The artistic-academic postgraduate programme Assemblies and Participation: Urban Publics and Performance was asking what role performance and media-based arts can play in the context of new urban movements of democratisation. By initiating transdisciplinary research processes between art, academia and society the postgraduate programme discussed and rehearsed from 2012-2015 new forms of assemblies and participation in an experimental conjunction of theoretical and artistic approaches. How can artistic and academic practices be combined in a way that the research process itself opens up for more social participation?