Jerome Greene Annex (Columbia Law School)
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and Heyman Center for the Humanities
The Editorial Board of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, a joint project of The New School for Social Research, New York University, Columbia University, and Brown University, welcomes you to our fifth annual Spring Conference:
The project is guided by one formal principle—the posing of a Socratic question “what is x?”–and by one theoretical principle—the concepts defined should be relevant to political thought and, more broadly, to thinking about the political. This program is supported in part with funding from the Title VI International NRC program at Columbia.
Friday March 6th
9:00 – 10:30AM Moderator: Adi Ophir
Lydia Goehr – Exodus
Rebecca Comay – Resistance
10:45 – 12:15PM Moderator: Andreas Kalyvas
Andrew Arato – Legitimacy
Nadia Urbinati – Crisis
(12:15-1:45PM: BREAK)
2:00 – 3:30PM Moderator: Ann Stoler
Hagar Kotef – Normal
Miriam Ticktin – Innocence
4:00 – 5:30PM Moderator: Stathis Gourgouris
Samuel Weber – Singularity
Emily Apter – Interference
Saturday March 7th
10:30 – 12:00PM Moderator: Jay Bernstein
Maxim Pensky – Amnesty
Alberto Moreiras – Infrapolitics
(12:00-1:45PM: BREAK)
2:00 – 3:30PM Moderator: Bonnie Honig
Timothy Bewes – Free Indirect
Jason Frank – Grandeur
4:00 – 5:30PM Moderator: Jacques Lezra
Linda Martín Alcoff – Whiteness
Dmitri Nikulin – Comedy
Political Concepts: A Critical Lexiconis a multidisciplinary, web-based journal that seeks to be a forum for engaged scholarship. Each lexical entry will focus on a single concept with the express intention of resituating it in the field of political discourse by addressing what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept. Each entry will serve as a short defining essay for a concept. Through their argumentative strategies and employment of the concept in question, entries will aim to reconfigure a concept, rather than take for granted the generally accepted definitions of that concept or the conclusions that follow from them.
Political Concepts does not predetermine what does or does not count as a political concept. Our aim is to expand the scope of what demands political accounting, and for this reason we welcome essays that fashion new political concepts or demonstrate how concepts deserve to be taken as politically significant. It is our view that “politics” refers to the multiplicity of forces, structures, problems, and orientations that shape our collective life. Politics enters the frame wherever our lives together are staked and wherever collective action could make a difference to the outcome. As no discipline possesses an hegemony over this critical space, we welcome submissions from all fields of study.
We consider Political Concepts to be “a critical lexicon” because each contribution resituates a particular aspect of political meaning, thereby opening pathways for another future—one that is not already determined and ill-fated. The term “critical” in our title is also meant quite literally: Political Concepts is a forum for conversation and constructive debate rather than the construction of an encyclopedic ideal.
