positional misunderstanding and intervene in order to overcome it. Far from threatening deliberative norms, these activists ‘acquire a new role within deliberative forums through their position as a third party challenging cultural and social hierarchies in deliberative and participatory democratic settings’ (p. 6). Overall, Doerr argues, ‘truly democratic deliberation involving diverse groups depends on the institutionalization of a third position for political translation’ (p. 13). Indeed, one could think of ‘political translation as a foundational model for democracy – a democracy that stems from the need to reconcile inequality and misunderstandings based on differences’ (p. 13). This insight is all the more valuable, given the increasingly multicultural and transnational nature of contemporary politics.
Doerr develops these insights on political translation through a rich empirical analysis of deliberative practices in very diverse environments presented in four empirical chapters. On the basis of an ethnographic work undertaken over a period of almost ten years, the four chapters introduce different deliberative contexts in which political translation features prominently. Chapter 1 analyses the European Social Forum (ESF) and national-level forums – in Italy, Germany and the UK. Chapter 2 is devoted to a comparison between the United States Social Forum and the German Social Forum. Chapter 3 studies a City Hall meeting in California. Before Conclusions, an informal community meeting in the very same Californian city is the focus of Chapter 4.
An overview of the European Social Forum opens Chapter 1. Born in 2002, from the protests of a range of actors opposing the EU’s neoliberal policies, the ESF is a grassroots experiment with radical democratic views and a strong interest in deliberative and participatory practices. After studying 11 Europe-wide Social Forum meetings, characterized by different languages and national groups, and nine monolingual Social Forum assemblies at the national level, Doerr concludes that the former assemblies worked better and more democratically than the latter. She relates this counterintuitive finding to the fact that ‘multilingual and highly diverse European assemblies drew explicit attention to cultural differences among participants’ (p. 17). This process, in turn, leads to the practices of political translation unearthing and challenging the positional misunderstandings effectively. Focusing on the Paris ESF meeting of 2003, Doerr documents the activities of Babels, a political translation collective, whose members progressively came to understand themselves and take action as a ‘disruptive third’. In particular, they addressed ‘the reluctance of influential and affluent groups at the European assembly to treat less privileged group members as equals within the deliberative process’ (p. 17). A more democratic debate was possible as a result of political translators’ threat to strike during the meetings and to their ability to include the perspective of marginal groups. To the contrary, national Social Forums systematically failed to detect and address positional misunderstanding leading to different types of marginalization in the German, British and Italian Social Forums. Despite their genuine democratic commitments, these actors fell short of an inclusive and egalitarian discussion. This was largely because the national forums relied on a neutral facilitator model, which proved ineffective against ‘unintentional’ and ‘preconscious’ forms of marginalization. On the contrary, the same groups attained a more democratic engagement at international meetings because of cultural and linguistic differences, which enabled the rise of effective political translation. This chapter is rich in inspiring manifestations of this phenomenon. For example, Doerr argues: ‘Because of the dynamics influenced and monitored by the Babels collective, the Italian grassroots feminists had pushed through an international meeting demands for gender equality that had failed at their national-level preparatory meetings’ (p. 45).
Another insightful perspective on how political translation helps social movements to overcome problems in their quest for democratic engagement comes in Chapter 2. The case study compares the successful deliberations of the United States Social Forum (USSF) – and the 2007 Atlanta meeting in particular – with the German Social Forum (GSF) – especially the Frankfurt 2003 meeting, which Doerr presents as a case of failed deliberation. The analysis reveals profound differences in the way the two social movements handle internal diversity. In the German meeting undercurrent tensions remain completely unnoticed. In this case, in fact, the most powerful actors in the coalition composing the GSF impose their ways at the price of losing a substantial part of the movement. In the US case, the opposite occurs. There are proactive and structured efforts toward political translation. This process is linked to the work of activists firmly committed to supporting the position of minority groups within the movement. Interestingly, activists practice political translation not against a backdrop of linguistic difference, but in a context of marked cultural and social heterogeneity. Political translators here are aware of the different ‘languages’ spoken by the more privileged members of the movement, on the one hand, and by the members of the minorities, on the other. The USSF’s political translation collective successfully reduces the scope for positional misunderstanding. As Doerr explains, the action of the US political translators cannot be reduced to the often instrumental and strategic action of bridge leaders and brokers. Rather, as this case study illustrates, political translation also includes genuine efforts to translate democracy across different groups. Doerr links this remarkable achievement to the presence of political translators with diverse backgrounds, which enable them to speak to the different components of the movement.
