Democracy as a Social Epistemology of Grounding: Document-Things, Little Tools of Democracy, and an Exploration into Their Modes of Grounding

Democracy is under siege, and we are challenged with maintaining and caring for it. A part of this is to better understand and critically and curiously examine it. This paper suggests moving towards analysing democracy through its material arrangements, what is coined here as the ‘document-things’ involved in procedures and practices of grounding. It is argued that justifications are incorporated and intertwined with mundane little tools, objects, and material arrangements – which together ground democracy and which carry, uphold, and enact a particular social epistemology. In doing this, the paper takes inspiration from the field of science studies as well as expanding on what Boltanski and Thévenot have called investment in forms towards the tools, objects, and arrangements of democratic procedure. What we might then observe is a form of epistemic capacity intimately linked to such material and procedural elements. Building from the Norwegian case, this paper pursues a close examination of such modes of grounding democracy through document-things and the social epistemology they are made to carry.