[Sci-tech-public] Fwd: April 9- KSG Science and Democracy Lecture and Panel Discussion

[Debbie Meinbresse]

>Science and Democracy Lecture and Panel Discussion
>
>Professor Yaron Ezrahi
>Hebrew University of Jerusalem
>
>
>          Necessary Fictions: Imagining Democracy after Modernity
>
>April 9, 2007, 5-7 PM
>
>Starr Auditorium
>
>Kennedy School of Government
>
>79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA
>
>This talk examines the declining power of earlier imaginaries of 
>science, nature and reality in sustaining modern democratic 
>categories of civic agency, political participation, and conceptions 
>of apolitical constraints. The change that concerns us is in the 
>idea of popular sovereignty between early to late, or post-modern, 
>democracy. Focusing on the role of fictions in modern political 
>history, I ask what kinds of experience, how many facts, or how much 
>publicly accessible evidence, are needed to lend such a fiction as 
>popular sovereignty the status of believable reality. The historical 
>record suggests that established political fictions are actually
>sustained by a very small number of facts. What contributes most 
>heavily to the believability of such fictions is the efficacy with 
>which they match or sustain the normative-epistemological frame of a 
>particular political world. I conclude with a brief examination of 
>the decline of scientific or natural reality as components of 
>post-modern political imaginaries of order, and the consequences of 
>that decline for enacting popular sovereignty in our time.
>
>Panelists:
>
>Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe; Fellow, Shorenstein Center, KSG
>
>James McCarthy, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
>
>Steven Shapin, History of Science, Harvard University
>
>Cass Sunstein, Chicago and Harvard Law Schools
>
>Yaron Ezrahi is professor of political science at Hebrew University 
>of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Descent of Icarus: Science and 
>the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Harvard, 1990) and 
>Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel (Berkeley 
>1998). His forthcoming book is concerned with the contemporary 
>crisis in the democratic imagination.
>
>http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/sts/events/ezrahi-necessaryfictions.htm
>
>Jessica Li-chiung Eykholt
>Faculty Assistant-Specialist
>John Kennedy School of Government
>Harvard University
>79 John F. Kennedy Street
>Littauer 355, Mail Box 17
>Cambridge, MA 02138
>
>Tel:  617-495-5636
>Fax: 617-496-5960


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