Videos of Lecture Series on “Urban Governance and Civic Participation” now online
All videos of the lecture series “Urban Governance and Civic Participation in Words and Stone” are now free to watch. The series was co-organised by Susanne Rau (one of the KFG spokespersons) and two former fellows of ours, Katalin Szende (CEU, Budapest) and Zoë Opacic (Birkbeck, London). It brought together leading experts from a variety of disciplines and countries to discuss the forms and kinds of urban governance.
The organizers comment that:
The question whether the governance and autonomy of medieval cities and the participation of their citizens in managing communal affairs may be regarded a laboratory of democracy or yet another form of the rule of the privileged has re-emerged with new answers in recent scholarship. Besides urban and legal historians and scholars of political thought, research in art history, literacy, spatial studies, and global history have provided a set of new answers. Governing bodies and institutions, with varying degree of participation by inhabitants of different social and legal standing have been examined, as well as the shaping of the physical environment, including its open spaces, buildings and ornaments.
The talks of renowned invited experts in this online lecture series will seek the origins of civic participation in political thought and explore its forms of expression in written and visual media from Late Antiquity to the seventeenth century.
You can now find all videos in a YouTube playlist.
The lecture series is followed by an adjoining summer university course, focusing on the same theme from a central European perspective. For more details and registration, see the course website. The summer university will take place between 10 and 19 July 2022, in Budapest and Prague, and is recommended for graduate students and junior faculty members. The course organizers look forward to receiving many applications!
