In response to David Held’s account of his involvement with the Libyan regime, John Keane has published an open letter at openDemocracy raising further questions for Held. This is one of the smarter interventions in the whole affair, it seems to me, because amongst the specific issues of ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ that Keane raises about money, PhDs, plagiarism, etc, he ends with a set of questions that transcend the specifics of this case. His ‘parting question’ is the ‘least tangible but most concrete of all’: “do you think the LSE Libya affair has done damage to the scholarly credibility of research programmes in the area of democracy?” Keane raises interesting questions (and not just for Held) about the extent to which research on a concept and practice which has such powerful normative force, undertaken in a spirit which wants to do justice to the values and promise behind this force, might always lend itself to the possibility of ‘perversion’ or ‘misrepresentation’. One response of course to Keane’s line of questioning on this issue is to dismiss all such research as hopelessly naive and idealistic. But that is hardly his intention. His question does raise some important issues about the relationship between broadly normative and more worldly analyses of democracy and democratization, however – and of how to temper the idealism of the former with the realism of the latter without reducing the real-world force of the normative content of ‘democracy’ in its various registers and forms to mere ideology and hypocrisy.
David Held on engagement with Libya
Lots has been written about the involvement of the LSE with Gaddafi’s Libya, and especially about Saif Gaddafi’s connections with academics such as David Held. Held himself now has an essay at openDemocracy defending his own engagement, as neither naive nor complicitous.
Mothering and feminism
Everybody’s at it. Another colleague at the OU, Lucila Newell, has a blog called maternalselves: thinking feminist mothering, focussing as the name suggests on issues of motherhood and feminisim. The site includes informal reviews of papers/books on related topics, and links to other more-or-less academicy blogs on this theme.
citizen joe smith on nuclear power
Workshop on the Politics of Participation
Crisis of Participation; Participating in Crisis – 12 April 2011
The Open University, Walton Hall, Michael Young, Rooms 1-3, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
http://www3.open.ac.uk/contact/locations.aspx
One-day workshop organised by the Publics Research Programme (Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, The Open University) in collaboration with Jenny Pearce (Professor of Latin American Politics and Director of the International Centre for Participation Studies, University of Bradford).
Workshop rationale
Just as publics are increasingly solicited to participate in solving the economic, social and political problems of various contemporary crises, so many existing forms of public participation seem to be straining under the tensions and antagonisms they are expected to contain. Crisis of Participation; Participating in Crisis is a one-day workshop intended to inaugurate conversations about the contemporary places, problematic roles and possible futures of public participation.
The idea is to come at the overarching theme from three perspectives: (i) contemporary art practice, critical social theory and popular culture/politics; (ii) critical social policy and governance; iii) development studies. These are three ways of cutting into debates about contemporary public participation in politics that have so far not sufficiently been brought into relation. The aim of this workshop is therefore to generate some new ways of viewing, engaging with and intervening in what’s going on.
Programme
10:15 -10:45 Welcome and coffee
10:45 -11:00 Introductions (Dr. Nick Mahony, Prof. Jenny Pearce and Prof. John Clarke)
11:00 -13:00 Panel 1: ‘Participating in crisis: public creativity’
Dr. Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London),
‘The desire for participation’;
Cecilia Wee & Sonya Dyer (Curators/organisers, ‘If Not, Then What?’ Chelsea Programme/Chelsea College of Art & Design)
‘Participatory creative practice in a climate of dissent’
Dr. Deena Dajani (The Open University)
‘Crisis of Representation: Gender and Participation in the 2007 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections’
13:00 -14.00 Lunch
14:00 -15:45 Panel 2: ‘Crisis of Participation: the contemporary politics of public action’
Prof. Jenny Pearce (University of Bradford)
‘The Twist in the Participatory Turn’
Prof. Marilyn Taylor (University of West of England)
‘Community Organising and the Big Society: is Alinsky turning in his grave?’
Prof. Helen Sullivan (University of Birmingham)
‘Does a ‘big society’ demand a limited localism?’
