Managing Director Portfolio

Networked Agency Working Group

The Networked Agency Working Group brings together fellows developing institutional innovations that enable communities defined by mobility, multiplicity, and cross-boundary belonging to exercise genuine collective governance within systems that currently treat them as passive recipients. Across four to five projects, the group explores how networks that span borders, faiths, and institutions can constitute themselves as recognized actors capable of deliberating collectively, pooling resources, and shaping the structures that affect their lives.

Fellows work across a range of contexts—including displaced and diaspora populations seeking transnational political representation, Jewish and Muslim communities navigating shared civic life, and universities partnering with diverse constituencies to build more responsive institutions. Projects share a common premise: the organizational capacity needed to reimagine these systems already exists within communities themselves—what is missing is institutional infrastructure that recognizes and supports it. By developing concrete demonstrators and working with municipal governments, universities, humanitarian organizations, and civil society partners, the group aims to shift both practice and the broader field's imagination of what genuine co-governance across difference can look like.

Informational Democracy Working Group

Democracy has always been an informational project — its success turns on whether citizens can form reliable beliefs about the world, deliberate collectively, and hold power accountable. That infrastructure is now under unprecedented strain. The collapse of traditional gatekeepers, the fragmentation of shared epistemic commons through algorithmic media, and the arrival of AI-generated content have combined to produce a crisis that is not merely technological but institutional: a structural mismatch between the informational conditions democratic life requires and the conditions that actually exist.

This working group, convened at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Research, brings together scholars and practitioner-intellectuals — drawn from complexity science, democratic theory, cognitive science, computational social science, and institutional design, with deliberate representation from non-Western democratic contexts — to work on that mismatch as a design problem. Its guiding premise is that complexity is not an obstacle to be overcome but the permanent condition within which democratic institutions must learn to operate. The group asks what institutions capable of sustaining epistemic trust under these conditions would actually look like — how insights from complexity science, collective intelligence research, and emerging deliberative tools can be translated into concrete governance architectures. Over the course of a year, core members develop sustained original arguments across five question clusters: designing for epistemic resilience, AI-assisted deliberation, the architecture of trust, information as political economy, and the systemic dynamics underlying democratic fragmentation. The goal is intellectual work of genuine consequence — and a contribution to the redesign of democratic institutions for the world as it actually is.

Futures of Difference

Futures of Difference is a multi-platform knowledge initiative exploring how social categories— especially (but not limited to) race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, age—are rapidly transforming amid three colliding global forces: social complexification, demographic transformation, and the rise of right-wing populism. Led by Steven Vertovec, the initiative comprises a five episode podcast series featuring conversations with journalist Georg Diez and leading scholars (including Michele Lamont, Dan Hiebert, Miri Song, Ye Junjia, and Ann Phoenix), a Substack platform offering subscription-free essays and research analyses, plus a YouTube channel with short films of top academics and a webinar series with discussions involving social scientists from the Global South. A Futures of Difference website links all of these modalities. Welcoming perspectives from individuals from around the world, it aims to foster critical dialogue about how categories of difference shape— and are shaped by—changing social and political processes.