International Colloquium

Neoliberalism and Surplus Democracy: new forms of political organisation

January 16 to 18, 2018

Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville)

Overview

In the light of the socio-political processes that involve us, we seem to move between disorientation and disenchantment. We could very well characterize our historical moment with the words of Antonio Gramsci: The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters".

However, it is worth recognising that not all of the old world is dying, nor all of the new world on the horizon carries emancipatory alternatives. We have witnessed the fall of great myths in the legal-political field,  the hijacking of  the State and its institutions by economic groups; the co-optation of our subjectivity (also between actors of the Left) by the neoliberal rationality; to neoconservative narratives that beyond the economic are gaining concrete expressions in the field of culture and a new reactionary common sense.

Faced with this historical horizon, it is urgent and necessary to open spaces of collective thought, reflection and dialogue that help us to identify the baselines of what we are living and to recognise and articulate the concrete experiences from which alternatives are being built.

For all these reasons, our seminar proposes to debate the following questions:
How to think and act in a world where utopias, as well as democracies, seem to be imprisoned by the inevitability of the strategies of a capitalism without boundaries, without bridles?
What experiences of emancipatory political organisation are underway in this process of dispute between society projects?


Coorganização: Instituto Joaquín Herrera Flores – IJHF – España/América Latina, Universidad Pablo de Olavide – UPO - España, Universidad Internacional de Andalucía – UNIA - España e Instituto Novos Paradigmas – INP - Brasil

Apoios: Programa de Doutoramento "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies" do Centro de Estudos Sociais/UC – Portugal, Fundación Rosario Valpuesta – España, Instituto Declatra – DECLATRA - Brasil e Mestrado PPGD – UFRJ – Brasil