丁香园AV

Overview

鈥淒ebt colony鈥�, 鈥淎dults in the Room鈥�, 鈥淯pper and lower Plateia鈥� are terms, expressions, book titles and spatial concepts that emerged during the years of Greece鈥檚 recent economic, social and political crisis to capture and frame 鈥� from a particular perspective 鈥� different aspects of the political. 鈥淒ebt colony鈥� proved to be an ingenious way of linking economics with a vocabulary of political domination and exploitation that resonated strongly among Greece鈥檚 kaleidoscopic left-leaning, political audiences. 鈥淎dults in the Room鈥� is a fictionalized framing of political and economic deliberations at the highest level. The reader no longer finds herself in the public squares where the masses act and is instead transported to those 鈥渟moky back rooms,鈥� asked to imagine an opaque world of elite governance. The book casts its protagonist as a heroic, colourful (a one-man bandiera rossa), and rational figure of resistance, fighting with rhetoric and logic the posited technocratic irrationality of impersonal forces (EU bureaucracy) and concepts (austerity). A personal memoir becomes here an idiosyncratic political manifesto, with notable commercial appeal to boot. As for the 鈥減lateias鈥� 鈥� here referring to Syntagma Square, where Greece鈥檚 political drama found in 2011 physical expression 鈥� they speak of the spatial dimension of politics. These physical spaces, inhabited by larger or smaller 鈥渕asses鈥� of anonymous citizens, engendered visions of popular sovereignty. Here one saw articulated in organic, general-will-type fashion, the informal authority of an imagined nation: one of the radical Left and one of the hard Right. Both segments of the 鈥減lateia鈥� conceived of themselves as some form of consensus omnium that was set against the presumably discredited political establishment residing in the constitutionally sanctioned parliament.

鈥淧olitical Animals: Explorations of the Political Across the Ages鈥� asks its participants to think about many of the themes raised by the aforementioned rhetorical tropes and spatial imaginings. By bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, researchers, and students from Canada, the US, UK, Serbia, and Greece, 鈥淧olitical Animals鈥� seeks to think about politics through lenses of rhetoric, writing, space, materiality, economics, rationality and irrationality, imagination, gender and much else. This is an opportunity for scholars, young and old, at different stages of their careers, to test their own conceptions of the political by being exposed to varied approaches and methodologies, while thinking about humanity鈥檚 ancient predilection for the political.

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