Overview

Democracy, Political Participation, and Social Movements is a co-led seminar by Dr. Devrim Kabasakal Badamchi and Dr. Selin Bengi Gumrukcu. The course considers democracy both as a set of normative ideas and an ideal that is intertwined with practice. Therefore, it is divided into two parts: The first five weeks focus on the normative landscape of democracy and the second five weeks focus on reasoning and reflecting on the meaning of political participation and democracy within the contexts of social movements.
In the first part of the course, we will try to answer questions such as “Why is democracy important?”, “What are the normative concepts that we associate democracy with?”. Within this scope, we reflect on the relation of democracy with concepts such as equality, justice, neutrality, toleration, multiculturalism, and secularism.

The second part of the course focuses on the relationship between democracy and social movements in general. It starts with analyzing the relationship between democracy and social movements by asking questions such as “Are social movements necessary for democracy?” and “Can democracies survive without social movements?”. In the following weeks, the nature of social movements and protests as well as their relation with the state are analyzed in detail. The last two weeks concentrate on mobilization under authoritarianism with specific reference to the Arab Spring as well as populism and its connection to social movements.