What Civil? What Society?
25 June 2012 - 28 June 2012
Venue: Committee Room 2, University Offices
An academic workshop (25-26 June) followed by a PhD summer school (27-28 June). Funding is available for both workshop and PhD summer school participants.
During the academic workshop and PhD summer school, we propose to examine the concept of 'civil society' not just in contemporary Europe and North America but historically and in contexts across the world as well as across academic disciplines. We will seek not to define 'civil society' but to identify the consequences - political, legal, social, moral, epistemological - of particular ways in which 'civil' and 'society' have been defined in different times and places.
We will pose three overarching questions:
1. What has been held (in different times and places) to make a society (or part of it) civil as opposed to uncivil (or barbarous)?
2. How has civil society been distinguished as a domain or sphere of society from domains considered non-civil (as opposed to uncivil) such as politics, the military, the ecclesiastical or religious, the economy, and law?
3. When civil society has been used to refer to one part of a broader society, such as recently for the NGO sector, how is the civil part supposed to relate to society as a whole?
a. What or who is excluded from civil society, and on what grounds? For example, do issues considered non-public get excluded from discussion in civil society, and if so, what does that say about the link between concepts of civil society and of the public?
b. What notions of society lie behind notions of civil society? This latter question will push us to reflect on concepts of society, from the medieval and early modern periods to the 19th-century birth of social sciences to contemporary debates about whether society exists or not.
For the workshop, we are calling for abstracts of twenty-minute presentations that would respond to our questions and help to open up discussion - over half the workshop time will be devoted to discussion - among scholars from the range of disciplines that will be represented at the workshop. Please click for the CfP for the workshop
For the PhD summer school, we are calling for applications from advanced PhD students, who will attend the workshop and participate in the PhD summer school, giving a 10-minute presentation on a related topic. Please click for the Call for summer school applications
Contact
Louise Harkins (l.harkins@abdn.ac.uk)