Seminarium POLPAN
Najbliższe seminarium POLPAN odbędzie się 22 października o godz. 14:30, IFiS PAN sala 154. Prezentację pt. “Understandings of the State: Their Foundations and Implications. A Cross-National Comparative Study” będzie miał dr. Marcin Slarzyński.
ABSTRACT
“Lo stato,” “devlet,” “der Staat,” “państwo” – all these words mean “state” in Italian, Turkish, German and Polish. Do they, however, refer to the same construct in all national and subnational contexts, and for all social groups within them? The overarching goal of this project is to answer this question on the basis of focus groups conducted in Austria, France, Italy, Poland, Turkey and the United Kingdom, and ethnographic case studies. The motivation to pursue this goal stems from a lack of comparative cross-national studies on the lay understanding of “the state” despite its central position in public and academic discussions. Even though there is a general agreement that many central concepts in social sciences and humanities such as “society,” “democracy” and “economy” are emergent, change their meanings with time and are differently defined in various national and institutional contexts (Polanyi 2001; Schmitter and Karl 1991; Collier and Levitsky 1997; Agamben 2009), this ambiguity and multiplicity has not been explored extensively when it comes to “the state.” Yet, works in ethnography of the state (Gupta 1995; Alexander 2002; Mitchell 1999) emphasize that the this concept is “discursively constructed” and “local.” This project builds on these anthropological studies, as well as Political Economy, Cultural Sociology and Historical Sociology works to answer the question: What are the social, political and cultural bases informing the lay understanding of the “state”? Related to this main question are three primary research tasks largely consisting of the analysis of data collected through comparative cross-national focus groups and two ethnographic case studies:
(1) The first task within this project consists in reviewing works in Political Economy, Historical Sociology, Cultural Sociology and Anthropology that deal with the state and use these as a point of reference to reconstruct the variety of ways in which different populations understand “the state.” This knowledge will then be a basis for organizing focus groups in six European countries as well as ethnographic fieldwork; (2) The second task is to assess how this state image is produced by the institutional context and how institutional context shapes understandings of “the state;” (3) The third task proposed as part of this project consists in
organizing a dialogue between representatives of different social science fields (Political Economy, Historical Sociology, Cultural Sociology and Anthropology). This dialogue will be institutionalized through the organization of two workshops and a concluding conference at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN) throughout the duration of the project. The main goal of this task is to leverage the interdisciplinary discussion between specialists in said fields about how, in which contexts and to what extent the results of this project summarized in points (1) and (2) can complement empirical and theoretical studies in the fields they represent. The outcome of this cooperation will be a special issue of an academic journal or an edited book dedicated to lay understandings of “the state.”
While the sources of academic perspectives on the state are varied – this project builds on Political Economy, Cultural Sociology, Historical Sociology and Anthropology – the lay images of the state and main hypotheses related to these are constructed within the framework of Sociology of Knowledge broadly defined, which studies the relationship between the social context and human knowledge (Swidler and Arditi 1994). In the description of the different images of the state, this project follows the method of “thick description” (Geertz 1973; Alexander and Smith 1993) applied in Anthropology and Cultural Sociology.
The pioneering nature of this project consists in its interdisciplinarity, which is assured through methodological innovation and the establishment of an interdisciplinary academic network. This is novel because discussions on the state are usually closed within specialized fields of Political Economy, Sociology and Anthropology. This hermetic state is maintained inter alia by different data and methods used in said disciplines. This project breaks these limitations by stimulating academic discussion and contributing to the fields of Sociology of Knowledge and Cultural Sociology.
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