Pierre de Fermat (Quelle: Wikimedia Commons)
I shouldn’t and won’t ever claim to be as brilliant as Fermat. When he scribbled his famous theorem by the margins of a book he was reading (or so the legend goes), he was certainly referring to a proof that he had somewhere on paper and not just an idea. Else, he might have felt like I do right now. (weiterlesen…)
Reflecting back upon the last few days I have to say – it was intense. And I mean that in a positive way. The location for the interim meeting of the IPSA Research Committee on “Power” was close to ideal. Soeterbeeck is a former monastery, with lots of character and a truely contemplative atmosphere that made it easy to focus on the issues at hand. But it also encouraged the kinds of more informal exchanges that are so important to provide the texture to all the more serious and abstract discussions. Henri Goverde, Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan did a wonderful job of making this possible.
The papers presented were quite varied and included theoretical treatises – referencing people as diverse as Foucault, Habermas, Bauman and Elias among others – as well as empirical case studies in environmental politics and the politics of the welfare state. Instead of falling apart, however, our discussions soon began to evolve around a rather concise and not necessarily expected set of issues. So, instead of summarising (weiterlesen…)