Summer School
reNEWed WAYS OF DOING POLITICS
Modern thinking on politics and on the political is centred on the institutions, ideologies and practices of nation-states. The experiences of varying social movements in different parts of the world and at different historical junctures have expanded this State-centred approach in two ways: by extending the “space” of doing politics and by stretching and blending the boundaries between the “political”, the “social” and the “cultural”. However, such an expansion still remains within the boundaries of the nation-state and of national societies. In reality, contemporary processes of globalisation and localisms have promoted new forms of doing politics that complicate these boundaries in three major aspects: first, new ways of doing politics are emerging both inside and outside of the State through local, national, regional and transnational knowledge networkings and activisms; secondly, institutional forms of representative democracy are being increasingly combined with mechanisms of participatory democracy; thirdly, new types of (trans)local collective action expressed through a politics of proximity, politics of memory and performative politics are breaking the boundaries between the spaces, temporalities and vocabularies of the politics of doing politics. This Summer Course will introduce students to a range of studies and concrete experiments on these contemporary forms of doing politics. The Course will also offer different analytical tools to help make sense of the major characteristics, novelties and contributions of these renewed ways of doing politics and redefining the political.
Date
15-17 July, 2009
Hours
10:00 am – 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm, daily
Course idiom
English