Prague – November 20–22, 2024
Democratic theorists have long been suspicious of representation, seeing it as alien or contradictory to democracy. Some still consider representation and democracy, in Hanna Pitkin’s words, an
“uneasy alliance”. The discontent expressed by citizens in the slogan “We have a vote, but we do
not have a voice!” during various protest movements throughout the last fifteen years gives credence to Pitkin’s warning. The latest developments also urge us to rethink the concept of representation and its place in democracy. The so-called constructivist turn proposed a novel approach to
representation, which allowed for a deeper appreciation of its democratic potential beyond electoral procedures. At the same time, it introduced a new set of questions regarding representation’s
democratic deficit. The conference invites researchers to discuss some of these questions. Are
there ways to rearticulate the democracy-representation relationship that would overcome citizens’
discontent and help tackle pressing global issues? How should this re-articulation look vis-à-vis the
climate crisis, which raises an urgent question of how to represent the non-human? Are there ways
to rethink representation to better cope with long-time pressing issues of social inequality or distrust towards institutions today enhanced by digital technologies, enabling easier dissemination of
conspiracy theories? What is the future of democratic representation beyond electoral procedures
and nation-states? Or does representation already belong to the past as a democratically exhausted concept?
The conference will be jointly hosted by the Institute of Political Studies at the Faculty of Social
Sciences, Charles University, the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts, Charles
University, and the Department of Political Philosophy and Globalization Research at the Institute
of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Keynote speakers
- Mónica Brito-Vieira (University of York)
- Paula Diehl (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel)
- Lisa Jane Disch (Michigan University)
- Sofia Näsström (Uppsala University)
Call for Papers
We invite proposals of individual papers as well as panels (comprising 3–4 papers) on the
following broadly defined topics:
- Representation in the History of Political Thought
- Representation After the Constructivist Turn
- Aesthetics of Representation: Images, Symbols, Bodies
- Populism as a Form of (Un)Democratic Representation
- Representing the Non-Human
- Democratic Representation Beyond the Nation-State
- Representation and Digital Technologies
Paper abstracts and panel proposals should be submitted electronically by June 30th, 2024. For
more details and to submit a proposal, please visit our website: ideasinpolitics.fsv.cuni.cz.
