CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS AND SUMMER SCHOOL APPLICATIONS (funding available)
Workshop followed by PhD summer school
WHAT CIVIL? WHAT SOCIETY?
hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL)
at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland
www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul
Workshop: Monday 25th - Tuesday 26th June
PhD summer school: Wednesday 27th June - Thursday 28th June
At the workshop and the PhD summer school that follows it, we propose to
examine the concept of 'civil society' not just in contemporary Europe and
North America but historically and in contexts across the world as well as
across academic disciplines. We will seek not to define 'civil society' but
to identify the consequences - political, legal, social, moral,
epistemological - of particular ways in which 'civil' and 'society' have
been defined in different times and places. In so doing we will pose five
overarching questions:
1. What has been held (in different times and places) to make a society (or
part of it) civil as opposed to uncivil (or barbarous)?
2. How has civil society been distinguished as a domain or sphere of
society from domains considered non-civil (as opposed to uncivil) such as
politics, the military, the ecclesiastical or religious, the economy, and
law?
3. When civil society has been used to refer to one part of a broader
society, such as recently for the NGO sector, how is the civil part
supposed to relate to society as a whole? What or who is included in or
excluded from civil society, and on what grounds? For example, do issues
considered non-public get excluded from discussion in civil society, and if
so, what does that say about the link between concepts of civil society and
of the public?
4. What notions of society lie behind notions of civil society? This latter
question will push us to reflect on concepts of society, from the medieval
and early modern periods to the 19th-century birth of social sciences to
contemporary debates about whether society exists or not.
5. Are notions of civil society (and society) defined by law or by some
other means, and what is the difference in practice?
Confirmed speakers include Jeffrey Alexander (Sociology, Yale), Maurizio
Viroli (Political Theory, Princeton), Philip Oxhorn (Institute for the
Study of International Development, McGill) and Ekow Yankah (Cardozo Law
School).
For the workshop, we are calling for abstracts of twenty-minute
presentations that would respond to our questions and help to open up
discussion – over half the workshop time will be devoted to discussion -
among scholars from the range of disciplines that will be represented at
the workshop.
For the PhD summer school, we are calling for applications from advanced
PhD students of any discipline to attend the workshop and participate in
the PhD summer school that follows it. Students would make a 10-minute
presentation on a related topic at the summer school.
Further information and applications forms are available at
www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul The deadline is Friday 13th April.
CISRUL is also offering PhD studentships to start in September 2012 -
details on the website.
Trevor Stack, Director
Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL)
Programme Coordinator, Department of Hispanic Studies
University of Aberdeen
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/spanish/staff/details.php?id=t.stack
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul
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