Political Community
25 June 2013 - 26 June 2013
Venue: King's College campus
Academic workshop
You can now download the Call for Workshop Papers for prospective workshop speakers or the Call for PhD Summer School Applications for advanced PhD students who will stay on for the summer school that will follow the workshop. Deadline for both is Tuesday 30 April.
Notions of political community are implicit in many or most contemporary debates – academic and public – of citizenship, civil society and rule of law, as well as of democracy, multiculturalism and human rights. But they are seldom made explicit and subject to analysis and reflection. That has also been our experience at CISRUL. Having debated and discussed aspects of citizenship, civil society and rule of law in a series of events since our founding in 2009, we have identified political community as a topic that crosscuts the three but which we have yet to comprehend fully, and are seeking papers that address the following questions:
1. When “political community” has been the explicit topic of debates, in particular times and places, what is meant by “political” and what is meant by “community”? What is not considered political and what is not community? To give just two examples, how is political community distinguished from religious community? And community from society?
2. What notions of political community have been caught up in citizenship, civil society and rule of law? Does citizenship, for example, always entail political community?
3. Can we identify political community beyond citizenship, civil society and rule of law? For example, are universities political communities? How about families, businesses and churches? Is multitude, as Hardt and Negri suggest, an emergent form of political community? What other emergent political communities might there be?
Confirmed speakers include:
- Margaret Somers, Professor of Sociology and History, U Michigan, author of Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Rights to Have Rights (CUP, 2008)
- John Perry, McDonald Post-Doctoral Fellow for Christian Ethics and Public Life, U Oxford, author of The Pretenses of Loyalty: Locke, Liberal Theory, and American Political Theology (OUP, 2011)
- Sian Lazar, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, U Cambridge, author of El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke, 2008)
- Ajay Gudavarthy, Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, author of Politics of Post-Civil Society: Contemporary History of Political Movements in India (Sage, 2013) and editor of Reframing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society (Anthem, 2012)
- Nigel Dower, Emeritus in Philosophy, U Aberdeen, author of An Introduction to Global Citizenship (EUP, 2003)
- Tamas Gyorfi, Lecturer in Law, U Aberdeen, author of "Between Common Law Constitutionalism and Procedural Democracy" in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2012)
Contact
Tracey Connon t.connon@abdn.ac.uk