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Please join the Sociology Department for a presentation by
Dr. Gülden Özcan
The Making of the Public Sphere: A Critique of Modern Police Power
In this presentation I focus on two main projects of modernity: police and the public. The construction of the public and the public sphere as governable targets has been crucial for modern governments, and this construction was rendered possible through police power. I develop a new approach to the concept of the public from the perspective of the social while situating police in the broader political context of modern state formation. In so doing, I examine the broad project of police in relation to capital accumulation, state formation, and political economy while I do a materialist reading of the public sphere abstraction by (re-)conceptualizing three major public spheres: the bourgeois public sphere as the ideal target, the proletarian public sphere as its dialectical opposite, and the market-public as its supplement. I argue that police power turns all kinds of potential dissenting populations, often pro-actively, into the public; that is, an addressable, responsible, accountable, and transparent subject. This in turn makes dissent predictable, reversible, and non-anonymous. More broadly, the perspective developed here can help to better comprehend how modern police power forms, deforms, and reforms the diverse publics of marginalized populations to make and orchestrate the public.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
9:00 am
Room C610 - University Hall
Contact:
Jenny Oseen | oseejs@uleth.ca | (403) 329-2551