The popular movements that have erupted around the globe, from Tahrir Square to the demonstrations in the Eurozone to the Occupy movements, are simultaneously movements for social justice and movements for democratic reform. Popular protest has stimulated a renewed – and now, more than ever, a truly global - public sphere that consciously links failures of democratic legitimacy on the national scale with failures of economic justice on the global scale. At the same time, the global economic crisis hastens the unraveling of the social welfare state whose stability has been the presupposition of our most powerful theories of social justice. Those theories, though enriched and deepened through the critiques from difference that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, may rest on Westphalian assumptions about the boundaries of justice that are difficult to sustain in the context of neoliberal globalization. Looking to the practices and rhetoric of those who are acting on behalf of "globalization from below," the lecture will explore alternative political imaginaries for linking aspirations to justice and claims for democratic rights in our dynamic and interconnected world.
