College Hall, Room 209 (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Lunch provided

Dalaina Heiberg (University of Chicago, Political Science)
"Canadian Liberal Sovereignty through Territorial Federalism: Illustrations from Francophone and Doukhobor History"

SINCE THE 1970S, MULTICULTURALISM HAS BEEN the guiding political policy of Canada's federal government with respect to diversity. However, in the 1990s, a new political idiom began to emerge in political analyses of Canadian politics: “multinationalism.” In her dissertation, DALAINA HEIBERG examines a focal question for Indigenous scholars and theorists of democracy: What possibilities does a multinational approach offer in terms of enhancing the political freedom of Indigenous peoples and Canadian citizens more broadly?  To get at these issues, she explores two cases of non-Indigenous groups – Francophone nationalists and the utopian Doukhobors, both “volunteers” to the Canadian project – and their struggles to achieve space for alternative forms of politics from the Anglo nation-state. These cases, she argues, illustrate the challenges that lie ahead when claims are made on federalism to go beyond making space for its own citizens’ plurality in order to make space for distinct political orders on land simultaneously claimed by the state.

Silverstein Forum, Stiteler Hall First Floor (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Food Provided
Co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies

Discussant: Donovan Schaeffer (Penn Religious Studies)

All attendees are encouraged to read Prof. Adcock's paper, available here.
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO OF THE EVENT HERE.

RECENT EVENTS UNDERSCORE THE THREAT OF COW PROTECTION in India: as laws against cow-slaughter are tightened, religious and caste minorities are being brutally assaulted or killed. How should we combat this politics? One strategy challenges cow protection on religious freedom grounds, as an imposition of Hindu religious preferences in violation of the religious rights of non-Hindus. Drawing on contemporary and historical material, Professor Adcock argues that a religious approach is counter-productive. Analytically, it yields an inadequate description of cow protectionist politics, past or present. Politically, it makes an unstable basis from which to resist Hindu majoritarianism.

CASSIE ADCOCK is Associate Professor in the Department of History and in the religious studies program at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in religion in the political culture of modern north India. Her first book, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (2013), addresses the politics of religious conversion in India by providing a critical history of tolerance, a secularist ideal central to the Gandhian tradition. Her current book project traces the long history of cow protection in north India from 1881 until 1969. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Scholar Award, an NEH-AIIS Senior Research Fellowship, and a Kluge Fellowship.

All attendees are encouraged to read Prof. Adcock's paper, available here.

Silverstein Forum, Stiteler Hall First Floor (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Food Provided

SINCE THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT OF THE 1960S, freedom of expression at colleges and universities has been seen not only as a necessary element of academic inquiry, but as a key tool to further social and political justice.  At the same time, recognition of the harm and exclusionary effects of certain types of unrestrained speech has prompted calls, often by students themselves, to limit expression on campuses. And with the alt-right seeking to shatter norms of political discourse, campus speech has become a battleground once again.  In the midst of these battles, the Andrea Mitchell Center has convened a set of prominent academics who have struggled with the complexities of the issue to help find a way forward: Sigal Ben-Porath and Keith E. Whittington, who will share the insights of their recent books, with George Ciccariello-Maher as discussant and Rogers Smith serving as moderator. Questions from the audience are encouraged.

SIGAL BEN-PORATH is Professor of Education, Political Science, and Philosophy at Penn, as well as a member of the Mitchell Center’s Executive Committee. Her research focuses on citizenship education, normative aspects of educational and social policy, and the social and educational effects of war.  She is the author of Free Speech on Campus (2017), which offers a framework for thinking about free-speech controversies both inside and outside the college classroom that seeks to shift the focus away from disputes about legality and harm and toward democracy and inclusion. 

KEITH E. WHITTINGTON is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and a leading authority on American constitutional theory and law. He is the author of Speak Freely (forthcoming April 2018), which examines such hot-button issues as trigger warnings, safe spaces, hate speech, disruptive protests, speaker disinvitations, the use of social media by faculty, and academic politics. Putting free speech and civil discourse at the heart of the university’s mission of creating and nurturing an open and diverse community dedicated to learning, Whittington highlights the dangers of empowering campus censors to limit speech and enforce orthodoxy.

GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER (discusssant) is an activist and former Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, as well as a lecturer in philosophy and political economy at the Venezuelan Ministry of Planning and Finance's School of Planning. In October 2017, he became the center of a media storm after tweeting, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide” (a term the alt-right uses to refer to interracial procreation). On December 28, Ciccariello-Maher announced his resignation from Drexel, effective December 31, citing "nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and Internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence directed against me and my family.”  He is the author of Decolonizing Dialectics (2017), which brings the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery.

ROGERS M. SMITH (moderator) is Penn SAS Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and former Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center.

College Hall, Room 209 (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Lunch provided

Lillian Frost (George Washington University, Political Science)
"Unequal Citizens: State Resistance to Removing Discrimination toward Women from Nationality Laws"

Will Levine (University of Chicago, Political Science)
"Heinrich Heine and The Young Hegelians on Popular Agency, Social Transformation, and 'The Beautiful Error of an Ideal Future'"

IN HER PAPER, LILLIAN FROST points out that existing theories about policy formation incorrectly predict resistance to removing discrimination toward women (DTW) in nationality laws. This gap is critical because DTW in nationality laws often results in serious human rights violations and suffering for individuals, including statelessness, lack of access to public services, and child marriage. What accounts for DTW in nationality laws? Why do states resist reforming these policies? How is DTW in nationality laws different from women’s issues where progress has been made? To make sense of state decisions to resist removing DTW from nationality laws, she adapts the concept of “securitization,” in which authoritative figures successfully cast an issue as an existential threat calling for extraordinary measures beyond the routines and norms of everyday politics. She argues that when state representatives securitize women’s nationality reform, then international and domestic actors alike will fail to secure reform.

IN A CHAPTER FROM HIS DISSERTATION on radical Kantians, WILL LEVINE is less concerned with analyzing the uptake of specific ideas in Kant than it is with analyzing an analogy that a number of thinkers draw between the impact of the French Revolution on France and the impact of Kant’s philosophy on Germany. Specifically, he examines the claim by the so-called “Young Hegelians” that Kant’s revolution in thought must go into practice, and how this claim illuminates their accounts of the connection between political ideals and political practices. He focuses especially on how the poet, journalist, and critic Heinrich Heine takes up this idea in his criticism – and on the relationship of Heine’s work with that of the early Marx. While much of the work that this particular chapter does is historical, he foregrounds the stakes for democratic theory more generally. 

The ARCH, 3601 Locust Walk, Rooms 107 & 110