Apart from the study of deliberation in the context of social movements, Doerr also sheds a light on political translation in the context of an institution deliberation. This is studied, in Chapter 3, with respect to the Santa Brigida participatory citizen forum. This case study shows the failure of institutional political translators to effectively play a disruptive third position that could empower the weaker groups in deliberation. In Santa Brigida, California, a for-profit urban redevelopment project has become highly contentious. At the heart of the contention lays the fact that the local council has failed to guarantee to residents that this project would protect the housing situation of local families. Given this, some of the Latino/as (majority) members of the city council have sought to establish a dialogue between the English-speaking officials and socially disadvantaged groups, especially Spanish-speaking resident immigrants. In her observation of the last one of these meetings, Doerr documents the failure of these progressive councilors to defend the demands of the minorities they are committed to represent. Indeed, in this process, the claims of the disadvantaged are not simply neglected but, in some cases, utterly disregarded. Indeed, individual citizens from minority groups are disrespectfully addressed by the local administration, which, through a series of devices, actually discourages participation. Furthermore, the administration also gives the impression of seeing as hostile the organization that voices the concerns of many in the Spanish-speaking population: the Santa Brigida Association for Community Housing (SABAH). Interestingly, in this context, the council’s much boasted translation services provided to support non-English speakers seem utterly insufficient to guarantee democratic participation. Doerr explains the failure of institutional political translators to empower citizens through deliberation in terms of councilors’ embedded interest in institutional power and their being trapped in its logics. The potential for political translation, which is indeed present among the citizens, is effectively defused through a rigid and unyielding institutional setting.
In the last case study, in Chapter 4, Doerr focuses, once again, on Santa Brigida. However, this time she presents a more successful case of political translation: the community forum by SABAH. This association, run by a group of mainly first- and second-generation immigrants, serves as the intermediary between residents and sympathetic council members. Seeing themselves as part of an urban social movement and having no interest in running for office, SABAH’s activists are mainly concerned with community education. Given their intention to ‘[make] it possible for socially disadvantaged residents and immigrants to become collective speakers on behalf of their communities’ (p. 99), SABAH’s activists are perfect examples of community-based political translators. Taking the reader back in time, Doerr investigates the unfolding of the meeting in which the association discussed the same proposal under examination in the Town Hall forum, discussed in Chapter 3. The analysis of SABAH’s meeting convincingly shows how the community forum ‘symbolically reversed some of the formal hierarchies and linguistic, gendered, and spatial marginalizing practices so apparent at the city hall’ (p. 103). There is a detailed description of the precautions taken by activists to enable citizens to speak for themselves in front of council members invited to the event. Also, the chapter shows the effectiveness of the work of activists as political translators and disruptive third parties. Activists bring to light and address positional misunderstanding in ways that are largely undetected by councilors, who end up making substantial concessions to popular demands. From a deliberative democratic standpoint, the difference between the institutional forum (analyzed in Chapter 3) and the community meeting (studied in Chapter 4) is striking. The different deliberative performance in institutional settings and in the public is also disheartening since it is in the former type of settings that many decisions affecting people’s lives are often taken. Yet, the ability of political translation to empower citizens leaves room for hope. This success commands greater attention to a democratic practice such as political translation, that, after reading this book, seems to have been neglected for too long.
Thanks to an exemplary interaction between empirical qualitative research and theoretical arguments, Political Translation is certainly a reading with rich and original lessons. It is nevertheless possible to find some aspects that it would have been interesting to engage with in greater depth as well as some questions that the reader might be left wondering about. In this respect, the first issue concerns engagement with theoretical work devoted to the relationship between linguistic aspects, justice and democracy. Though some of the main works from political philosophy and democratic theory are discussed in the book, these mentions seem mainly cursory. Engaging with contributions such as Habermas (1984, 1989), Van Parijs (2011), Kymlicka (2004) or by Taylor (1995) – authors who are all cited in this work – would take an entire book of itself. Thus, it is too much to demand such an effort in this largely empirical study. The book might nevertheless have been even more powerful if it spelled out how this study on political translation adds to these existing theories, rather than offering an overview of the ideas of key authors. Furthermore, while certainly Political Translation enriches democratic theorizing, Doerr seems to portray democratic theorists’ approach to deliberation across cultural and linguistic divides in too stark terms. For instance, in the work of Dryzek (2005) or O’Flynn (2006), there is a clear sense that deliberation across deeply different contexts (also linguistically) is not only possible but often even desirable (for more recent contributions, see also: Ercan, 2017). Finally, deliberation across linguistic divides has been investigated with curiosity (rather than skepticism) in the work of leading scholars of public deliberation such as James Fishkin (e.g. Fishkin et al., 2014), which would surely have been worthwhile to engage with. Issues of comparability lead to a second remark.
Doerr’s investigation of how political translation affects democratic deliberation is systematic and convincing. Nevertheless, the way in which the democratic, deliberative and participatory qualities of her case studies are assessed relies heavily on self-assessment by participants or on the researcher’s field notes. While this choice is valuable and entirely legitimate, it might have been interesting to see the quality of deliberation of her case studies assessed through a more systematic framework. Without the need to employ methodologies such as the Deliberative Quality Index, designed for quantitative research in formal settings, there is no shortage today of frameworks to assess the deliberativeness of assemblies qualitatively. This choice would not have granted a better assessment. Yet, it might have provided more ground to compare evaluations made in this study with those of other qualitative studies. This might have made it somewhat easier for future scholarship on political translation to build upon Doerr’s seminal work.
Overall, there is little doubt that with this book, political translation has entered democratic scholarship through the main door and that this work will be a powerful contribution to future debates. The influence of critical work by key scholars such as Young, Mansbridge, Polletta and della Porta, and of their pioneering effort to blend social movement scholarship and democratic thinking, is clear in this study. Indeed, Doerr’s book might well be one of the most original and fascinating products of this intellectual journey yet.