Goñi, I. (2026)
Participation and deliberation are often discussed as if actors simply choose a design from a shelf, and they just decide what framing to give each experience. But participatory practices do not begin with that choice. The ways they unfold are shaped by sedimented histories, including previous democratic and authoritarian projects, institutional trajectories, and earlier struggles over who gets to participate and on what terms.
Drawing on traditions of participation in Latin America, particularly Chile, this paper argues that we need to recover these deeper historical layers if we want to understand why participation takes the forms it does today.
Without this critical context, we risk treating participation design as a series of decontextualised actor decisions. We also risk forgetting more transformative democratic imaginaries that were not simply abandoned because they failed, but were actively narrowed, displaced, or transformed.
In other words, participatory designs are not simply picked off the shelf. They carry sedimented histories. Deeper frames is a way to make those histories visible and recover the democratic possibilities they might still contain.