Political Protest

This course attempts to understand the role of political protest in the public space. The course will start by looking at the “expressive” possibilities of the state faced with the assumption of neutrality in liberal democracies. It will then look at different theories of protest and civil disobedience in order to better elaborate the relationship between the state and citizens. It well then look at diverse manners that citizens can make their needs and problems known through protests. Using the tools from philosophy of language, and more specifically the theory of speech acts, this course then considers protest as a complex matrix of diverse speech acts that involves plural forms of collective and distributed agentivity, diverse goals and varied criteria for success. Within this framework, political protest is seen as having multiple objectives beyond the modification of legislation, such as the constitution of a political community, the construction of solidarity, the dissemination of information and the space for self-education.