Invitation to Political Community inter-disciplinary workshop at CISRUL, U Aberdeen, 24-25 June 2014

Trevor Stack Discussion

Invitation to workshop

POLITICAL COMMUNITY: AUTHORITY IN THE NAME OF COMMUNITY

Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Tuesday 24-Wednesday 25 June 2014

Academic coordinator: Trevor Stack (t.stack@abdn.ac.uk)

Workshop administrator: Claire Wojciechowski (claire.wojciechowski@abdn.ac.uk)

Website: http://wp.me/PASsb-45

Speakers include Margaret Somers, Stephen Tierney, Ajay Gudavarthy, Gurpreet Mahajan, Dejan Stjepanovic, Jan Kotowski, Andreea Udrea, Katinka Weber, Rivke Jaffe, Martijn Koster, Marc Kruman, Balazs Majtenyi, David Thunder and Camille Walsh.

Following our successful Political Community workshop in June 2013, CISRUL invites you to attend a workshop that will allow us to develop our understanding of political community, prior to publishing a volume.

We confirmed in our June 2013 workshop that the term “political community” was appropriate for identifying a core set of issues that interest us at CISRUL (even though it was evident that no term will ever carry all the right connotations and none of the wrong ones). Though we each have our own preferred approach, reflecting the wide range of perspectives in CISRUL, several of us are using the term “political community” for one whose members feel somehow represented within its structures of authority, and thus somehow obliged to their fellow-members to follow its norms and accept its decisions. A political community could also be termed a democracy but we prefer to use the term “democracy” for a form of government; our focus is more on the link between authority and community than on the precise structure of government. In a political community, authority is exercised in the name of some kind of community of members – this is the point on which for the most part we converge.

That said, we understand both “authority” and “community” in a variety of ways. We are interested in established political institutions but also in less formal and/or emergent structures of authority. Similarly, we are interested in nations as the (arguably) paramount political communities of the contemporary world, but also in other forms of political community in past and present. Pre-modern cities are obvious examples, but we are open to the possibility that there are political communities other than nations in the present day, even if these may be linked to or embedded within nations.

As in all CISRUL activities, our approach is fully inter-disciplinary and our interests include but go beyond contemporary Europe and North America. Our speakers will present on Scotland, Netherlands, Hungary and SE Europe, USA, Bolivia, Jamaica and India, as well as on political community in philosophy, post-colonial studies, and constitutional and international law. Abstracts are available at http://wp.me/PASsb-45.

The workshop will be held at the beautiful Old Aberdeen campus of the University of Aberdeen on Tuesday 24th and Wednesday 25th June.

Please find further details at http://wp.me/PASsb-45. There will be no charge for attending. To register, email the administrator Claire Wojciechowski (claire.wojciechowski@abdn.ac.uk).

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Trevor Stack

Director, Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) and Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies University of Aberdeen.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/spanish/staff/details.php?id=t.stack

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul