2013 Ridenour Faculty Fellowship Conference News: “Governing Possibilities and the Possibilities of Governance”

Scholars from the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and across the university community are convening today and tomorrow, Friday, April 26, in Blacksburg, Va., for the 2013 Ridenour Faculty Fellowship Conference. This year’s theme is, “Governing Possibilities and the Possibilities of Governance,” and it builds on the successful 2012 Ridenour conference, which focused on Distressed Cities.

For 2013, the interdisciplinary conference coordinating team created a program that explores all levels of governance during this two-day conference. Sessions are structured as discussions and conversations featuring SPIA faculty, graduate students and distinguished guest speakers in various semi-structured formats that allow both information and reflection.

In particular, as the 2013 long-ish title suggests, SPIA invite scholars to think about the social construction of both the form of governance and of what is governed by referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “space of possibles” (as a noun). Among the questions that are being explored during the two-day program include:
What is the space of possibles and what is at stake in the field of governance?
We can ask about the social possibilities of governance: what kind of governance are the current socio-economic power relations bringing forth?
And we can ask about the act of governing social possibilities: how are the powers that be organizing what is socially imaginable and thus possible?

Sessions examine questions such as:
How do we understand current debates about governance (or indeed government) in crisis?
How do our definitions of public and private space reflect current forms of governance?
How does the idea of participation and shared governance fit in?
How does governance legitimation change in the face of environmental crisis?
What are the tensions between attempts of democratization in developing countries and a context of neo-liberal international governance?
Finally, what are different theoretical perspectives of the concept of governance and what are its disciplinary and transformative potential?

SPIA scholars strive to integrate scholarship and practice to continuously inform, question, and advance knowledge in the public sphere. The Ridenour Faculty Fellowship Conference provides a forum to advance this core mission.