丁香园AV

Summer 2014. Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Retaining, Re-tooling, or Re-building?

10 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W). Monday, May 5 - Friday, June 20, 2014, 10am-4pm.

As citizens of the twenty-first century our lives are in an ever-accelerating state of change.  Technological advances, the speed at which we do business, the global nature of commerce and culture, and even the growing instability of the earth鈥檚 environment all point towards continuous change and the need for rapid responses. And yet, in the center of this maelstrom of change and re-examination, sits a surprisingly immovable, presence: our systems of governance. 

Municipal, provincial, and federal elected bodies would be easily recognizable to any 150 year-old historical visitor in form, function, process, and guiding principles.  Large unelected bureaucracies still operate on antiquated foundations in a kind of stasis, struggling to respond to the change revolving all around. Yet, there is a new generation of young voters that has grown up submerged in the information age and is unlikely to accept a democracy where their only interaction is to vote once every few years.  This generation has answers at their finger-tips, can organize a flash-mob in a matter of hours, and for whom the deep ruts of any political party affiliation belie their own complex fluidities of identity and interest. 

This course is interested in the possibilities our current historical situation offers to these deeper questions of governance, citizenship, privacy, human rights, democracy, and freedom. The plan is to deconstruct the current systems into manageable constituent parts and carefully examine each of these for ongoing utility through a variety of lenses.  Potential questions might include:  What are the component parts of our current systems of governance?  What is the range of possible replacements?  What are the options for governance that might previously not have been considered as a result of our ability to encounter each other across the globe instantaneously?  What are the hopes, fears, dangers, and possibilities for new forms of governance or parallel alternate structures as individuals, communities, cities, and nations move forward? 

What happens to our lived experience of governance, often first encountered in the family, when most families are blended, where father no longer 鈥渒nows best鈥�, and external adjudicators are often not available to solve any of our problems?  What is the role of the citizen in light of technologies that are capable of mining our every personal data, or releasing mountains of information (e.g. wikileaks and Anonymous) that were previously hidden, or rapidly bringing together groups and public opinions in direct response (e.g. Occupy, the Arab Spring, or the BC marijuana action)? 

How do governments, judicial systems and the bureaucracies that support them need to change in the face of this new world order and the growing sense that we have indeed entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene?  How do we imagine a new politics and the architecture of new models of governance to replace the 鈥渄emocracy on one day every four years鈥� system?  Can the horse and buggy structures of Congressional and Parliamentary politics that have caused gridlock in Washington and a total shift of power from the Commons to the prime minister鈥檚 office in Ottawa evolve into something more accountable, accessible and responsive? How might the next generation use the tools of the new media to build alternative networks of communication and popular governance in the shadow of the old order? Are our technological advances outstripping our systems of governance?

FACULTY

Sean Blenkinsop is an Associate Professor in the 丁香园AV Faculty of Education with a secondment for five years to the Semester in Dialogue.

Tony Penikett is a Vancouver-based mediator and the author of "Reconciliation: First Nations Treaty Making in British Columbia," published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2006.

OUTLINE

Governance for the Twenty-First Century Outline