Uncertainty can be understood as an organizational practice of control, dealing with uncertainy in “high reliability organizations”, as Weick & Sutcliffe (2001) put it – and to learn how to manage the unexpected. Moreover, uncertainty can be understood not only as a condition or a mode of organizing, but as an epistemological and ontological foundation of our times. As Dewey’s notion of uncertainty (1929) is explicitly linked to a call for democratizing societies as well as (self-)organizing and democratizing organizations in society (1927/2012), it is a relevant foundation for organizational democratization understood as democracy as becoming.

Starting with experience is core for Dewey – which involves the experience of existential uncertainty (Dewey 1964; 1969) the symposium is interested in the question, how to organize aesthetic experience, embodied transformation and democracy as becoming. Creative democracy in organizing can still be seen as a “task before us”, as Dewey (1991) puts it.

So how does a positive relation to uncertainty contribute to conceptualizing alternative strategies of organizing democracy-as-becoming? How can integrative and democratic creative (Follett 1923; 1924) education support organizational democratization? What is the role of listening, relationality, embodiment and aesthetic transformation?

The European Horizon 2020 project “AECED” – Transforming Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogies and Democracy-as-becoming” is exploring the relation between aesthetic and embodied learning, responsive pedagogies and democracy as becoming. It connects to different institutional contexts in educational fields and different European countries.

Based on its Participatory Action Research (PAR) strategy (Bryman 2012), the project with six national partners works with a democracy-as-becoming approach to support individual and collective learning, organizational democratization and epistemic transformation.

Based on an innovative aesthetic and embodied pedagogical framework, project has established associated frameworks and guides to pedagogical practice, that support responsive pedagogies for education for democracy and democracy as becoming. How do the different projects relate to partners in collaboration, how does collaboration happen in the diagnosis of a problem and in the development of a solution?

The case studies operate within complex institutional settings and different stakeholders of different layers of institutionalized power. How does contexts like the municipality in Lisbon, Portugal, the GOOD network of NGOs in Croatia, the ministry of education in Latvia, the Multi-Academy Trust in England, or a commoning social movement relate to the vision of organizational democracy and democracy as becoming? What are the uncertainties in reaching out and relating to them, what are the challenges of democratizing and what are the strategies of uncertainty to be found here? Will partners try to frame democratization as a need of qualification in times of a VUCA world? Will they argue for controlling uncertainty by specific perspectives on mindful education as a functional claim? Will they transform and open up in and “into the open” themselves? And in which way will such institutionalized settings allow for de-institutionalization, for de-hierarchization, for de-alienation – and democratization- as-becoming?

The symposium is interested in the dynamics established (Basit 2010) in this participatory research settings and the (power-)dynamics in cocreating change in practice (Kemmis & McTaggart 2014).

From this exploratory journey, we will relate and reflect the potentials of theorizing organizational, institutional, embodied and discursive dynamics of “democracy-as-(de)-institutionalizing-becoming”, in the sense, that normalized, societally and instititutionally established regimes of power and knowledge become experienced, reflected upon and questioned – and in this sense “enlightened” – maybe into a Foucauldian “not to be governed like this” (Weber & Maurer 2006).

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