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How does critical reflection happen? And what circumstances influence the forms critical reflection takes and the issues it comes to address? Recent contributions suggest that we should pay greater attention to the ways social conditions and other factors affect what people reflect upon and how. Examining John Dewey's perspective on the relationship between practical engagement, objects of knowledge, and democracy, this article develops a relational perspective. Dewey significantly affected how Jack Mezirow theorized transformative learning. But Mezirow's theory is less attentive to the roles played by particular contextual features, such as structural circumstances, ideas and theories, and individuals'understanding and responses to diverse ways of viewing things and thinking. Rereading Dewey, this article suggests that these subtle features, or subtle "frames of reference," help construct reflection. Consequently, to deepen critical reflection, these subtle features need to become accessible to people as additional objects of knowledge on which they may reflect.

Alla behöver någonstans att bo. Bostaden är så central för vår välfärd att vi ser den som en mänsklig rättighet. Bostadsfrågan skär in i flera olika politikområden och kan diskuteras från vitt skilda utgångspunkter. Var – och hur – vi bor påverkar i hög grad vårt handlingsutrymme och våra framtidsutsikter. De ojämlika förutsättningarna på bostadsmarknaden är en av de tydligaste klassmarkörerna i dagens Sverige.

I antologin "Allas rätt till bostad" analyserar 28 bostads- och urbanforskare från olika akademiska discipliner svensk bostadspolitik, dess förutsättningar, historiska utveckling och konkreta resultat. En socialt medveten bostadspolitik behöver inte minst förhålla sig till den växande ojämlikheten i det svenska samhället. Men den bostadspolitik som har förts, med privatiseringar och vinstkrav även på offentligt ägda bolag, har tvärtom fått klyftorna att växa. Hyresrätten är till exempel idag klart missgynnad jämfört med bostadsägandet. Antologins texter diskuterar också – bland mycket annat – den betydelse bostadsbidraget, besittningsskyddet, byggindustrin och barnkonventionen kan ha i ett vidare bostadspolitiskt perspektiv.Bostadspolitiken är en ödesfråga för många människor och för ett demokratiskt samhälle. Antologin visar att  det krävs mer debatt och politisk fantasi och större rättvisa i bostadsfrågan än vi ser i dag.

That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authentic communication requires genuine commitment, which is conceptually at odds with self-interested reasoning. This article finds that both incentives and genuine commitment are necessary conditions for trustworthiness in speech, but neither is sufficient on its own. The problem is thus how to combine them. Examining the work of Habermas and Bourdieu, this article develops a relational perspective on authentic communication. It suggests that latent institutions can induce trust by making trustworthiness preferable, and still allow speakers to earn citizens' trust through genuine ethical commitment.

Policies on preventing radicalization and recruitment to violent Islamist organizations have been widely criticized for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Muslims as a group. Sweden has stood out by international comparison by announcing an approach built on inclusion and participation, especially with regard to Muslim civil society. But what does it mean to make a policy process inclusive and participatory? How can values of inclusion and participation be combined with efficient implementation and realization of policy goals, especially in a policy area where discourse and practice have tended to reinforce patterns of exclusion and discrimination? This article develops a framework that puts the roles of participants at the center: what expectations, boundaries and capacities come with an invitation to participate? Based on interviews with actors involved in the Swedish policy process, including Muslim civil society leaders, the study suggests that participation, in this case, meant primarily being present, thereby confirming commitment and stakeholder status and contributing legitimacy, and providing instrumental knowledge and communication networks. While Muslim representatives were often not expected to be more involved, some indicated that they themselves hesitated to go beyond these roles for several reasons. They expressed a concern that merely having opinions or critique could be interpreted as 'radical' and as not accepting the idea that Muslims as a group should have special responsibilities for preventing radicalism. One way of overcoming such obstacles is through subtle, indirect exercises of influence that allow policy-makers and administrators to anticipate the concerns and interests of affected groups without requiring their direct participation.

Deliberative systems theory suggests that a democratic society works well when citizens’ experiences and views, as expressed in various forms and sites of communication, are connected and taken up by other citizens as well as policy-makers. Pluralism, which is not always easily reconciled with high-quality deliberation in every instance, is seen as instrumental to the realization of democratic values and sound decision-making. This perspective raises new methodological challenges, such as (1) identifying sites of communication that serve important functions in a deliberative system, (2) connecting different sites and (3) assessing their impact. Recent scholarship has found that these challenges can be fruitfully met by applying interpretive methodology, which, like deliberative systems theory, aims to understand social interactions on their own terms, and not by measuring their correspondence to theoretical ideal-types. However, for theory development, as well as to help improve actual deliberative systems, researchers also need to make generalizable inferences. This paper develops a relational approach that combines interpretive methods with structural theory, which allows researchers to assess and explain the deficiencies, as well as the opportunities, that citizens experience. The principles of relational analysis are illustrated by research on citizen deliberation about urban riots.

Local political leaders as well as international organizations have embraced participatory budgeting in response to problems of political exclusion and citizens' dissatisfaction with representative democracy. This article provides a framework to highlight important aspects of thepoliticsof participation. The framework allows scholars to explore how factorsexternalto spaces of participation interact with aspects of participationwithinthem. The framework conceptualizes participatory budgeting as political spaces, whose boundaries are shaped by ideologies, interests, and patterns of social exclusion. In dynamic spaces, such boundaries are constantly renegotiated and contestation helps maintain their openness. In static spaces, by contrast, predefined boundaries are imposed on participants who may accept or reject them. Empirical examples of participatory budgeting illustrate the usefulness of this framework. The article ends by discussing key avenues for further research.

Urban riots are typically carried out by individuals who live in residential areas that are relatively marginalized socially, economically and politically. Previous research has discussed several aspects of deprivation that may help explain this relationship. Contributing further to this research, we aim to explain why marginalization produces riots by developing a rationalistic specification of social mechanisms. The utility of our model is demonstrated by a case study of the 2013 Stockholm riots. The model consists of (a) general local incentives that appeal to individual motives, but only lead to participation in riots when (b) the delicate local equilibrium is destabilized by an event that (c) makes riots appear justified, risk-free and thrilling. The advantage of this rationalistic model is that it shows why other people, in other places, would have reason to act in much the same way under similar circumstances.

The term 'meta-deliberation' refers to processes of addressing problems with the way that conversations about shared concerns - our ordinary deliberations - proceed. This article discusses the distinction between meta-deliberation and ordinary deliberation and examines three questions raised by previous arguments about meta-deliberation: (1) what kinds of communication should count as meta-deliberation, (2) does meta-deliberation always lead to reflective understanding and improvements in practices of deliberation, and (3) why would deliberative systems need meta-deliberation? Consistent with the systemic perspective on deliberation, this article suggests an inclusive view of which acts and sites may contribute to processes of meta-deliberation: it argues that meta-deliberation faces the same potential problems as ordinary deliberation, such as unequal power relations and narrow perspectives, and therefore requires careful examination; but when meta-deliberation works, it provides societies with reflective capacity, which helps them locate systemic weaknesses. The article concludes by discussing how further studies can help make meta-deliberation more inclusive in order to serve system-level critical reflection.