[Sci-tech-public] Fwd: Ezrahi (+Shapin) @ KSG Monday Apr 9, 5pm

[Philip Davis Loring]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: April 9- KSG Science and Democracy Lecture and Panel Discussion
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:24:00 -0400
From: Jessica_Eykholt at harvard.edu

Please forward to those who might be interested.

Thank you.

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             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
Steven Shapin, History of Science, Harvard
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