Democracy, Spatiality, and Subjectivity in the Americas

Catherine L. Benamou
Film and Media Studies
UC Irvine

Horacio Legras
Spanish and Portuguese
UC Irvine

This Working Group assembled colleagues in the humanities and the social sciences around three key areas that served as conceptual meeting places and a grid for methodological comparison and for the sharing of research: democracy, urban and transnational space, and subjectivity as it pertains to the formation of cultural and social identity. These concepts are often invoked to express civic and political commitments, as well as the play of difference, change, and mobility in the overlapping realms of ideas, sociopolitical activity, and community life.

Our central intellectual objective was to establish a cross-disciplinary dialogue on distinct formulations of our three core concepts. On the one hand, our inquiry emphasized the importance of place in the construction and actual implementation of universal notions such as democracy and subjectivity: in what ways are community-based democratic practices such as those we can observe today in La Paz, Bolivia different or similar to the ones that we observe in California? What is the impact of the increasing segmentation of national space (gated communities, subtle forms of exclusion of the poor from public urban areas, construction of neighborhoods around a core religious activism, etc.) on dominant notions of citizenship and political agency? How are intersecting understandings of race, gender, and ethnicity negotiated in different contexts and national realities? What happens with these national determinations once its bearers become migrant subjects to metropolitan locations?

On the other hand, we identified how disciplinary differences, including the different languages and methods used to explore these concepts, are negotiated in the complex cultural and political geography of the Americas. Specifically, we debated a set of questions that have been obstructing transdisciplinary collaboration in academia. Can the rift between the social sciences and humanities (both broadly defined) in their approaches to the spheres of culture and society be bridged? Does culture matter for a political scientist? Do we construct the same object when we talk about democracy from the perspective of history and in the perspective of sociology? What is the role of subjectivity and corollary processes of identification in the explanatory models of different disciplines? Does the mediation of sociocultural experience carry the same meaning from social scientific and humanities perspectives, or from the perspective of philosophy and anthropology as compared to media studies? Are all disciplines engaged in a criticism of identity or is this a strategy peculiar to the humanities? What counts as evidence for each of our disciplines? What criticisms, misunderstandings or plain misreadings govern the relationship of one discipline towards the other, even of a whole field (humanities, social sciences) towards the other? Throughout, we remained attentive to the ways in which our work both transcends and relies on the regional in its theoretical and methodological import.