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PhD defence by Catherine Koekoek

On Thursday 16 October 2025, from 13:00 to 14:30, C.R. Koekoek will defend her PhD thesis entitled: Towards an Architecture of democratic infrastructure.

Supervisor: prof.dr. M. Huijer
Location: Senate Room, Erasmus Building, Woudestein Campus

Brief summary of the thesis:
This thesis examines the democratic importance of places such as community centres, bookshops and community theatres in an era characterised by both too much and too little politics. Too much, because an international, radical right-wing movement is using post-truth rhetoric, thereby undermining the conditions for democratic coexistence. Too little, because the physical places where people can come together and organise themselves on their own terms are under pressure after years of neoliberal policy. In this context, protest (for example, a protest vote for often anti-democratic parties) seems to be the only way to effectively voice discontent.

A design for democratic infrastructure develops an alternative democratic response to these problems of over- and under-politicisation by focusing on the informal places, practices and relationships that enable democratic articulation. The thesis is an interdisciplinary and practice-based political theory and includes three interdisciplinary case studies: a history of community centres in Rotterdam from 1918 to the present, an ethnographic study of the oldest feminist bookshop in the Netherlands, and interviews with the directors of the social-artistic theatre organisation Rotterdams Wijktheater, in which Catherine Koekoek herself has performed.

More information: www.eur.nl

Photo: Sabine van der Vooren