Workshop 11: POWER AND THE POLITICAL

The aim of the workshop is to further debates on power and the political, their relationships and to carry out studies of the two. The workshop gains its inspiration from poststructuralist discourse theory, Ernesto Laclau’s work and Foucault in particular, but is open to other approaches that seek to theorize power and/or the political and their connection to the contexts of investigation. In broad terms Foucault's work focuses on questions of governing, the more silent, micro day to day workings of political power, whereas Laclau's work directs the attention to moments of rupture, the creation of broader popular movements and identities.Papers are invited which compare the two approaches, as well as papers reflecting on the concepts of politics and power following from either, or compared with other approaches. We welcome (however do not limit the range of papers to) contributions from post-Marxist, post-foundational, feminist, postcolonial or psychoanalytic research traditions.The aim of the workshop is to question any taken-for-granted nature of these two dimensions in the study of politics, and to help make explicit what is implied – theoretically and methodologically – in the different approaches. How we might study politics is intimately related to the reflections on the nature of the political and power, and vice versa.The language of the workshop is English, to in particular welcome international scholars working in the Nordic countries. 

Chair: Charlotte Fridolfsson (Linköping, Sweden)

Vice-chairs: Emilia Palonen (University of Helsinki, Finland) och Allan Dreyer Hansen (Roskilde, Danmark)