APSA dispatch
Halfway through what’s been a good conference for me this time. Sadly, while my intellectual interests are quite broad, I find I have a better conference experience when I limit myself to political theory panels and nothing but. So far that’s worked out well.
It’s cold, rainy, and windy here in Philadelphia, and that’s a good thing. The last time I was here for Labor Day weekend, you couldn’t step outside without being drenched in sweat.
By the way, Philadelphia = I fine city. Nothing in particular I can put my finger on, but I really like the vibe of the place.
Unlike Henry, I’m too lazy to read the program in advance; I just look at the stuff for the next timeslot of panels 15 minutes before they start to see if anything is worth my time.
This is the first conference I’ve been to which provides free wifi for attendees, although it’s only in one hallway at the convention center. Still, it’s a nice touch.
The graduate students who put together the Iris Marion Young tribute session deserve a hearty thanks and congratulations for what must have been a very difficult and emotional task. It was a lovely event that made me deeply wish I’d had a chance to know the person as well as the theorist. Watching Jacob Levy emotionally recall how much his arguments with her meant to him was powerful; perhaps I’m biased but I think political theorists–good ones, at least–have the best arguments. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought how wonderful it would have heen if the transcripts of the Levy/Young debates were available for all of us.
If you’re looking for something to download from proceedings, I’d recommend some of the following:
Josiah Ober, “The original meaning of Democracy: the capacity to do things, not majority rule”
Behind the snakes on a plane-like literalism of the title lies a detailed historical account of the emergence and use of the concept of democracy in Ancient Greece. Good stuff.
Mort Schoolman, “A Pluralist Mind: Agonistic Democracy and the Problem of Violence Toward Difference in Connolly’s Pluralist Thought”
I appreciated this paper not so much for it’s contribution to a theory of political violence, but for his close exigesis of Connolly’s thought, and the connections he draws between the Conolly’s early conceptual work (Terms of Political Discourse) and his later Foucauldian pluralism.
All three presenters and the discussant (Lisa Disch, Clarissa Hayward, Andrew Rehfeld, and Jenny Mansbridge) for one of the most consistently excellent panels I’ve ever seen at a conference on the theory of political representation. Disch’s fresh, compelling reading of Hannah Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation, a widely read 37 year old book, had pretty much everyone in the room smacking their forehead and asking themselves “Why didn’t I think of that?”
And a special thanks to Farah Godrej, for her thoughtful and insightful comments on my half-baked paper on Modernity and emerging female subjectivities in the postwar cinema of Yasujiro Ozu. And thanks to my co-presenters, Shirin Deylami and Sarah Sarzynski for fascinating papers on Iranian and Brasilian cinema, respectively, and to Russell Arben Fox, for getting the panel together, even though he was, unfortunately, UNable to attend.
If any APSA attendees want to purchase embarrassing stories about Scott and Rob for the price of a beer…