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SIAS Summer Institutes 2009/2010

Comparative Perspectives on Federalism and Separation of Powers: Lessons from - and for - National, Supranational, and Global Governance

July 20 - July 31, 2009 in Berlin, Germany
August 16 - August 27, 2010 in Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Conveners:
Professor Daniel Halberstam, The University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Professor Dr. Christoph Möllers, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

 

Action Theory in Philosophy and Social Sciences

July 20 - July 31, 2009 at the National Humanities Center, NC, USA
August 16 - August 27, 2010 in Erfurt, Germany

Conveners:
Professor Dr. Hans Joas, Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt, Germany
Professor Robert Pippin, University of Chicago, USA

 

 

The Program

The SIAS Summer Institutes are designed to support the development of scholarly networks and collaborative projects among young scholars from the United States and Europe. Led by distinguished senior scholars, the institutes are open to recent Post-docs and Ph.D. candidates who are now studying or teaching at a European or American institution of higher education. Each institute will accommodate twenty participants and will be built around two summer workshops, one held in the United States and another in Europe in consecutive years. Participants will present their research and collaborate on new projects at the seminars and between the two meetings. The program seeks to explore theoretical, methodological and empirical issues, promote the integration of approaches and interpretations from various disciplines into the participants' research, review the state of research in an institute's field, and identify promising areas for further research.

The SIAS Summer Institutes are sponsored by SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study) consisting of the following institutes:

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, CA
Collegium Budapest, Hungary
Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, Netherlands
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, MA
Russell Sage Foundation, New York, NY
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany

This program is made possible by grants from  the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

It will cover the cost of travel, meals, and lodging for both the U.S. and European meetings.  Fellows will also be awarded a stipend of $ 600 for the workshop taking place in the US as well as € 500 for the workshop in Europe.

 

SIAS Summer Institute 2009-2010 on "Comparative Perspectives on Federalism and Separation of Powers: Lessons from – and for – National, Supranational, and Global Governance"

Federalism is undergoing a remarkable revival on several levels. From the United Kingdom to Iraq, from Germany to South Africa, we witness new and continuing efforts to re-imagine federalism within traditional state structures.  At the supranational level in Europe, we observe the emergence of a new kind of political entity that invokes the idea of federalism and that has come to serve as the touchstone for debate about federalism and regional integration in other parts of the world. And at the level of global governance, the quest for a normative paradigm for international relations is being discussed against the backdrop of the Kantian concept of international federation.

Along with the renewed concern for federalism has also come a resurgent interest in the separation of powers. Here we move from the traditional administrative state of the 20th Century – with its challenge to classic understandings of democracy – to novel, pressing questions of the role of supranational agencies and the problem of “fragmentation” in global administrative governance.

This ambitious Summer Institute proposes to examine federalism and separation of powers across a variety of contexts. With a strong emphasis on the European Union, the United States, and Germany, the seminar will draw on a host of cases to develop more fine-tuned, comparative, and interdisciplinary tools of analysis. The aim is to gain a deeper understanding of the theory and practice of federalism and separation of powers and of how they relate to ideas of legitimacy and justice in national, supranational, and global governance.

The workshops will comprise a carefully selected group of post-graduate scholars and junior professors in law, the political and social sciences, and the humanities. The purpose is to shape significantly the current scholarship of all participants as well as to promote the creation of original scholarly works. One objective will be each participant’s creation of a fresh or significantly altered work of publishable quality by the close of the second workshop. The broader objective is the creation of a long term transatlantic interdisciplinary community of leading scholars to tackle problems of pluralism in national, supranational, and global governance.

Tentative outline of first seminar:

The institutes are open to junior scholars from a variety of disciplines:

  1. recent law graduates and junior faculty (J.D., LL.M, or the equivalent not earlier than 2003, S.J.D., Ph.D., or the equivalent not earlier than 2004),
  2. post-docs and junior faculty in the social sciences or humanities whose scholarship focuses on legal authority (Ph.D.s not earlier than 2004), and
  3. S.J.D. or Ph.D. candidates in the aforementioned disciplines who are currently studying or teaching at a European or American institution of higher education.

