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Blog
IT
TAKES
A
MOVEMENT
Social Mobilization and Rebuilding Democracy
July 3-9, 2023
Organized by
The Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC),
Central European University (CEU), and the
Center of Transcultural Studies (CTS)
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Around the world, democracies are breaking down. Many are being dismantled from within while others face attacks from without. In both cases, the issues underlying democracy’s erosion are not superficial but deeply entrenched and complex. As a result, democracies will not be renewed without considerable effort. Technical fixes imposed from above may slow democratic degeneration, but they cannot reverse it. Rebuilding democracy—fortifying its institutions and advancing its project—takes a movement from below.
Yet, when it comes to social mobilization, democratic societies tend to be apprehensive. A handful of exceptionally civil, organized, and focused social movements may serve as evidence of a dynamic public sphere and a healthy democratic culture. But far more often, democratic governments respond to social mobilization with less enthusiasm, treating it as anything from a nuisance to a threat. After all, what democratic purpose could social mobilization fulfill in a society with fair elections, democratic representation, and independent courts? Given the growing frequency, intensity, scale, and volatility of twenty-first century social mobilizations in democratic societies, it is difficult to see them simply as a confirmation of democratic flourishing or evidence of its undoing. Instead, from Indian farmers to Canadian truckers and Colombian taxpayers, from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Yellow Vests, these mobilizations index social, political, cultural, and economic crises that democratic governments have failed to address. In this context, what is the relationship between social mobilization and democracy? Do loosely networked local protests in disparate contexts share a global anatomy? When are social mobilizations a threat to democracy and when are they the foundation of its renewal?
The aim of It Takes a Movement is to re-examine the relationship between social mobilization and democracy by attending to the stunning complexity and diversity of twenty-first century protests and social movements. The course will employ a global perspective, comparing social mobilizations across different democratic contexts, tracing transnational connections and fissures, and establishing common features. To this end, the course will foster a robust dialogue among students, activists, and scholars assembled from all over the world. Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of the fraught relationship between democracy and social mobilization as well as new questions and ideas about how it might be productively addressed.
The course will fund a minimum of twenty students and reserves one third of available spaces for applicants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
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The application deadline is March 5, 2023. Once admitted, all costs related to participation will be covered by the organizers. For US based students, airfare and ground transportation will be covered only up to USD 500.
Given CGCC’s role in the Summer School, a minimum of three (possibly five) Northwestern graduate students will be admitted. Interested students should apply through the application portal on the Summer School’s page on the CEU website and then email Dilip Gaonkar (d-gaonkar@northwestern.edu) to indicate that they have applied.
For more information about the faculty, course directors, and course coordinator, please visit the Summer School’s page on the CEU website.
The Center of Global Culture and Communication (An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
& the Center for Transcultural Studies
Jointly present
Questioning the Present: An Online Public Forum on
The Force of Non-Violence
(Verso, 2020)
Judith Butler
(Distinguished Professor,
Department of Comparative Literature & Program of Critical Theory,
UC Berkeley)
Judith Butler’s recent book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.
Respondents
Jay Bernstein (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School)
Anne Boyer (Poet, Essayist, Writer, Kansas City Art Institute)
José Medina (Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University)
ON ZOOM
Friday, June 2, 10:00 am to 12:00 pm CST
Register
https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMuduyqrjMiHdTjDyeurWBnLPNjXCFlHNMv
An extract from The Force of Violence to review before the forum
https://drive.google.com/file/d/114dyGGXs4keP0D6KvjJ9n3LyQtCoRWgl/view?usp=sharing
The Center for Global Culture and Communication
(An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
Invites you to an in-person conference on
Rhetoric and Politics of Protest and Social Mobilization II
Friday, May 26, 2023
TGS Commons
2122 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60201
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Participants
Banu Bargu
(History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Humberto Beck
(Center for International Studies, El Colegio de México)
Liam Olson-Mayes
(Communication, Tulane University)
Wendy Pearlman
(Political Science, Northeastern University)
+ Roundtable with graduate students!
Convened by Professors Dilip Gaonkar & José Maria Medina
Lunch and light refreshments will be served.
