On May 13-15, 2021, the Department of will virtually host an event titled “Democratic Representation: Acts, Aesthetics, Institutions,” which has been organized through the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT), which faculty members Jason Frank and Jill Frank co-direct with their colleague Karuna Mantena of Columbia University. CSPT is the oldest scholarly organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the history of political thought, and this will be the first CSPT conference organized at Cornell. Past conferences have moved between Columbia, Chicago, and Yale.
The conference will feature a distinguished group of international scholars addressing the “crisis of democratic representation” from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Prominent symptoms of this crisis include the breakdown of traditional political parties, the paralysis of legislatures, the degeneration of systems of electoral accountability and widespread claims of electoral fraud, the proliferation of extremist and conspiratorial micropublics, and the global rise of authoritarian populist leaders claiming to speak and act on behalf of the “real people.” The conference will explore these urgent political issues by elaborating the theoretical, historical, and empirical dilemmas internal to the idea of democratic representation itself.
“Democratic Representation: Acts, Aesthetics, Institutions” will be held online and is free and open to the public. The full list of conference participants, schedule, and information about registration can be found here.
