[Workshop] The Cultural Politics of Trust: Recognition, Institutions, Democracy
🗓 16-17 Nov 🕒 9:30am 🔹 online
The Cultural Politics of Trust: Recognition, Institutions, Democracy is the third Spanish-Serbian meeting of philosophers and social theorists, organized by the GINEDIS group of the University of Complutense Madrid and the Laboratory for Social Critique of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.
The participants will address questions such as the following:
- Who do we trust and how is our trust shaped?
- Is trust changeable or does it have to be immutable in order to be trust at all?
- If recognition is the prerequisite of trust, what is the precondition for recognizing someone as trustworthy – will others appear to us as equally trustworthy in a society premised upon the notion that democratic social life is a zero-sum game of competing for scarce resources, compared to one premised upon the idea that democratic life is a process of the cooperative solving of problems?
- How do various intersecting asymmetries between individuals that persist in nominally democratic societies influence their capacities to trust and recognize?
- Is a “culturally cohesive” social fabric an important precondition of our capacity to recognize and trust others, as communitarian political philosophers (and right-wing populists as well) have argued – and how does this factor intersect (either positively or negatively) with democracy?
- Are institutions the condition of possibility of interpersonal trust and what happens if they are failing or crumbling?
- Are institutions themselves at any time solid and immovable, or are they rather in a constant process of change, and how does this reflect on relations of trust?
- Finally, what should a critique of institutions accomplish – does it reveal the changing nature of institutions, does it want to fix them?
