Call for Papers: The End(s) of Democracy | Political Concepts 2025

Funding Opportunity

The annual Political Concepts conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, February 28 and March 1, 2025, at Brown University, under the auspices of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. The conference is part of the Political Concepts Initiative, a collaborative project of colleagues from the New School, Columbia University, NYU, CUNY, and Brown, and is convened by Timothy Bewes, Ainsley LeSure, Brian Meeks, Adi Ophir, and Vazira Zamindar.

The goal of the Political Concepts Initiative is to experiment with modes of concept construction, concept performance, and/or concept analysis, and to use this concept-work as a tool for enhancing critical questioning of the political, while creating a framework for an ongoing conversation across disciplines, methodologies, and styles of thinking in the humanities and social sciences.

Theme

We have been witnessing the undoing of democracy for some time now. The forces responsible for “undoing the demos” include neoliberal capitalism; the privatization of public spheres; the virtual simulations of the public that have generated its atomization and the multiplication of insulated niches on social media; the commodification of every form of online association and interaction; the corporatization of knowledge and communication coupled with the hyperbolic volume of knowledge production and dissemination; the frequent criminalization of free association and free speech; and the transformation of voting (in the places fortunate to have it at all) into an economic transaction. Capital, it seems, no longer needs democracy to ease its flows, preferring new forms of autocratic state formations, ethnonationalism, and racism, while exacerbating the catastrophic effects of climate change, or mitigating them for the few and the wealthy, at the expense of the multitudes.

This description is not an autopsy; it should also be read as an urgent call for action. The ends of democracy — its goals, what gives it its sense and meaning — require a rethinking. For this, democracy must be reconfigured both as a system of constraints over power and as a form of being-with-others, a call to multitudes of individuals to share the power(s) to which they have been subjected. Power should be understood in the multiplicity of its forms and institutions, including but not limited to the State and its apparatuses. Democracy must be thought of as a transformative process, a vector of power continuously exercised by the many who live through it. We may take inspiration from traditions and histories of anticolonialism as well as from insurgent and inventive forms of ongoing activism, within and outside of our universities. Those many who perform democratization bring it to local and international corporations of production, commerce, and communication, to intergovernmental institutions, and — close to home — to our universities and other institutions of research and education, in short, to every institution where power authorized by the few is exercised over the many without transparency, accountability, let alone sharing.

The Political Concepts Initiative has two components: annual conferences and workshops, and an online journal. We expect and encourage conference participants to submit a version of their papers to this journal. Two volumes of selected papers have been published with Fordham University Press (2018 and 2020).

The goal of the Political Concepts Initiative is to experiment with modes of concept constructing, concept performing, and/or concept analysis, and to use this concept-work as a tool for enhancing critical questioning of the political, while creating a framework for an ongoing conversation across disciplines, methodologies, and styles of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. The initiative offers a platform for exploring the political dimensions of the way concepts—including their critical construction and deconstruction—work, are used and abused, distributed, and disseminated. The conversation is led by presentations of single concepts, i.e., each speaker presents one concept, and only concepts (usually one or two words) are admitted as titles. Speakers are matched for panels of two according to their concepts’ expected overlaps and resonances; presentations are followed by a general discussion to which ample time is dedicated.

We do not come to this conversation with an agreed idea about what a concept is, or how concepts perform their political work, nor do we presuppose any conventional answer to the question what is the political or what makes concept-work political. But we do expect our participants to have these questions in mind when they study, construct, or deconstruct the concept they are going to present. They may not address these questions explicitly during their presentation, but the delineation of the concept and traces of a political dimension attending its discursive work should be marked or hinted clearly enough for the audience to grasp, reflect upon, and question in the discussion.

More generally, we operate under the assumptions that revised political lexicons are urgently needed today, to better understand the world in which we live and act, and that the humanities can and should contribute toward such a revision. Participants are thus invited to re-think and re-articulate concepts they are working with or to construct new ones that seem necessary for their work, to revise key political concepts, but also to conceptualize terms and common nouns that function as concepts or reconstruct the political work of concepts and terms that are not usually considered “political.” We urge our participants not to be content with a concept’s history—although coming to terms with this history may be of great importance—or with its usage by this or that acclaimed thinker, but to consider how a given concept works for them, beyond or even against what it actually does in prevalent discourse, or according to this or that author, to the point of creating a new concept or taking another out of circulation.

Abstract Submission

The deadline has passed, and submissions are no longer being accepted at this time.

Participants are invited to present a single concept that helps thinking about, revising, or questioning some of the concerns outlined in the call for papers. Such a concept may be one that needs to be revised, deconstructed, or invented to better reflect on, criticize, or resist whatever falls under this ambiguous title. Only concepts (usually one or two words) are admitted as titles.

If your proposal is selected and you will be coming from outside Brown, the Cogut Institute will reimburse your travel expenses and cover your lodging in Providence. If you have any questions about the conference or the project, please email humanities-institute@brown.edu.