PUBLIC ACADEMY :

"Understanding and Explaining the Current Crisis"

Theory and Philosophy Summer School 2012

Public Academy in TAPSS 2012

The public academy dimension of TAPSS is now entering its third year. In this activity, the summer school seeks to involve students in presentation and debating sessions that illustrate how academic knowledge can and does become relevant to wider society. While most academic knowledge would claim to ultimately have relevance to publics beyond academia, various disciplines and broad theories have struggled with demonstrating exactly what is this kind of relevance and how their kind of knowledge becomes more widely diffused. Hence, the public academy dimension of TAPSS will seek to make students familiar with some dimensions of how academic knowledge can be made relevant to forums beyond the academy. This is not an exercise in examining the fuller dimension of the public understanding of philosophy, humanities and social science so much as tentative explorations of how these kinds of knowledge can be applied in practice.

In previous years of TAPSS the current economic and social crisis formed the core of the public academy sessions. This serves as a pressing and inescapable example of a social problem that is in need of being addressed. Some of these themes will be reworked in the public academy sessions of TAPPS 2012. They are:

• Understanding the normative issues that arise in the crisis and examining the potential contribution of theories and disciplines that up to now have not been prominent in its societal construction, such as normative sociology, normative political philosophy and the normatively skeptical tradition of systems theory;

• Exploring how the crisis has been understood through the prism of economics as a mode of knowledge and seeking to understand both the internal debates that make for wide differences in economic diagnoses and prognoses and how other disciplines offer a vantage point on economic processes and their social impacts;

• Creating reflexive awareness amongst students of their existing participation in national and transnational knowledge production and reception structures and using differences arising in this participation as a resource to clarify different social perspectives on the crisis; 

• Bringing to bear the kinds of knowledge that show the impacts of economic and social crisis on various social spheres such as changes in higher education examined in last year’s school.

For this year, TAPSS proposes to continue these rich and productive traditions in its four sessions. All the sessions will include full opportunities for debate and for incorporation of the kinds of knowledge worked up elsewhere in the summer school sessions.