The working precept of this research stream is that a radical renewal of the democratic imagination is urgently needed to make sense of the current condition of democracy and to deal practically with the myriad global threats it is currently facing.  For more than a few scholars, journalists, politicians and citizens, democracy is admittedly a boring, so-yesterday subject. For others, it is a confused and disappointing ideal that no longer makes sense, or has any existential purchase. Democracy is a nice-sounding word, they say, a phantom that is everywhere and nowhere. Democracy promises heaven but delivers hypocrisy and hell, or nothing at all. Our research offers a counterview to this despondency and cynicism. Its central concern is to breathe life back into the spirit of democracy, to push for its redefinition, to persuade scholars and publics alike that far too much current thinking and commentary about democracy is failing to come to grips with the predicaments, problems and puzzles of our age. In these embattled times, our view is that democratic politics and ways of living require not just more action, but more imaginative thought.

At the heart of our research stand tough questions: might we be living in times in which many real-world things are happening to democracy that are not just unexpected or strange but far weirder than we can presently think? But what does it mean to think imaginatively about democracy? Come to think about it, what exactly is thinking? And what about the relationship between democracy and imaginative thinking? Might there be surprisingly close links between the act of thinking imaginatively and the theory and practice of democracy? Can we think about democracy democratically (a question famously posed by the eminent French classics scholar Nicole Loraux)? And most immediately: why bother trying to reimagine democracy when, after all, there is climate change, AI, savage wars in Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine, worsening US–China rivalries, and many other pressing matters to worry about?