Winter School 2021
From February until April 2021, GTGC hosted an online PhD Winter School together with the University of Padova (Italy) and the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) on “Sustainable Glocal Futures: Knowledge, Democracy and Global Communications".
In total, 32 PhD candidates from around the world (12 from Leiden University) participated in the Winter School to critically reflect on the Eurocentric representation of global space and time. GTGC organized the sessions on '(Dis)Illusions of Democracy' that involved 10 speakers (5 from Leiden) discussing the current struggles with democracy both nationally and globally.
“What happened to the hopes and expectations of liberal globalists? Are we seeing a 1930s-like systemic counter-movement against liberal democracy? Or is a deeper coloniality of modern democracy coming home to roost? What prospects are available to retrieve and/or reconstruct democracy in the current more global world?”
The panel in the first session addressed the questions above, focusing on the national scale, with commentators on Egypt, Philippines, Tunisia, Uganda and USA. The second panel, that focused on the global scale, gathered commentators on cosmopolitan democracy, Euroscepticism, the Global Right, global multistakeholder democracy, and the World Social Forum. Each session had a first part involving a round table discussion among the specialist researchers and a second part of small-group discussion among the student participants with the speakers.
Other topics discussed during the Winter School included, amongst others, the impact and regulation of digital technologies; global communication; linguistic citizenship; and epistemologies of the south.