Democracy & Diversity

8^th Summer Graduate Institute
Cracow, Poland
July 11- 31, 1999

We at TCDS are looking forward to welcoming another fifty junior scholars from Eastern Europe, the U.S., and other parts of the world to our eighth Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institute in Cracow. At our castle site, overlooking the Vistula, we offer an intensive three-week equivalent of a full semester’s graduate study in the U.S., bringing an interdisciplinary, comparative, and highly interactive approach to the social, political, and cultural challenges of democracy and democratization. The Institute is widely known as an intimate international forum for lively but rigorous debate on the critical issues of democratic life.

Our core faculty from the from New School University’s Graduate Faculty will be joined this year by distinguished scholars and guest speakers from Poland, Yugoslavia, Israel, and South Africa. In addition to our ever-evolving seminars on citizenship, nationalism, and gender, we will offer a new course this year on the role of media in a democratic society. The Institute’s public policy workshop will also emphasize the use of media and communications in policy development.

Upon completion of the Institute, U.S. graduate students receive full course credits and non-U.S. participants receive certificates. But their unique three-week experience does not end there. Because we encourage and facilitate further participation in the ongoing activities of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, alumni soon find that they have become active members of a much broader transregional community of open-minded scholars committed to strengthening civil society and bridging the gap between academia and the “real world.” I hope you will consider joining us.

Elzbieta Matynia
Director, Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
 

Sustaining Democracy
Professor David Plotke,  Department of Political Science, Graduate Faculty

Professor David Plotke, Department of Political Science, Graduate Faculty How can democratic practices and institutions be sustained? What do political institutions contribute to democratic continuity? What views and activities do citizens need to share for democratic politics to continue? These questions need attention in both newer and more established democracies. We will look at settings where democracy has been   maintained and at settings where democratic practices have been destroyed or have never emerged.

Media and Democracy
Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb,  Department of Sociology, Graduate Faculty

In this course, the problems of sustaining a democratic public sphere in the media age will be investigated. We will consider the relationships among face to face deliberation, the printed word, and electronic media. We will explore how different concepts of the public reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the present state of democratic media-formed discourse. The relationships between free associations, free speech, and free electoral politics will be studied comparatively, as they are shaped through commercial, state, or publicly supported and controlled media. Readings will include the works of de Tocqueville, Arendt, Habermas, Chomsky, Said, Baudrillard, Appadurai, Schudson and Postman.
 

Theories of Gender in Culture
Professor Ann Snitow, Committee on Gender Studies and Feminist Theory, New School University

Now in its eighth year, this course surveys central debates about the role gender plays in the shaping of both public and private lives. The readings reflect the current process of redefinition going on in the field "gender studies" and include a wide range of material from scholars and emerging women's movements in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This summer we will also do some comparative analysis of the entry points that are available for introducing a gender perspective into swiftly changing regional configurations of thought and action.
 

Ethnos and Demos: Nation, Nationalism and Politics of Ethnic Conflict
Professor Shlomo Avineri, Dept. of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; and Professor Ivan Vejvoda, Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; and Ivan Vejvoda, Soros Foundation Yugoslavia.

Whether defined as philosophical concept, ideology, attitude, or group's state of mind, nationalism continues to be a major idee force of the last two centuries, leading to successive reconfigurations of the world map. The course will explore the multifaceted character of this key phenomenon of modernity, especially the relationship between ethnos and demos, nationhood and identity, and the ethnification of politics. Special attention will be given to Central Europe, Israel, and the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

Workshop: Policy, Democracy & Public Interest

Forum: Negotiated Transitions - Ten Years Later

Guest speakers: Czeslaw Milosz (Poet, 1980 Nobel Laureate in Literature); Mary Simons (Professor of Political Science, University of Cape Town); Adam Michnik (Political writer, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza); Jan Urban (editor-in-chief of Transitions).

Field Trips: Jagiellonian University, Auschwitz -Birkenau.

Applications are due on April 15th, and TCDS staff will collect them until this date. Students will be notified of their acceptance by May 3.
 

 1999:Curriculum