Lara Herford

Democracy in Dispute – On the Metapragmatics of a Politically Communicative Practice of Dissent

In my doctoral research, I examine a currently observable and markedly positive re-evaluation of dispute as a democratic resource—one that enables the articulation of opposing positions and facilitates the negotiation of societal contradictions. My focus is on dispute as a political-communicative practice that is being re-framed and revalorized within contemporary discourses about a “crisis of democracy.” This shift becomes particularly apparent in repeated calls for a “better argument culture.”

These calls reflect a form of ‘discursive awareness’, which I analyze in my project. This awareness reveals both idealized norms of political negotiation and (re)produced understandings of democracy.

Theory and empirical analysis are closely interwoven: theoretical frameworks are not only applied but also treated as objects of investigation in their own right. My analysis draws on two sets of data: (i) a corpus of current popular and academic papers and books that address the topic, and (ii) a selection of diverse media formats that experiment with new modes of engaging in conflict.

Across these materials, references to Jürgen Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonism frequently emerge as key points of orientation in the (re)conceptualization of dispute. These notions of ‘discourse’ are brought into dialogue with the Foucauldian-informed understanding of discourse commonly employed in discourse linguistics.

Positioned at the intersection of discourse linguistics, democratic theory, and contradiction studies, my project aims to explore the relationship between (i) contradiction (singular) as an ordering figure—linked to the resolution of structural societal tensions—and (ii) lived contradictions (plural) negotiated through dispute. Dispute thus emerges as a linguistic and discursive practice through which normative tensions—such as those between inclusion and exclusion, or between consensus and ambiguity tolerance—are articulated and negotiated