Dr J.J.M. van de Sande (Mathijs)

Mathijs van de Sande teaches political/practical philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen. In 2017 he obtained his PhD at the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium). He was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) in Brighton (2011-12), and a Fulbright scholar at The New School for Social Research in New York (2015). In the spring semester of 2023 he will be a visiting researcher at Sciences Po Paris.

His main research interests are radical democracy, political representation, and the democratic role and relevance of protest. He draws from a variety of theoretical sources as well as political practices (such as anarchism, feminism, (post-)Marxism, and social movement studies). His book "Prefigurative Democracy: Protest, Social Movements and the Political Institution of Society" (2023) gives an account of how contemporary protest movements seek to 'prefigure' the political and societal change that they seek to establish, within their own practices and organisational structure. Since 2021 Van de Sande has been working on a new research project (which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung) on 'communalism' and the political afterlives of the Paris Commune of 1871.