ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates a coming to practice that thrives on tensions and instructive complications. It distinguishes between serving democratic and bureaucratic policy-making by drawing on radical democratic theory. It focuses on feminist (post)critical policy analysis for examples of a more complex scientificity that refuses re-positivization through the philosophy "in" science of empirical work that embraces a reflexivity grounded in constitutive unknowingness, generative undecidability, and what it means to document becoming. Oliver Marchart and William Connolly exemplify work in "radical democratic theory" that addresses what this 'widened space" might look like that we cannot now conceive due to the limits of our problematics. The chapter presents exemplars that enact a "corrective" move in contemporary critical theory invested in "making matter matter". At the least, such exemplars demonstrate the possibilities of using empirical work to explore the theoretical and philosophical implications of post-foundational frameworks toward more democratic practices of knowing.