The conveners of this Institute are:


The two workshops will take place from 
July 20 to July 31 2009 in Berlin, Germany and in  
Summer 2010 in the USA (date and location to be announced)

 

SIAS Summer Institute 2009/10 on "Action Theory in Philosophy and the Social Sciences"

In this seminar we will discuss a representative sampling of important work in the philosophical and social scientific literature on action and agency. The problem of action has been of crucial importance in philosophy and social theory since the late 18th century. But unfortunately the discussions in different disciplines and schools of thought have often gone on independent of each other. The discipline of economics, for example, has mostly been dominated by a model of rational choice. Related models of instrumental, strategic or utilitarian agency have also been important in other social-scientific disciplines, although sociology has mostly been based on ideas about normatively oriented action. For the German intellectual tradition with its strong emphasis on hermeneutics the model of action as expression, inaugurated by Herder, has been particularly important. In America for a long time the pragmatist understanding of action as creative was hegemonic. Revitalizations of the Aristotelian understanding of action (e.g. in the work of Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Catoriadis) or new approaches like the theory of communicative action (Jürgen Habermas) add to the enormous diversity of the field.

In academic philosophy, in addition to the traditions mentioned so far, analytical philosophy has developed an intense discourse of its own. The question there is whether there are distinct sorts of events for which we may appropriately demand reasons or justifications from subjects whom we take to be responsible for such events occurring. As it is sometimes put, to focus appropriately on that issue we also need to ask for a broad delimitation of the practical normative domain (whatever is done for reasons, purposively, where reference to such reasons is essential in understanding what was done), and so are asking about the possibility that there are these distinct sorts of events, actions, things done for reasons. That there may be no such distinction, that there might be just natural objects and their properties and ontologically uniform natural events, has been a major issue in modern practical philosophy for some time now. We often ask as well, sometimes as an independent question in practical philosophy, sometimes as tightly interwoven with an answer to the first, for an assessment of what rightly should count as such reasons or justifications, as distinct from what subjects might as a matter of fact themselves count as such reasons. In accounts that tie acting well to the exercise of practical reason, these discussions obviously include claims we take to be of the highest importance—ethical and moral sorts of reasons, questions of right or justice, etc.

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to these issues, with the hope that for each participant from one discipline greater familiarity with work and approaches in the other disciplines will shed light on different ways of posing the central questions and will open up different avenues for research. On the philosophical side, readings will include both eighteenth and nineteenth century "expressivist" theories (such as Herder's and Hegel's) and their contemporary representatives (Charles Taylor, Pippin), as well as the extensive literature that grew up after Wittgenstein’s influence on the issues of agency and intention, such as work by Anscombe, Davidson, O’Shaghnessy and Searle. On the social scientific side, both classical positions (Weber, Durkheim, Tönnies, Mead) and more contemporary positions (Parsons, Habermas, Giddens, Joas) will be treated. The goal is not a survey of positions, but to find a way to bring various authors from differing traditions into dialogue with each other about the core issues involved in understanding human beings as agents.

Over the course of the two week seminar, each participant will be asked to make a presentation that will then be discussed by the group as a whole. In addition, various outside speakers from the two relevant disciplines will be invited to make presentations to the seminar.


The institutes are open to Ph.D. candidates and scholars who have received a Ph.D. since 2004.

The conveners of this institute are:

The two workshops will take place from

Application Procedure

To apply, send the following, in English, to the appropriate address below:

  1. A completed application (forms available below)
  2. A curriculum vitae
    A statement of up to 1,000 words (not counting cited references) detailing current research interests and past research and writing related to the institute topic
  3. A list of not more than five background readings potentially relevant to all participants of the summer institute
  4. One letter of recommendation

application-form_federalism.pdf

application_form_action_theory.pdf

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Applications should be received by March 27, 2009. Candidates selected will be notified in April, 2009.

Candidates should note that they are applying for two summer workshops: one in Berlin, and another in the USA and that successful applicants will be expected to attend both workshops. The working language of the institute is English.


EUROPEAN CANDIDATES SHOULD ADDRESS QUERIES AND APPLICATIONS TO:

SIAS Summer Institutes
c/o Petria Saleh
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Wallotstrasse 19
D-14193 Berlin, Germany
Tel.: +49 30 / 89001 - 158
Fax: +49 30 / 89001 - 400
E-Mail

U.S. CANDIDATES SHOULD ADDRESS QUERIES AND APPLICATIONS TO:
SIAS Summer Institutes
c/o Richard R. Schramm
Vice President for Education Programs
National Humanities Center
P.O. Box 12256
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2256, USA
Tel.: 919-549-0661
Fax: 919-990-8535
E-mail rschramm@nationalhumanitiescenter.org 

 

 

 

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