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This article outlines the concept of Global Experimentalist Governance (GXG). GXG is an institutionalized transnational process of participatory and multilevel problem solving, in which particular problems (and the means of addressing them) are framed in an open-ended way, and subjected to periodic revision by various forms of peer review in light of locally generated knowledge. GXG differs from other forms of international organization and transnational governance, and is emerging in various issue areas. The Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances is used to illustrate how GXG functions. The conditions for the emergence of GXG are specified, as well as some of its possible benefits.

The article revisits the idea that non-majoritarian institutions, broadly understood as governance arrangements that delegate the pursuit of constitutionally pre-set goals to bodies insulated from politics, are apolitical and technocratic. To do so, it draws on scholarship exploring the links between delegation and politicisation, as well as scholarship emphasising the experimentalist features of policymaking by independent regulators. The paper argues that limited politicisation of the regulatory process can strengthen independent economic regulation in the EU. Limited politicisation is enabled via substantive concepts and doctrines that allow for a plurality of interests, goals, and perspectives to permeate the enforcement of rules that are apparently narrowly directed to a single objective, as well as procedural arrangements that allow for stakeholder participation or periodic revision of regulatory solutions. These doctrines and mechanisms have become pervasive in EU economic regulation, as illustrated by examples from EU competition law. While they politicise the regulatory process, thus strengthening the democratic credentials of economic regulation, said arrangements need not undermine the non-majoritarian character of the institutions deploying them and the effectiveness of their regulatory action. As such, limited politicisation may allow regulators to resist pressures from elected officials, proving useful at times of backlash against NMI’s independence and growing authoritarianism. This article is a contribution to a Special Section that critically analyses the role of non-majoritarian instruments and institutions with respect to three challenges that shape contemporary democracies in Europe: socio-economic inequality and discrimination, growing authoritarianism, and the pressing climate crisis.

Experimentalism's newfound prominence in relation to climate-change action invites questions-integral to this special issue-about whether it is capable of meeting the transformational challenges that societies face. Answers require greater clarity regarding what experimentalism is, and is not. To address this, I first conceptualize the available alternatives. Drawing from John Dewey's influential account, these alternatives can appropriately be understood as \"absolutist.\" I argue that both policy insiders' plans for carbon pricing and trading schemes and outsiders' radical vanguardist visions fit here, each offering the false promise of a singular correct criteria by which to formulate and evaluate strategies for change. By contrast, experimentalism can be understood as a rich and promising method. While critics often characterize it as modeled on voluntary lifestyle initiatives, which can readily co-exist within a larger unsustainable order, an understanding of experimentalism ought not be limited to individualized or depoliticized projects. Properly understood, I argue that it includes approaches that can be scalable and political in ways that might foster systemic change.

Queer theory often lauds overtly experimental modernisms as models of antinormative disruption and critiques \"conventional\" narrative forms for complicity with normative ideologies. Nella Larsen's Passing, however, exemplifies how many Harlem Renaissance writers deployed realist and/or linear narrative forms in queer ways. The novel's subtly experimental narration depicts the process by which respectability politics influences a middle-class Black woman to straighten out her own life story in the process of narrating it to herself, revealing the queer deviations undergirding its linearity. A study of Passing's narrative form thus reveals the queer potential of \"conventional\" narrative form to critique conventionality from within.

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avantgarde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”

This article explores the contributions of a pragmatist approach to social innovation studies. It characterizes the epistemological assumptions of pragmatism and its implications to conceive of “science in action.” It explores the contributions of pragmatisms in developing a perspective to analyze civil society and its action to promote social innovation, focusing on the key notions of “public inquiry” and “democratic experimentalism.” The aim is to discuss the contributions, challenges, and limits of conducting pragmatic studies—from an analytical and methodological perspective—giving way to co-operative and engaged research that connects and co-ordinates teaching and knowledge transfer, theory and practice, experts and ordinary citizens, and knowledge and experiences in social innovation studies.

This text discusses the role of civil society in public action to face the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Based on a pragmatic approach, the study examines the collective actions promoted by civil society actors in Brazil, highlighting the characteristics, scope, and limits in the governance of this crisis. The study uses documental analysis to observe the recent mobilization of civil society in the country and field research to explore the reality of the city of Florianópolis. The results offer an overview of the performance of “invisible networks” of civil society actors, pointing out the challenges and outcomes of their actions. The findings suggest the need for further studies exploring the role, perspectives, and dilemmas of civil society in the production of “experimentalist governance” in response to the numerous challenges posed by the pandemic at the local level.

Rawls famously argues that the parties in the original position would agree upon the two principles of justice. Among other things, these principles guarantee equal political liberty—that is, democracy—as a requirement of justice. We argue on the contrary that the parties have reason to reject this requirement. As we show, by Rawls’ own lights, the parties would be greatly concerned to mitigate existential risk. But it is doubtful whether democracy always minimizes such risk. Indeed, no one currently knows which political systems would. Consequently, the parties—and we ourselves—have reason to reject democracy as a requirement of justice in favor of political experimentalism, a general approach to political justice which rules in at least some non-democratic political systems which might minimize existential risk.

The gene is a fundamental concept of genetics, which emerged with the Mendelian paradigm of heredity at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the concept has since diversified. Somewhat different narratives and models of the gene developed in several sub-disciplines of genetics, that is in classical genetics, population genetics, molecular genetics, genomics, and, recently, also, in systems genetics. Here, I ask how the diversity of the concept impacts data-integration and data-mining strategies for bioinformatics, genomics, statistical genetics, and data science. I also consider theoretical background of the concept of the gene in the ideas of empiricism and experimentalism, as well as reductionist and anti-reductionist narratives on the concept. Finally, a few strategies of analysis from published examples of data-mining projects are discussed. Moreover, the examples are re-interpreted in the light of the theoretical material. I argue that the choice of an optimal level of abstraction for the gene is vital for a successful genome analysis.

In this article, I analyze the work of two mid-century Chilean artists–the documentarian Sergio Bravo (1927-), and the photographer Antonio Quintana (1904-1972)–, and the form by which they use different technological media in order to capture and construct popular subjectivities. Instead of conceiving “the popular” as an archaic and traditionalistic label, both artists open new possibilities to incorporate popular subjectivities into discourses of political and artistic modernization using formal experimentation and radical aesthetics. The works of Bravo and Quintana are not only capturing a form of popular practice (they are not restricted to be ethnographic documentations), but also creating or imagining a notion of a popular subjectivity defined by hard work, effort, creativity, and eventually, the capacity to carry out a radical transformation of society. This process of “imagining” popular subjectivity coincides with the political project of claiming the worth and complexity of popular classes, which historically had been neglected by dominant discourses of Chilean culture.