Introduction: From words to worlds / Didier Fassin and Veena Das -- Knowledge / Veena Das -- Democracy / Jan-Werner Müller -- Authority / Banu Bargu -- Belonging / Peter Geschiere -- Toleration / Uday S. Mehta -- Power / Alex de Waal -- War / Julieta Lemaitre -- Revolution / Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi -- Corruption / Caroline Humphrey -- Openness / Todd Sanders and Elizabeth F. Sanders -- Resilience / Jonathan Pugh -- Inequality / Ravi Kanbur -- Crisis / Didier Fassin.
Summary:
"The dystopian transformation of contemporary societies that has expanded to various parts of the world and to diverse domains of human activities requires a rethinking of our conceptual repertoire rather than the reinvention of neologisms. The terms that we consider as belonging to a political lexicon need to be understood in relation to a constellation of concepts and a diversity of experiences across different societies in both comparative and relational terms. Chapters in Words and Worlds are organized around individual terms that form part of a political lexicon that many use to understand what is unfolding before their eyes. The juxtaposition of these different terms and the cross references that show unexpected connections across diverse domains of social life, whether concentrated in small spaces or dispersed across vastly distant ones, challenge the reader to see these dystopian developments through a different modality of reading and sensing. Words like knowledge, authority, democracy, corruption, inequality, and crisis have become part of our everyday vocabulary; yet, what animates these words, what give them life, what makes them dead, urges us to examine these common vocabularies from new and different angles rather than using them as crutches to avoid facing current disturbing realities"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.