CISTAS seminar on Civil Society & Pragmatism

With prof. Ilana Silber & prof. Frank Adloff 

Time and Date 
Tuesday, June 28th  2016, from 10-16

Location
Copenhagen Business School, Råvarebygningen 2000 Frederiksberg, room PHR4.17.
The nearest metro station is Fasanvej opposite Føtex on Nordre Fasanvej.
The seminar will be in English.

Please register to: le.dbp@cbs.dk no later than Monday the 20th of June.
The seminar and lunch will be free of charge and open for all interested. Seats are limited.

The Civil Society in the Shadow of the State (CISTAS) project analyses Danish civil society historically, sociologically and politically, raising questions of the role of civil society in the development of the modern state and the welfare state, the role of civil society today, and its role will in the future.

The conceptualization of civil society as one of three sectors in society has become widely used in civil society research. The sector perspective helps us to analytically identify the distinctness of each sector, yet it has also shown its limitations when we want to understand how civil society is actually practiced in various situations. The pragmatist perspective has proven to be a particularly fruitful alternative approach to the study of civil society practices by avoiding; an a priori definition of civil society, re-formulating the unit of analysis, and emphasizing the (historical) process of making and practicing civil society. 

This workshop discusses the new pragmatist take on civil society research and take Frank Adloff´s  new book published June 21th “Gifts of Cooperation, Mauss and Pragmatism” and Ilana Silber´s articles  ““Emotions as Regime of Justification? The Case of Philanthropic Civic Anger,” (EJST 2011) & "The Cultural Worth of Economies of Worth"(from D. Inglis and A. Amila; The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2016)

Ilana Silber is presently professor at Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University. Her major fields of interest are sociological theory, cultural sociology, and the sociology of gift-giving and philanthropy, to which she brings a crosscutting engagement with comparative historical and interpretative cultural analysis.

Frank Adloff is presently Professor of Sociology, at Institut für Soziologie, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. His current research interests focus on: historical-comparative macro-sociology, philanthropy, gift-giving and reciprocity, civil society, social theory, religion and the welfare state.