Clive Barnett works on the geographies of democracy and public life. He is author and editor of books and scholarly articles on colonial and postcolonial discourses, critical theory and the public sphere, political philosophy, popular media cultures, poststructuralism, and social movements. This includes empirical research on the UK, South Africa, USA, and Europe. His current research focuses on emergent forms of public action and their implications for understandings of democracy. Clive is a member of the OpenSpace Research Centre, and is Co-Director of the Publics Research Programme in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the OU. He is also a Member of the Open University′s Ethics Centre.

Murray Low′s research focuses on relationships between geography and democracy including institutional and spatial aspects of elections, changing practices of accountability and legitimacy in cities, and the geography of political party organisations and social movements. His work has dealt with the relationships between global networks and democracy, constructions of globalization and states in geography, and geographical aspects of political representation. He has recently completed research funded by the Leverhulme Foundation into city democratisation in South Africa. He is co-editor of Spaces of Democracy: Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation (Sage, 2004), and of The Sage Handbook of Political Geography (Sage, 2008)