Duration
14 Sep 2020 - 18 Sep 2020
This course aims to strengthen the awareness of how the use and changes of political concepts affect our ability to comprehend some of the main contemporary social and political challenges. Researching basic concepts in politics requires epistemological perspective facilitating access to political phenomena and experience on which these concepts are based.
The course programme and lecturers will work on building such epistemological framework, while critically engaging with clusters of concepts that are crucial for the development of critical political thinking in the 21st century and for understanding of contemporary post-totalitarian processes. Among these might be: the break with socialism/communism and its consequences, the emergence and decline of revolutionary and emancipatory movements at the end of millennium, the withdrawal of the liberal-democratic political model, the return of totalitarian tendencies in Europe and elsewhere, the burning issues of truth in/and politics, the rise of new racism and new global divisions, the problems of nation-states and sovereignty, the increased numbers of refugees, the criminalization of migration, and the rise of the global climate justice movements.
Papers and presentations will also be dedicated to specific authors or conceptual schools while addressing their similarities, differences and explanatory perspectives. Moreover, the idea is to discuss, reframe and re-describe some selected political concepts in an original theoretical and for political practice relevant way. Single concepts will be addressed along the ways of their forming, situating and translating in various discursive practices and also in multilingual contexts.
Video Lectures 2020:
Gorazd Kovačič - Arendt's Intervention in the Liberal Tradition of the Concept of Society
Jerneja Brumen - Could “the banality of the ecocide” be an Arendtian concept? A discussion
Mirt Komel - “To act or not to act”: Arendt, Hegel, and Shakespeare in Action
Ringo Rösener - Understanding Isolation and Conspiracy Theories with Hannah Arendt's "Ideology and Terror”
Wolfgang Heuer - “Tianxia / All Under Heaven” or “To be in the World”? - China and the Crisis of Liberalism
Vlasta Jalušič - Arendt, Koselleck and »begreifen«: thinking political concepts in times of »crisis«
Toni Čerkez & Martin Gramc - Virus and Biopolitics: A View from the Body
Rafael Lambert Kasper - Between 1919 and COVID-19: Some Thoughts on a Political Change
