Agonistic diplomacy: a participatory method for structuring dissensus in co-design

This article proposes agonistic diplomacy as a participatory method for structuring dissensus through designed mediations that make disagreements workable without dissolving them. Grounded in STS/Actor – Network Theory, agonistic pluralism, and debates on publics-in-the-making and infrastructuring, we operationalise the method through two transferable design devices: symbolic infiltration (parodic mimicry that saturates hegemonic grammars from within) and critical affect (care-as-confrontation that politicises ordinary experience). We report a two-case interventionist study. Case 1, A Igreja do Empreendedorismo, was a staged performance delivered to an audience of approximately 300 participants; it produced institutional hesitation, reframed entrepreneurial rhetoric, and generated circulations and aftereffects that exceeded the event. Case 2, Tudo bem por aí?, deployed an anonymous listening platform during COVID-19 collecting 76 testimonies in 7 days and returning an analytic synthesis that enabled negotiated ‘minimal pacts’ around wellbeing and institutional care. To keep outcomes inspectable, we specify evidence indicators (frame/lexicon shifts, public formation/transformation, socio-technical stabilisations, and echo-effects) so effects are auditable rather than asserted. Contributions are conceptual, linking agonism, diplomacy, and infrastructuring at a procedural level; methodological, designing devices, scripts, evidence thresholds; and practical, providing guidance for public services, organisations, and education, alongside boundary conditions and risks for further comparative and longitudinal work.