Democracy and Governance from above and Below: Vulnerability and Possibility

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

The intersection of governance, democracy, and citizenship is complex and multifaceted, as is the interaction between state power and the ability of populations to determine their life outcomes. This panel takes up these issues in the world-system, the United States, and China through a variety of approaches. These include an argument for the relationship between extractive politics and inequality; an interrogation of possibilities created by sex workers for alternative forms of governance; a rethinking of "the people" through the Menciusian concept of vulnerability; and an examination of China's modernization policy on the lived realities of peasants. Together these papers stage a dynamic conversation about how the interplay of precarity, sovereignty, and agency shape the political.

Sub Unit

• Division 42: Critical Political Science (formerly New Political Science)

Individual Presentations

• Extractive American Politics: Considering Democratic Costs - Grace E Reinke, University of New Orleans

• Rethinking Democracy in Anthropocene: A Menciusian Perspective on Vulnerability - Duan Zheng, Tongji University

• Who Has the Power to Change the World? Activism and Global Governance - Alisson Rowland, University of California, Irvine

• Whose Better Life? Problematizing the ‘Modernization’ of Social Trauma - Yujie Zhang, Chongqing University

• Non-equivalent Exchange: Democracy’s Unequal Playing Field - Paul Kellogg, Athabasca University

Chair

• David Watkins University of Dayton

Discussant

• Richard R. Weiner Rhode Island College