| Kommentar |
In the wake of the contemporary wave of populism studies, various concepts of ‘the people’ reemerged in the social sciences. We will deal with a range of these concepts which seek to define constitutive and mobilizing characteristics of ‘the people’ (and their antagonists) in the first part of this class.
In the second part, we will deal with Habermas’ proposition of communicative action theory. That is, we will read classics of democratic deliberation theory with regards to manifestations of legitimacy and illegitimacy of perspectives in and through discourse. In view of the dependence of inclusive deliberation on manifestations of social roles (comrades, allies and onlookers/’others’), we will dig into theories of ‘people-making’, and discuss contemporary and historical cases of particularistic and pluralist people-making in societies characterized by political debates riddled by the salience of ‘the migration issue’.
In the third part, we will discuss what socio-cultural evolutions of people-making ‘mean’ in a broader historical context. Do societies ‘learn’ perspective-taking and opening towards ‘new’, dissonant or marginalized perspectives? If so, how? We will thus engage with the cultural sociology of socio-cultural evolution and collective learning theory which center around the questions: (1) if, and how, certain types of people-making foster/block that ‘othered’ perspectives become allies and/or comrades, (2) how they secure and store that these ascribed social roles then remain so, and (2) which narrative foundations and institutionalized forms of democratic deliberation help maintain inclusive and exclusive people-making (permanent search for vs. fixing of boundaries, respectively) in postmigrant societies. |
