Institutions, Narratives and Identities
A graduate student workshop at the University of Florida
February 18-19, 2012
“Normative sources of analytic agendas are fundamental in all political research.”
David Collier
“The point of comparative political theory […] is precisely to move toward a more genuine universalism, and beyond the spurious “universality” traditionally claimed by the Western canon and by some recent intellectual movements.”
Fred Dallmayr
Guest Invitees:
Packey J. Dee Professor, Philosophy and Political Science, University of Notre Dame
Professor, Political Science, University of Toronto
Director, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
The separate but parallel attempts to grapple with the issue of identity within both comparative politics and political theory offer tantalizing possibilities for collaboration. Comparative politics has been productive in uncovering those empirical markers emblematic of identity that are crucial for the patterning of political phenomena. As an antidote to univocal assertions, political theory offers pluralized narratives of identity formation. This workshop uses identity as a thematic focus to demonstrate the potential of collaboration between these subfields.
Over the past decade, practitioners within comparative politics have urged for deepening and updating theoretical concepts such as democracy, identity, and violence. In turn, political theorists have made strides to reconnect the subfield to its home discipline and the broader political world by reminding its practitioners that political theory has always been an inherently comparative enterprise. That the two subfields should be moving closer to one another – as evidenced by the emergence of comparative political theory – is no surprise. In many respects, both comparative politics and political theory trace their beginnings to ancient Greece. In ancient times, a theorist (theôros) was someone who traveled outside the confines of the polis to attend the religious festivals of other Greek cities and reported back the knowledge gained.
In order to facilitate this conversation, we invite abstracts that engage a broad range of thematic areas including, but not limited to, the following:
- Methodological approaches to the study of identity
- Psychoanalytic, semiotic, sociological approaches to identity
- Spatio-temporal bounds to identity
- Memory (short-long time periods), “real”/imagined, agent-structure relationships
- Formal/informal Institutionalization of identity
- Citizenship, democracy, civic-nationalism/ethno-nationalism, culture, modernization/industrialization
This workshop has been sponsored by the Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science.
(The deadline to submit abstracts has now passed.)
