Demos: Life in Common
Banff Research in Culture 2015 – Summer Research Residency
June 1, 2015 – June 19, 2015
Application deadline: December 10, 2014
The word demos names ‘the people’, and thus democracy is, at its most basic constitutive level, the shared power of people thinking and acting. Democracy is grounded upon the capacity of the people to narrate and decide the shape of collective life. But the ‘democracy’ we experience and live with today has devolved into practices of state sovereignty and governmentality, a society characterized by social and economic inequality, and an under-represented and disenfranchised electorate. And it seems, too, that hopes in technology as a mechanism that might yet create a new common ground have failed to achieve their promised ends.
Demos: Life in Common invites participants to consider the ways in which we constitute and experience collective life in this century. (more…)