Reflections written by OU Master Student Victoria Rosa Garcia
I recently attended a two-day conference at the American University of Paris as part of the OppAttune Democracy Co-Lab which is an interdisciplinary initiative focused on countering oppositional political extremism through attuned dialogue. Hosted by Dr Zona Zarić and Professor Stephen Sawyer and The Open University, the event brought together scholars, practitioners, and students to explore how hostility toward care, democracy, and gender becomes normalized in everyday political life, and how it might be resisted.
Rather than treating extremism as something confined to radical fringes, the conference foregrounded OppAttune’s concept of everyday extremism: the subtle, repetitive narratives, jokes, silences, and frames that gradually render hostility ordinary. These “silent narratives” circulate across online and offline spaces, shaping what comes to feel like common sense. What they normalize is not overt violence, but the erosion of solidarity, preparing the ground for exclusionary politics and authoritarian responses.
A central concern of the Democracy Co-Lab was how care and democracy have become primary targets of these narratives. Care is repeatedly framed as softness, dependency, or indulgence, while democracy is cast as inefficient, naive, or incapable of decisive action. Both are recoded as liabilities rather than necessities. Alongside this, anti-gender mobilizations attacks on feminism, LGBTQAI+ rights, and reproductive justice converge with anti-care and anti-democracy discourses, delegitimizing interdependence and equality.
The conference offered a powerful conceptual lens through the idea of Care Democracy. Rather than treating care as private and emotional, and democracy as public and rational, this framework insists that they are mutually constitutive practices. Care sustains democracy by recognizing vulnerability, interdependence, and the need for attentiveness to others. Democracy, in turn, extends care by institutionalizing whose needs, voices, and lives matter. When care is devalued, withdrawn, or commodified, democracy begins to hollow out; when democratic institutions erode, infrastructures of collective care collapse with them.
This argument was grounded in feminist care ethics, drawing on thinkers such as Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, who emphasize that our responsibilities arise not only from laws or abstract principles, but from the concrete relationships that sustain life. Dependence and vulnerability are not failures to be overcome, but conditions of human existence that societies must organize around fairly. The hostility toward care in contemporary discourse, evident in phrases such as “welfare dependency,” “burdens on the taxpayer,” or “undeserving outsiders” which reflects a fantasy of sovereign independence that denies the realities of social reproduction.
Nancy Fraser’s account of the crisis of care provided a particularly compelling framework. Capitalism, Fraser argues, is parasitic on care while simultaneously undermining it, externalizing responsibility onto women, migrants, and precarious workers. The conference extended this analysis to democratic institutions, showing how they too are hollowed out, their substance transferred to technocratic bodies or financial markets. In this suggest a narrative of betrayal and conspiracy proliferate, even as empirical research on echo chambers suggests a more complex picture than simple ideological isolation. This raises urgent questions about how everyday extremism operates through gendered and affective dynamics rather than information alone.
The OppAttune model of Track, Attune, Limit was presented as a practical response to these challenges. Tracking involves attentiveness to emotional escalation, power relations, and threat construction. Attunement requires acknowledging underlying fears and grievances without legitimizing harm. Limiting establishes firm democratic boundaries against dehumanization and violence. Together, these practices aim to sustain dialogue without collapsing into either appeasement or exclusion.
The first day focused on stimulating theoretical contributions, while the second took the form of a student academy, emphasizing workshops, reflection, and skill-building. Key questions explored how gender, nationalism, welfare, migration, and extremism intersect; how anti-care, anti-democracy, and anti-gender narratives converge, and what it would mean to practice care as a democratic method within institutions, media, education, and law.
The conference ultimately argued that countering everyday extremism requires generative counter-narratives, stories in which care is strength, democracy is survival, and gender justice is foundational. For me, the two days in Paris offered not just conceptual insight, but a reframing of what democratic engagement demands: attentiveness, responsibility, and the courage to stay in dialogue when withdrawal might feel easier.
As a master’s student, I found this structure particularly impactful. Democracy was not presented as consensus or comfort, but as the demanding practice of remaining in relation across difference. Care, in this framing, emerged as a disciplined and collective practice, one that resists simplification, sustains dialogue, and refuses the withdrawal of solidarity in the face of everyday extremism.
Beyond the intellectual depth of the programme, what stood out most was how genuinely inspiring the speakers and fellow attendees were. The generosity with which scholars shared their work, alongside the openness and curiosity of postgraduate and early-career researchers, created an atmosphere that felt both rigorous and deeply supportive. I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to have taken part in this space of collective thinking and care. The conference strengthened my commitment to this area of study, and I will be following the work of the OppAttune Democracy Co-Lab closely, with real optimism about the positive changes its research and praxis can bring. At a time when care and democracy are routinely framed as fragile or expendable, the work emerging from OppAttune offers a compelling reminder that these are, in fact, essential conditions for a liveable and just future.
