My name is Dannica Fleuss. I am a visiting professor in political philosophy at the University of Nairobi (Kenya) and and a research associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance (University of Canberra, Australia). I am also a senior lecturer at Heidelberg University and Helmust-Schmidt University (Hamburg). I served as a researcher at the Institute for Future Media, Democracy& Society (FuJo) at Dublin City University (Ireland) where I worked on interdisciplinary projects about democratic/deliberative strategies for addressing the current climate emergency (funded by EU/Horizon2020 and the Irish Research Laureate Council).
I am also the president of the non-profit association DemocracyNet and a co-convener of the UK PSA’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group.
I held positions as a senior lecturer, research fellow and visiting professor for political science, political theory/philosophy and applied ethics at diverse universities across the globe.
My core research interests are understandings of democratic legitimacy, decolonial/intersectional and critical theory, climate change policy, empirical analyses of deliberation — and comparative assessments of SciFi stories.
Whenever I need a break from all the thinking, I am running, climbing or hiking — and passionately explore the world outside of libraries, offices and labs!
Recent Publications
Books:
(forthcoming/2025). The Sciences of the Democracies. UCL Press in collaboration with Chicago University Press. (Monograph with J.-P. Gagnon [kead author] et al.)
(2021) Radical Proceduralism. Democracy from Philosophical Principles to Political Institutions. Emerald Press.
Book Launch, UK Political Studies Association (PDD) on YouTube here
Book Review by S. Chambers (2022) here
(2024). African Women and Intellectual Leadership. Life Stories from Western Kenya. Routledge. (Co-edited with Maurice Amutabi, Emily Achieng Akuno & Humphrey J. Ojwang)
Journal Articles & Book Chapters:
(2024) Life Stories Matter! Leadership, Gender, Dislocation—and Seeing Myself as a Stranger. Afterword in Amutabi, M., Akuno, E., Ojwang, H.J. & Fleuss, D. (Eds.). African Women and Intellectual Leadership. Lifestories from Western Kenya. Routledge.
(2023). Challenging the Rules of the Game. How Deliberative Democrats Should Use the Tools of Participatory Governance. In Bussu, S. & Bua, A. (Eds.). Reclaiming Participatory Governance. Routledge.
(2023). Citizens’ Assemblies: Top-down or bottom-up? – Both, please!, in Reuchamps, M. , J. Vrydagh and Y. Welp (eds) Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies, De Gruyter Publisher, 141-154. (with Sonia Bussu).
(2022): Macro-Level Assessment of Deliberative Quality. In: Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy. Edited by: Selen A. Ercan, Hans Asenbaum, Nicole Curato, and Ricardo F. Mendonça, Oxford University Press, 129-147.
(2022). Understanding developments in Participatory Governance. A report on findings from a scoping review of the literature and expert interviews. Manchester University. ISBN: 9781910029787. (S. Bussu, Y. Golan & A. Hargreaves; with A. Bua, R. Falanga, D. Fleuß, C. Forde, E. Williams, M. Wojciechowska)
(2022). Review of D. Fleuss — Julia Maskivker: The Duty to Vote. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). The Review of Politics, 1-4. (Online first)
(2021) The Marginalized Democracies of the World. Democratic Theory 8(2), 1-18 (with Gagnon, J. P., Asenbaum, H., Bussu, S., Guasti, P., Dean, R. et al.).
(2021) Measuring Nation States’ Deliberativeness: Systematic Challenges, Methodological Pitfalls, and Strategies for Upscaling the Measurement of Deliberation. In: Political Studies 69(2), 307-325 (with K. Helbig).
