Cultural Perspectives on Politics

Politics involves meaning: how human beings think, speak and feel about who they are, the kind of societies in which they live, and how those societies should be governed. Many current challenges to democracy – the rise and spread of xenophobic populism, waning political participation, democratic responses to climate change – are dependent on how citizens and political leaders conceive of the challenges in question. Yet this kind of socially and culturally constructed and mediated meaning has not been the focus of dominant approaches in political science. This course introduces cultural perspectives on politics, including theoretical and empirical work in and around political science, cultural sociology and cultural studies, as well as literary fiction and non-fiction with political life in focus. In the course students will get to know and compare different theoretical and methodological approaches, and use these to identify and analyze political phenomena from a cultural perspective.