What does democracy and belonging mean in the context of the Anthropocene, amidst warming skies, broken floodgates, pandemics, red tide algal blooms, bleached reefs, and migrant borders?
In recent times, a significant erosion of public trust in national governments, in democratic institutions, has not only coincided with the rise of fascist populism, extreme nationalism, and the “Big Man”, but with critical questions about the limitations of democracy as a technology of sharing power evenly and the diminishing force of the citizen as a unit of analysis. Something haunts citizenship that is invisible to the foundational readings of classical humanism: something shimmers in the open that the calculations of power and power-sharing, our myths about what/who counts, and our understanding of what it means to be human, cannot see.
In the so-called Global South, democracy has often arrived powered by colonial machines – as a portmanteau of neoimperialist interests, military incursions, neoliberal market algorithms, capital, and regime-change. It seems easier to notice from within the fields of precarity in the South, from within the geopolitical unevenness occasioned by climate matters, that the citizen, the ballot box, the nation-state, and the system of rights and privileges at the heart of democracy may be inadequate to the question of how power becomes powerful.
Join the Democracy & Belonging Forum on Thursday, July 6, 2023 (8:00 AM - 9:30 AM PT / 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM ET / 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM CET) for the next mbari in the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, where OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe will speak with Minna Salami and Professor Madhulika Banerjee about the changing body of democracy, the presumption of universality often entangled with conversations about democracy, the moral and architectural limitations of the concept, the historical practices of commoning that have existed alongside the emergence of democracy as a technology of power, and what we might do together to instigate new forms of being-together that are responsive to the times and the intelligence lost when politics are animated exclusively by people.
Click here to register for free.
Note: Forum members will have exclusive access to engage with Bayo virtually after the conversation takes place in a private Zoom room. More details on this coming soon.
