Democracy Rising

Slought is pleased to announce "Democracy Rising," a one-day symposium and workshop on Sunday, July 24th, 2016 from 9:30-5:00pm, with opening remarks by Chris Hedges at 10:00am. Organized with the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS), and paralleling the Democratic National Convention, the program is an expression of the critical role played by education and free thought in the exercise of democratic principles. It features a collective of scholars and activists who are dedicated to thinking critically about American politics, the challenges facing global democracy, and the implications of contemporary social structures for marginalized groups.

We live in a moment in which the promises of democracy in the United States are being actively interrogated. After decades of uprisings, conferences, campaigns, and marches led by those who have preached the importance of resistance, institutional systems of power claim they are in agreement with democratic ideals even as their actions suggest otherwise. Democracy Rising is a symposium and workshop that seeks to examine these contradictions and complexities, and to collaboratively discuss and debate the possibility of changing them.

Through a series of moderated roundtable discussions and collaborative group dialogue, Democracy Rising will attempt to formulate alternative modes of democratic responsibility. Unlike ordinary conferences, seminars, symposia, and colloquia, which are planned well in advance and often set to recur at regular intervals, Democracy Rising follows the erratic rhythms and temporal tangents of sociopolitical upheaval, and for this reason can only be convened "on the fly" through the responsiveness of its organizers, supporters, and participants.

In this respect, Democracy Rising is an idea, a meme; a rhizomatic nomadic structure that arises where crisis demands participation; a nexus between theory and practice that takes form in relation to sites and topics of struggle. This emergent and dialogical approach, continuously generated by the movements that demand and live them, enters into the public realm as a declaration of purpose for a critical consensus.