The Center for the Study of Citizenship is pleased to announce our New Scholars’ Conference in Citizenship Studies on Friday, February 27th at the Alumni House on Wayne State University’s campus. The conference is free and open to the public. Please see the conference schedule following this announcement.

Joan W. Scott, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Center’s Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence from February 25 to March 5, will serve as keynote speaker.
Joan W. Scott’s work in history, gender studies, political philosophy, and political science has challenged the foundations of conventional scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, including the nature of evidence and experience and the role of narrative in scholarship. Her recent work focuses on the relationship between gender and the universalizing tendencies of culture and democratic politics.

The title of Professor Scott’s address is “French Universalism in the 1990s.” The following is a brief precis of her speech:

In June, 2000, France passed a law that now requires that half of all candidates for elective office be women. It is referred to as the 'parity law.' Joan Scott examines the way in which the feminists who organized the successful campaign for passage of the law argued for it, placing their demands carefully within the context of French republican political theory. The law is not about quotas (as most Americans assume), nor is it about the state imposing political correctness on its citizens. Rather the parity law was overwhelmingly endorsed by public opinion and, for that reason became a prudent measure for politicians to endorse. The argument for parity was, at the outset, neither essentialist nor separatist; it was not about the particular qualities women would bring to politics, nor about the need to address a special women's interest. Instead--and this is what the lecture will explore--the original argument was rigorously universalist. This study of a recent French feminist movement's attempt to refigure universalism addresses a set of questions much debated by philosophers, psychoanalysts and feminist theorists: What is the relationship between anatomical difference and its symbolic representation? Is sexual difference a fixed or mutable phenomenon? The parity movement offers a case study through which these questions can be explored.

We hope to see you at the conference. Please call 313-577-2593 or email m.kruman@wayne.edu for more information.

Marc Kruman
Director
Center for the Study of Citizenship