Playing With Boundaries as Democratic Scholars

The meaning of research has changed, in particular in relation to local democracy. Researchers do not want to just contribute to the stock of knowledge regarding local democracy or comment on democratic processes from the outside; they also want to be among the democratic agents and use their knowledge, also of theories and theoretical concepts, and skills to contribute to democratic processes. In this article, five such researchers and their work in four different countries are discussed. This results in the presentation of new strategies for democratic research, the most characteristic quality of which is the ability to play with practice-theory boundaries.