CISRUL events, February-June 2012
Lunchtime seminars
All seminars will take place on Mondays at 12 – 2 pm and there will be sandwiches, tea and coffee.
On the weeks in which we don’t have a seminar, we’ll meet for lunch at 12.30 in Zeste.
In New King’s 11
13 February
Ben Davies “Corporate Citizenship”
Following from our Citizenship in Oil-Producing Societies workshop, Ben Davies
(Business School) will lead a seminar on corporate citizenship.
20 February
First reading group on civil society
Provisional readings (to be confirmed):
Adam Seligman The Idea of Civil Society ch. 4 Jerusalem, Budapest, Los Angeles
Michael Walzer “The Civil Society Argument” in Gershon Shafir, ed. The Citizenship
Debates
Jeffrey Alexander The Civil Sphere Chapter 2 “Real Civil Societies: Dilemmas of
Institutionalization”
5 March
CISRUL PhD student presentations
Alena Thiel, Marek Szilvasi, Ulisses Pereira-Terto, James King
In Macrobert 315
19 March
Anne Griffiths “Law, Gender and Citizenship: Negotiating Access to and Control over
Land in Botswana” (co-hosted with Law School)
Anne Griffiths will be acting as external advisor to CISRUL, helping us to develop our
inter-disciplinary approach since she straddles the disciplines of anthropology and
law as Professor of Legal Anthropology at Edinburgh. She has carried out many years
of fieldwork in Botswana on comparative and family law, African law, gender,
culture, and in Scotland on 'The Child's Voice in Legal Proceedings.' She will draw on
her recent fieldwork in her seminar, linking it to our interests in rule of law and
citizenship.
In Taylor A31
16 April
Andrea Mura “Universalism versus Nationhood: The ‘Multiverse’ of Islamist
Citizenship”
This seminar will analyse the notion of citizenship in the light of two competing
discourses informing the genealogical background of Islamism: nationalism and
universalism. This will be done by examining the way two pioneering figures of
Islamist political thought, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, have respectively
engaged with such discourses when constructing space and community. Although
initial attention will be put of Hasan al-Banna’s valorisation of national citizenship,
and his discursive integration of key nationalist signifiers such as the ‘nation-state’,
‘the people’, and ‘territory’, most focus will be on Sayyid Qutb’s effort to recover a
universalistic ethos and especially how Qutb revalorised a universalistic
understanding of Muslim community and citizenship, highlighting the specificity of
Arab conceptual counterparts such as ‘dawlah’, ‘ummah’, and ‘dar al-Islam’. Such an
inquiry will help to grasp the speculative implications of contemporary transnational
views in the Islamist galaxy.
30 April
Karen Salt “Navassa Island; or, a History of the Caribbean in Twilight”
This seminar deals with a forgotten island in the Caribbean that remains at the heart
of a sovereignty battle between the U.S. and Haiti. In this seminar, Salt presents this
battle and argues that a different history of the Caribbean emerges once one
contends with this small non-human inhabited island that has existed for a large
portion of the last two centuries outside the public eye.
In Macrobert 252
14 May
Ajay Gudavarthy “Beyond Civil Society?”
Ajay Gudavarthy (JNU) will be our CISRUL Visiting Fellow this semester, having
participated in two of our previous workshops. He is publishing a volume on Partha
Chatterjee’s use of the “political society” concept and a monograph on civil society
movements in India. In his seminar he will question the argument that political
movements can “expand and transform the sphere of civil society” and the
emphasis that it “possesses but the potential” and the reaffirmation that
“individuals can realize their self “.
28 May
Second reading group on civil society (readings tbc)
CISRUL workshops
25-28 June
CISRUL workshop and PhD summer school “What Civil? What Society?” (co-hosted
with the Centre for Early Modern Studies)
Workshop in Committee Room 2, PhD summer school at The Burn
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.