Conferência
Beyond
the Civil Society Agenda? 'Civic Participation' and Practices of
Governance, Governability and Governmentality
Sonia Alvarez, University of
Massachusetts
1 de Julho de 2008, 16:00,
Sala Keynes, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra
No âmbito do Programa de
Doutoramento "Democracia no Século XXI"
Apresentação
Civil society as we have come to know it—as a
civic arena, a political space, a policy buzzword, a moral imperative,
a theoretical concept or all of the above—has been produced through
diverse means and in contradictory ways by an array of actors and
discourses in and across a variety of sites and historical moments.
Focusing on contemporary Latin American experiences and drawing
principally on the case of Brazil, the paper traces the genealogy of
civil society and analyzes how diverse currents of “civil society talk”
converged to configure what I call the “Civil Society Agenda”: a
hegemonic though contested set of normative and prescriptive
assumptions about “citizen participation” and “civic action” that have
deeply shaped the discourses and practices of both public officials and
participants themselves (and many of their academic observers) in the
Americas. That Agenda prescribes what actors operating in the space of
civil society—variously demarcated as distinct from political society,
the State, the private sphere, and (sometimes) the market—should do and
how and to what end they should act and “participate.” The essay then
turns to an exploration of the various ways in which “civil society”
and “civic participation” are invoked by and implicated in diverse
ensembles or regimes of practices of government, namely Governance,
Governability and Governmentality. I end with a consideration of how
activists and scholars might unsettle and move beyond the Civil Society
Agenda.
Nota
biográfica
Alvarez is Director of the
Center for Latin American Studies, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, where she also teaches courses on Government and Politics of
Latin America. She is the author of Engendering Democracy in Brazil:
Women's Movements in Transition Politics (1990); and co-editor of The
Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and
Democracy (1992) and Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures:
Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (1998). Her articles have
appeared in Signs, Feminist Studies, Revista Estudos Feministas,
Estudios Latinoamericanos, International Feminist Journal of Politics,
Debate Feminista, Meridians, Revista Mora, and numerous edited
collections and social movement publications. Before coming to UMass,
Alvarez was Professor of Politics at the University of California at
Santa Cruz. In Brazil, she has been Fulbright visiting professor in the
Department of Political Science and the Inter-Disciplinary Graduate
Program in Social Sciences at the State University of Campinas and
visiting scholar at the Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences at the
Federal University of Santa Catarina. She was a Program Officer in
Rights and Social Justice for the Brazil Office of the Ford Foundation
from 1993 to 1996 and is currently on the national or international
boards of editorial advisors of several scholarly journals, including
Latin American Politics and Society, Political Geography, Bulletin of
Latin American Research and Revista Estudos Feministas. She served as
President of the Latin American Studies Association from November 2004
to May 2006. |