Quinlan Bowman

Quinlan Bowman is an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in China. He is Major Convenor for DKU’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major and co-directs the Lab for Global Social and Political Thought at DKU’s Humanities Research Center. Previously, he co-directed the Citizenship Lab at the Humanities Research Center. He has also held positions at the University of Chicago, the University of Canberra (Australia), and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).

Broadly, Quinlan’s research and teaching interests are in democratic theory and practice, the history of social and political thought, the philosophy of the social sciences, ethics, and comparative public policy. He is co-author of Deliberative Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Other recent publications have addressed such topics as the role of abstract normative theories in guiding actual democratic practices; the philosophical presuppositions of deliberative policy analysis; and qualitative and multi-method approaches to investigating citizen participation and deliberation.

While a Fellow at the Ash Center, Quinlan will be working on a book manuscript entitled “Citizens, Not Subjects: Promoting Democratic Goods through Creative Action.” Drawing on case studies from around the world, the manuscript aims to expand our democratic imaginaries and so promote the democratization of policy processes. It aspires to help citizens, practitioners, and scholars to envision political systems that put lay participation and deliberation at the heart of policymaking. The included cases illustrate how creative lay action can render policy processes more inclusive and effective at mitigating pressing public problems. They also explore how public participation can operate at multiple geographic scales – from the neighborhood level up to the transnational – and illustrate how participation at different levels might be linked up. Diverse policy domains are considered, including nature conservation, public health, urban and rural development, and more.