Event
Citizenship from the perspective of the non-citizen
@ Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the New University of Lisbon, Portugal - April 18, 2012 –
THE MANY
HISTORY, THEORY AND POLITICS
International Conference
Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the New University of Lisbon
The definition of a collective subject of politics constituted one of the most
important questions in modern political thought, history and social sciences. All
these disciplines tried to answer the question who makes politics? as part of a
wider questioning on what is politics? In the last decades, however, the names
given to collective political subjects – such as people, nation, class or masses –
became the object of an ever growing questioning regarding their adequacy, thus
creating a conceptual crisis. This crisis’ first consequence was the downgrading
of any notion of politics as a collective affair. The view that individuals were both
the base and object of politics became dominant. According to such a view, the
collective should be seen as a mere aggregation of individualities. Nevertheless,
this conceptual crisis also opened up to other possibilities. Recent years were
also marked by the quest for new concepts or for a renewal of old concepts in
order to name the collective subject of politics. Such a quest, in its many guises,
entails a strategic notion of politics where the plurality of a singular subject
always exceeds the sum of its parts. Such debates around the names of the
collective political subject have been taking place in domains as diverse as
philosophy, history, economics, political science and anthropology.
This conference aims to gather a set of contributions to the question of
the collective subject of politics. The conference welcomes papers that present
theoretical contributions to the debate as well as case studies gathered from any
geographical space and from all historical periods. It is mainly – but in no way
exclusively – directed at researchers from different disciplinary areas working
on political thought and social movements. The working language of the
conference is English.
