Summer 2025
Civic Engagement in Repressive Contexts. This course is at full capacity and is no longer accepting applications.
Dates: June 02, 2025 - July 10, 2025Day/Time: Monday; Thursday 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT
Level: 100-Level
Certificate: Civic Engagement
Instructor: Jeffrey Goldfarb, Obaidullah Bahir, American University of Afghanistan
The course seeks to help the students and professors of the course answer the classic question: “What is to be done (by us)?”. It does this through examining four themes: cultural freedom, investigating the arts and sciences as a key achievement of modernity and an important ground for civic engagement; media and autonomous publics, examining the notion of public life and the role a free public space plays in supporting alternatives to autocracies; politics as concerted action, considering how people, when they come together on the basis of shared principles, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, and developing a capacity to act in concert, create political power as an alternative to violence and coercion; and finally, the responsibilities of intellectuals and the roles they play in creating democratic public life, political power and cultural freedom.
Credits: 3 US / 6 ECTS