Critical Theory in Critical Times WORKSHOP
Focused on Professor José Medina’s The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance
Friday, May 19, 2023
3:30-6:30pm
Harris Hall-108, 1881 Sheridan Rd, Evanston
Reception to Follow
A Discussion With
JOSE MEDINA
Invited Commentators:
Luvell Anderson Syracuse
Miguel Caballero Northwestern
Marcela Fuentes Northwestern
Nancy Tuana Penn State
This event is generously co-sponsored by The Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Critical Theory Cluster, and the Department of Philosophy
Symposium on Environmental Advocacy and Visual Culture
Friday, April 14, 2023
Northwestern University
Frances Searle Building 3-417
2240 Campus Drive, Evanston
Presenters include…
9:30 am: Phaedra Pezzullo (University of Colorado)
11:00 am: Debra Hawhee (Penn State University)
1:30 pm: Finis Dunaway (Trent University)
3:00 pm: Ashley Cordes (University of Oregon)
Sponsors & Co-Sponsors: The Centre for Global Culture and Communication; The Graduate School; Buffett Institute for Global Affairs; Department of Communication Studies; Rhetoric and Public Culture; Rhetoric, Media, and Publics; Climate Crisis + Media Arts; Environment, Culture, and Society; and Environmental Policy and Culture
As part of the Rhetoric & Politics of Protest & Social Mobilization Workshop Series,
The Center of Global Culture and Communication
(An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication) ,
the Department of Philosophy, and
Graduate Program in Rhetoric, Media, and Publics
jointly present a discussion of
Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896
featuring
Charles Postel
(Professor of History, San Francisco State University)
Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896, published in 2020, is an in-depth study of American social movements after the Civil War and their lessons for today by a prizewinning historian. The Civil War unleashed a torrent of claims for equality―in the chaotic years following the war, former slaves, women’s rights activists, farmhands, and factory workers all engaged in the pursuit of the meaning of equality in America. This contest resulted in experiments in collective action, as millions joined leagues and unions. In Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896, Charles Postel demonstrates how taking stock of these movements forces us to rethink some of the central myths of American history. Despite, a nationwide push for equality, egalitarian impulses oftentimes clashed with one another. These dynamics get to the heart of the great paradox of the fifty years following the Civil War and of American history at large: Waves of agricultural, labor, and women’s rights movements were accompanied by the deepening of racial discrimination and oppression. Herculean efforts to overcome the economic inequality of the first Gilded Age and the sexual inequality of the late-Victorian social order emerged alongside Native American dispossession, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow segregation, and lynch law. Now, as Postel argues, the twenty-first century has ushered in a second Gilded Age of savage socioeconomic inequalities. Convincing and learned, Equality explores the roots of these social fissures and speaks urgently to the need for expansive strides toward equality to meet our contemporary crisis.
Respondents
William Keith (Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Ashley Ferrell (Doctoral Candidate, Rhetoric & Public Culture, Northwestern University)
Ryan Bince (Doctoral Candidate, Rhetoric & Public Culture, Northwestern University)
Trienes Forum (Kresge 1515)
1880 Campus Drive
Monday, April 10
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
The Center of Global Culture and Communication (An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
& Center for Transcultural Studies
jointly present
‘Questioning the Present: An Online Public Forum on
Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South
(Duke University Press, 2020)
Prathama Banerjee
(History and Political Theory,
Center for the Study of Developing Societies-CSDS, New Delhi)
Respondents
Humberto Beck
Center for International Studies, El Colegio de México
Murad Idris
Political Science, University of Michigan
Rochona Majumdar
South Asian Languages and Civilizations/ Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago
ON ZOOM, Friday, February 3, 2023, 10:00 am to 12:00 pm CST
Register https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYtd-GqqT0tG9RzwmBIV3DZ2hMmlSUeJKlG
In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of “the political ” from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal.
The Center of Global Culture and Communication (An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
& the Northwestern University Department of Philosophy
jointly present
Resisting Prison Injustice
featuring
Lisa Guenther
(Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies,
Queen’s University)
For as long as prisons have existed, people in prison have resisted carceral power. This workshop reflects on two very different examples of prisoner resistance: the California Prison Hunger Strikes of 2011-2013, and a current movement to create a memorial garden at the former Prison for Women in Kingston, Canada. While resistance to prison injustice takes many different forms, it also raises some common questions: How do people in situations of extreme isolation and control connect across systemic barriers to organize collective resistance? What role do memory, imagination, and affect play in resisting carceral logics? And how are networks of solidarity sustained across the prison walls?
Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015). From 2012-17, she facilitated a discussion group with men on death row in Tennessee called REACH Coalition, and she is a member of the P4W Memorial Collective Advisory Board. She is currently working on a critical phenomenology of prison abolition and decolonization on Turtle Island.
Respondents
Corey Barnes (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University)
Sooraj Saksena (Doctoral Student of Philosophy, Northwestern University)
ON ZOOM,
Thursday, February 9
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm CST
The Center of Global Culture and Communication (An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication) & the Center for Transcultural Studies
jointly present
‘Questioning the Present: An Online Public Forum on
The Populist Century’
(Polity Press, 2021)
Pierre Rosanvallon
(Modern and Contemporary Political History, Collège de France)
At a time when the words and slogans of the left have lost much of their power to inspire, Pierre Rosanvallon takes populism for what it is: the rising ideology of the twenty-first century. In The Populist Century he develops a rigorous theoretical account of populism, distinguishing five key features that make up populist political culture; he retraces its history in modern democracies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present; and he offers a well-reasoned critique of populism, outlining a robust democratic alternative. This wide-ranging and insightful account of the theory and practice of populism will be of great interest to students and scholars in politics and the social sciences and to anyone concerned with the key political questions of our time.
Respondents
Michael Sandel (Professor of Government, Harvard University)
Charles Taylor (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University)
Nadia Urbinati (Professor of Political Science, Columbia University)
ON ZOOM,
Friday, December 2
10:00 am to 12:00 pm CST
Register Here