Words and Worlds

Words and Worlds                                                                             

A Lexicon for Dark Times

International Workshop organized by
Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and
Didier Fassin (Institute for Advanced Study)
Institute for Advanced Study, 22-23 September 2017

Papers and Schedule

After a series of dramatic and disquieting political events that have taken place in the past months, most conspicuously in the United States and Europe, it is important to both acknowledge their troubling reality and worrying consequences, and distance oneself from them by exploring other no less unsettling but less visible issues and by shifting the focus to a diversity of national contexts. The idea of the workshop is that each of the participants addresses one question formulated through a keyword that is immediately comprehensible for interlocutors or readers but which can be deconstructed or displaced in the analysis. If possible, this question will be treated principally in a national context, but parallels with other places and times, or moves to an international scale can also be pertinent. Multiple disciplines have been convened, including anthropology, sociology, geography, history, economics and political science, in the hope of a stimulating dialogue.

Workshop Participants

Democracy (Jan Werner Müller)

Authority (Banu Bargu)

Revolution (Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi)

War (Julieta Lemaître)

Power (Alex de Waal)

Environment (Jonathan Pugh)

Corruption (Caroline Humphrey)

Openness (Todd Sanders)

Security (Kim Lane Scheppele)

Terror (Talal Asad)

Belonging (Peter Geschiere)

Inequality (Ravi Kanbur)

Intolerance (Uday Singh Mehta)

Knowledge (Veena Das)

Crisis (Didier Fassin)