Just Serrano
Trustee
Just is a philosophy researcher and lecturer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Specializing in social and political philosophy, he works on the epistemic challenges of current democratic societies. These include the emergence of post-truth and the new roles science and technology play in solving citizens’ problems. He draws on John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy as providing a promising response to the existing crisis of liberal democracies. His work also engages with the Frankfurt School Critical Theory as well as feminism. These critical approaches help to uncover existing power structures about how knowledge in modern societies is produced.
In his current research, he explores bottom-up democratic innovations such as the emergence of municipal citizen lists in France or the organization of climate camps in Germany, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. He is also part of the research project, Democracy and its futures, funded by the national research agencies of Germany (DFG) and France (ANR). Previously, he taught courses on digital technologies and democracy at the Bavarian School of Public Policy, hosted at the Technical University of Munich.
Just holds a PhD from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2018), which also awarded his MA in Political Theory along with the Technical University of Darmstadt. At the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, he spent six years with the Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS), also known as the Frankfurt School, whose members in the 1930s developed the Critical Theory still adopted in humanities and social sciences today. There, he coordinated the International Working Group on Critical Theory, and worked on different projects.
Just has published articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics such as domination, collective articulation, political participation, and current populist movements, as well as book chapters for Routledge, SUNY Press, and Metzler. His first monograph, Democratization and Struggles Against Injustice, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield International.
