Center Theme for 2005-06: States of Autonomy

The Center's 2005-06 programs will examine the idea of autonomy, especially as focused on the human body, and its larger implications and relationships. The idea of the modern self, arguably one of autonomy or self-determination, retains intellectual currency despite, or perhaps as a result of, post-structuralist challenges, but it raises many questions. What sort of condition is autonomy? Why do we value it? What are the conditions under which autonomy is developed and expressed? Can there be autonomy in an extra-social state of nature, or is some kind of social or even civil order necessary?

Historically, notions of autonomy have underwritten conceptions and authorizations of the sovereign state with no rivals for authority, and the state has been a crucial organ for legitimizing individual autonomy as a desired "state of being." But other ways of theorizing the relationship between autonomy and citizenship, individuality, and community are possible. Among the issues we will explore are the relationships between different kinds of states and the autonomy of their citizen-subjects; how autonomy figures in relation to other kinds of community, for example, ethnic, religious, aesthetic, or consumerist; how claims to individual autonomy whether personal, national, or supranational, modify or subvert the state, and how multi-national, international, and para-state organizations such as NGOs employ and inflect notions of autonomy. We are also concerned with how states or other collectivities choose to intervene in the lives of persons defined as not fully autonomous: children, slaves, the sick, the disabled, and others considered not fully rational. Finally, in light of recent conflicts over the legitimacy of sovereign states, and the assaults on human bodies that inevitably ensue from them, we are interested in alternative conceptions linked to these concepts and structures that may be in the process of formation.

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Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director