The Inequalities and Democracy Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute is delighted to invite you to its public seminar.

If you would like to attend, please register here. 

Please keep in mind that external guests will not be able to enter the building without prior registration.

The seminar starts with a 25-minute paper presentation followed by comments from the discussant. Discussion open to the audience follows. To actively take part in the discussion, please read the draft paper beforehand. The paper is available upon request from the author.

Abstract:

This talk will outline the theoretical foundations of political voice. It advances an important argument, namely, that some sections of society are routinely ignored or actively excluded from mainstream politics. In order to be visible and present in public life, marginalized groups must speak up and speak out, often through protest. As marginalized groups articulate their collective voice through protest, they simultaneously lay claim to belonging to political community, and paradoxically, constitute democracy, an institution which frequently excludes them. The talk outlines the original concept of political voice which is based on three core elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. It discusses the case of LGBTIQ activism and pride in India.

Speaker:

Aidan McGarry is Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University, London where he is the Dean. He is the author of six books including Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism (Zed, 2017), The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam University Press, 2019, open access) and Political Voice: Protest, Democracy and Marginalized Groups (Oxford University Press, 2024). His research has been published in, amongst others, Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Political Studies Review, International Journal of Communication, and Visual Studies. Previously, he led an AHRC-funded international project looking at protest aesthetics, communication and visual culture. Aidan has held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam (2018-19). In 2022-23, he was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award based at University of Southern California in Los Angeles where he conducted research on environmental activism.

Discussant:

Violetta Zentai is a cultural anthropologist with a PhD from Rutgers University (USA). She was co-director of the Center for Policy Studies at the CEU (2003-2020) before joining the Democracy Institute. She is also a faculty member of the Department of Public Policy and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the CEU. Her research focuses on intersecting inequalities, social exclusion/inclusion, social movements, and civic solidarity. In the last two decades, she served as a team leader and coordinator of a number of larger comparative European research projects and doctoral training networks. She was a member of the core team of CEU’s Open Learning Initiative (OLIve) in 2017-2022 and has remained active in its new autonomous civic entity.