This year the Workshop on Knowledge and the State, sponsored by the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects, will continue to explore the relationship between public governance and technical expertise. The goal of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of why public officials select and deploy the expert knowledge that they do, and how expert knowledge itself is shaped by shifting political demands and anxieties. While these questions are far from novel, the sense of the Workshop’s convenors is that across a range of domains – from climate science and clean energy to epidemiology and public health, from the economics of inflation, trade, and competition to computer science and the science of race and gender – the distinction between political and epistemic authority has become especially blurred.
In particular, the workshop this year will focus on the role of philanthropy in shaping knowledge and the state. We will meet twice in the fall semester and four times in the spring semester either to engage with guest speakers presenting new work on these topics, or to discuss and debate classic scholarship on the same.
The first meeting of the semester will take place on Thursday, October 16 at 4:20PM in Fayerweather 413. Bringing together the collective expertise of Elisabeth S. Clemens (Sociology, University of Chicago) and David Pozen (Columbia Law School), the session will introduce and broadly frame the topic of philanthropy.
Readings can be found below. In the meantime, please be sure to register below.
We hope to see you there.
Ira Katznelson, Jeremy Kessler, and Alma Steingart
Readings:
- What Are Foundations For?
- Repugnant to the Whole Idea of Democracy? On the Role of Foundations in Democratic Societies
- Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better, Chapter 4
- Civic Gifts: A History of Voluntarism and Giving as forms of Governance