Professor Nicole Curato PhD

• PhD in Political Sociology, University of Birmingham (2011)
• MA in Sociology with Distinction, University of Manchester (2007)
• BA in Sociology (cum laude), University of the Philippines-Diliman (2004)

Nicole Curato is Professor of Democratic Governance in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Birmingham. She is best known for grounding deliberative democracy in the lived experiences of precarious communities in the Global South, with a focus on the conditions that enable historically excluded groups to assert their presence in policymaking and implementation.

Her recent work focuses on developing a political vision and practical pathways for building a 'global deliberative democracy' by shifting the position of subjugated knowledges from the margins to the centre of deliberative theory and practice. She also continues her influential research on the governance of deliberative practices through the concept of Deliberative Integrity.

Nicole is the founder of the Global Citizens' Assembly Network (GloCAN), former editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy and Australian Journal of Political Science, founding editor of the Deliberative Democracy Digest, and founder of the Deliberative Democracy Summer School. She currently serves as co-editor of the European Journal of Political Research. She has convened diverse voices at major academic conferences and delivered over 250 keynotes, plenaries, and public lectures around the world hosted by institutions such as Cambridge, Yale, the National University of Singapore, University of Pretoria, the Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Venice Biennale, and Club de Madrid.

Before joining the University of Birmingham, she was a research-focused professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She holds a distinctive record of securing major categories of grants awarded by the Australian Research Council, with five successful applications across DECRA, Future Fellowship, Special Research Initiative, Discovery and Linkage schemes, alongside funding from the ESRC, Norwegian Research Council, and the Medical Research Future Fund Genomics Health Futures Mission.

She welcomes collaboration with academics, civil society groups, grassroots movements, practitioners, and policymakers interested in developing a global ethos in local and national deliberative practice, as well as co-creating capacity-building programmes for deliberative citizen engagement in diverse political settings.

• Public Policy and Evidence, Degree Apprenticeship (2026-2027, with Louise Reardon)
• Public Leadership, MSc Public Management (2025-2026, with Sonia Bussu)

Nicole welcomes PhD students interested in advancing research on the theory of deliberative democracy, particularly in Global South contexts. She is especially keen on projects exploring:

- Democratic innovations in policy vacuums, polarised societies, and illiberal regimes
- Deliberation in fragile and conflict-affected settings
- Authoritarian innovations or governance practices that co-opt democratic experiments for illiberal ends

She has supervised ten PhD students from ten countries, with topics ranging from Indigenous deliberative governance in Australia to the role of deliberative design in promoting empathy and perspective-taking. She brings a strong commitment to supporting researchers from diverse backgrounds, professional biographies, and intellectual traditions.

PhD title

• PhD in Political Sociology, University of Birmingham (2011)

Nicole's research is widely recognised for advancing deliberative democracy in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Her work has shaped global discourse on democratic innovations in the aftermath of disasters, during pandemics, and amid environmental conflicts.

Her current projects include:

• Deliberative Integrity. The Deliberative Integrity Project promotes critical and reflective dialogue on how deliberative processes can be designed, implemented, evaluated, and researched with integrity as a guiding standard. Building on the report Deliberative Integrity: Risks and Responses in Mini-Public Governance (co-authored with Lucy J. Parry), Nicole is now focused on translating these insights into practical guidance for securing the integrity of deliberative citizen engagement in democratic governance.

• Global Deliberative Democracy. This project explores politically plausible and normatively defensible pathways to bring historically marginalised voices—women, peasants, refugees, the dispossessed, and enslaved peoples—into the centre of global public deliberation. It seeks to co-develop deliberative designs with these communities and to articulate a procedural framework that claims space for their knowledges, experiences, and political agency on the global stage. The project challenges the idea that meaningful deliberation is simply about scaling up participation or hosting glossy yet largely inconsequential participatory events. Instead, it takes the position that genuine global deliberation must break free from dominant Eurocentric frameworks that continue to shape global consensus and suppress alternative ways of knowing and being.