The Clough Center is dedicating its 2024-2025 year of programming to the theme of "Envisioning Democratic Futures."
Meet the Director
After a decade of leadership by BC Law Professor Vlad Perju, the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy has a new director.
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Spring Symposium on Attachment to Place
At this gathering, a cross-disciplinary group of leading scholars from around the world from our Boston College community joined experts for a series of dialogues on place, nationality, and global politics. Sessions focused on topics related to the importance of place, including the Environment, Nations and Borders, Religion, Digital Space, Urban Planning, Land, and Commemoration.
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The South of Our Imagination
A Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Karen Cox has risen to prominence as one of the most authoritative commentators on the American South today. To shed more light on a region and the places that continue to define our nation today, the Clough Center enthusiastically welcomes Prof. Karen Cox as a Distinguished Lecturer for the 2023-24 academic year. This event is part of the Clough Center's year-long exploration of “Attachment to Place in a World of Nations”.
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“Darwin’s Nightmare”
Written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper, the Oscar-nominated documentary Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) investigates the social and ecological impact of the global fishing industry in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria. As a contribution to our ongoing exploration of “Attachment to Place in a World of Nations,” the Clough Center is pleased to host a viewing of Darwin’s Nightmare, followed by a discussion of the film with Director Hubert Sauper.
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Making the National Geographic
The Clough Center is delighted to welcome Prof. Appadurai as a Clough Distinguished Lecturer of the 2023-24 academic year. Serving as his respondent is Zine Magubane, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, whose work critically examines the legacies of slavery and colonialism to develop new theoretical tools for a truly global sociology. Prof. Appadurai’s lecture is entitled “Making the National Geographic: The Infrastructure of an Intimate Abstraction.”
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Attachment to Place in a World of Nations
Over the last two centuries, the nation-state has risen to become the dominant territorial unit of governance, law, economy, and culture. So it remains even in today’s globalized order. Yet for much of world history, other modes of structuring political space prevailed, from great dynastic and religious empires to independent cities, tribal confederations, and local communities. Even today, many people across the globe continue to define their identities in relation to other forms of “attachment to place.”
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What the Constitution Means to Us 2023
Since the founding era of the United States, the American Constitution has been central to our public life. It has inspired hope, and it has provoked despair. It has remained in place, as few other national constitutions have. Yet it has also repeatedly been changed, and some today think it needs to change again. At a moment when its basic meaning seems more contested than ever, how should we look at the Constitution today?
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Clough Reception
On August 31, 2023, The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy hosted a reception for the research, public service, and doctoral fellows, along with the Clough correspondents.
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Renewing Journalism, Restoring Democracy
By keeping the public informed and holding the powerful to account, journalism plays a vital role in the life of democratic societies. Maintaining an objective public record–whether by fact-checking political advertisements, or scoring political speeches with Pinocchios–is only the most obvious of journalists’ contributions. When institutional norms fail, the media serve as an additional set of guardrails, offering critique while safeguarding democratic institutions.
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“The Return of the Native”
As the second Clough Distinguished Lecturer in our relaunched series, Prof. Tarrow will draw on his extensive comparative research into European democratic regimes to speak to the challenges polarization poses to American democracy today. He will also make the case that the postwar experience of European countries can afford valuable insights into the nature of these challenges, and how they might be addressed. Prof. Tarrow’s respondent will be Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, and one of the foremost scholars and practitioners of community organizing.
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"Degenerations of Democracy”
As the first speaker in the Clough Center’s relaunched “Distinguished Lecture” series, Prof. Calhoun will address the issues explored in his most recent book, Degenerations of Democracy, co-authored with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar. Challenging commonplace narratives, this work interrogates the underlying causes of democratic decline, and examines the most promising strategies for revitalizing democracy across the globe. Calhoun’s respondent is Elizabeth McKenna, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an expert in social movements, political parties, and grassroots democratic politics.
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Coping With Defeat? A Roundtable Discussion
How do religions that have grown accustomed to political rule cope with the loss of their political authority in modernity? And how might they learn to coexist, peacefully, with the modern state? In his latest book, Coping with Defeat, Clough Center Director Jonathan Laurence sheds new light on these questions by offering a comparative analysis of two religions not often treated together: Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam.
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What the Constitution Means to Us
Since the founding era of the United States, the American Constitution has been central to our public life. It has inspired hope, and it has provoked despair. It has remained in place, as few other national constitutions have. Yet it has also repeatedly been changed, and some today think it needs to change again. At a moment when its basic meaning seems more contested than ever, how should we look at the Constitution today?
