Democratic Participation, the Politics of Oppression and the Environmental Crisis - Einzelansicht

This course seeks to understand different forms of oppression as they relate to the ecological crisis and the deficits of representative democracies, especially in regions of limited statehood.  We will further investigate how participatory democracy can transform relations of oppression. The course will be divided into three parts. The first part of the course will introduce the concept of oppression and explore how it relates to democratic and environmental crises. The second will explore how grassroots participation creates alternative spaces of innovation, adaptation and governance for the oppressed and excluded sectors of the society. The third part will delve into the possibility of transforming democracy and environmental governance by institutionalizing these alternative spaces of participation. Our aim is to think critically and normatively about citizen participation in order to strengthen and improve empirical processes in the real world, so theory will be framed against the light of empirical cases throughout the entire course. The course will be held in English.

Recommended preparatory reading:

-          Martin Breaugh (2013): The Plebeian Experience: A discontinuous History of Political Freedom, New York (Columbia UP).

-          Charles Taylor; Patrizia Nanz; Madeleine Beaubien Taylor (2020): Reconstructing Democracy: How citizens are building from the ground up, Cambridge/MA (Harvard UP).