Professor Sheila Jasanoff from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University delivered a lecture at IDI on Thursday, December 31st at 4pm. The lecture and subsequent discussion was part of IDI’s year-long Democracy in Crisis seminar series.
Professor Jasanoff is a scholar of international repute. Her work focuses upon the linkages between science and democracy, and specifically upon the points at which science and technology meet the law, politics, and public policy in modern democracies. Her talk is entitled Fact and Fantasies: Science and Culture in Late Modern Democracies and will address the means by which democracies deal with biotechnological challenges.
The Democracy in Crisis seminar at the Israel Democracy Institute is a Jerusalem-based group of scholars in the social sciences, humanities and law, which meets once a month to discuss issues pertaining to democratic theory and the challenges of global governance.
The seminar's goal is to assess the state of democratic theory and practice at the dawn of the 21st century. Democracy in Crisis is a conceptual project with normative intent: setting out to canvass the broad range of concerns with which contemporary democracies grapple, participating scholars transcend the boundaries of the liberal nation-state and have begun drawing a conceptual map for navigating the uncharted terrain of a new global constellation. The assembled experts subject to critical examination the perhaps outdated vocabulary of Western liberal democracies, and seek to reconstruct a conceptual tool-box better equipped to meet the challenges of our time.
In the past, the Democracy in Crisis seminar focused on topics like the consequences of the current financial crisis and its implications for neo-liberalism; recent developments in the field of international law and defense of human rights, and more.