15:45 -16:00 Tea
16:00 -16.30 Reflections, identification of key themes and next steps
16:30 Depart
RSVP: If you would like to attend please e-mail: Socsci-ccig-events@open.ac.uk (Sarah Batt, Research Secretary, CCIG, a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk, Tel: 01908 654704). For further information please contact Nick Mahony, (n.mahony@open.ac.uk) / CCIG website: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/
Sarah Batt
Research Secretary, ICCCR and CCIG
The Open University
Faculty of Social Sciences
Research Office
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
Tel: +44(0)1908 654704
Fax: +44(0)1908 654488
The University as a Public Good
Nigel Thrift at The Chronicle of Higher Education, argues that we need to make a case for thinking of the University as a public good (without saying what the substance of this claim would consist of). A good place to start fleshing this argument out is a recent SSRC publication, Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University (which includes a chapter by a couple of OU colleagues, John Brennan and Mala Singh). John and Mala belong to a research centre specialising in just these issues, CHERI, based at the OU, but not for much longer which is a great shame. Updates on the future of their research can be found here.
Sloterdijk, Honneth, and the politics of ‘provocation’
One of the theorists who is all the rage in spatial-theory-land at the moment, subject of a veritable ‘second coming’, is German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Society and Space had a special issue on his work a year or so ago, and Stuart Elden has edited a collection of essays on his work which is forthcoming. It’s interesting to watch this process, in particular the finessing of Sloterdijk’s political interventions. Sloterdijk is a professional provocateur, and amongst the various ‘controversies’ he has triggered in the world of German letters revolves around a Ayn Rand-like assault on the welfare state in 2009. I’m a bit slow, so am only now catching up on this, because I’m trying to write something about Honneth. You can read a summary of Sloterdijk’s position in English here in Forbes magazine or here in City Journal, both resolutely proud free-market publications. You can read Axel Honneth’s substantive response to Sloterdijk in translation here. Apart from the obvious politics to this (see the commendation of Sloterdijk by the National Review) there is also a dispute about how to interpret the role of various emotional dynamics in political life – a central theme of Honneth’s reconstruction of critical theory, and a feature of Sloterdijk’s work too since his ‘first coming’, in his analysis of cynicism. Rage makes the world go round for Sloterdijk, whereas disrespect and dignity are key dynamics for Honneth. Might sound similar, but quite different really. I’m not inclined to get too excited about Sloterdijk’s spatial metaphysics, which is what does excite geographers and others who like all things ontological; I actually think the reactionary inflection he gives to an analytics of resentment is helpful in reminding us that simply asserting the importance of ‘the emotional’ or ‘affect’ in life has no necessary political meaning per se – everything depends on how this affirmation is worked through. The Sloterdijk/Honneth to-do is interesting for drawing out the significance of this issue, and also helps to clarify an issue at stake in suggestions that Honneth’s ethics of recognition has some affinities with the work of Rancière – an affinity rooted in a particular sort of commitment to avoid a scholastic disdain for ordinary people (the case is made by Jean-Philippe Deranty).
Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism
The website for the Oecumene research project based at The Open University, led by Engin Isin, is now up and running. The project has its own blog, and you can sign up as an ‘Oecumene Affiliate’ to keep up to date and become involved.
This is how the project is described:
“Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism focuses on the tension between two different institutions: citizenship, the process by which belonging is recognised and enacted, and orientalism, the process by which European political institutions are considered originary and primary. What connects citizenship to orientalism is that citizenship has been historically seen as a Judeo-Christian institution contrasted against Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Hinduism. The project revisits questions of citizenship as political subjectivity in ‘orientalized worlds’ through genealogical investigations without orientalist assumptions. The aim is not only to uncover citizenship practices that remained either invisible or inaudible in other worlds but also to explore the possibilities of a renewed and expanded understanding of European citizenship.”
Living Geography
From Alan Parkinson of the Geographical Association at Living Geography, a draft of resources for school teachers to use to teach about and through the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. If I still taught students in real-time, this sort of material would be great even at undergraduate level – the sorts of pedagogy being done in school geography is often rather wonderful.
A non-event?
Fascinating interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, one of the bright new things of French philosophy, on the Tunisian revolution. He’s very rude about Badiou and Zizek’s pronouncements on all this: ‘It’s obvious that Badiou and Zizek, who reacted very late to the first positive event of historical and global scope of the twenty-first century, know absolutely nothing about the situation’.
Pop Theory 