Political Emergence as a Historical Problem: Notes on 21st Century Collective Protests and the Example of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution with Prof. Stefan Jonsson

Abstract
In this talk Prof. Jonsson will present and discuss the historical problem of analyzing and explaining unpredicted and spontaneous crowd events, such as have marked the global order after the global fiscal crisis of 2008. As he argues, this problem consists in the conceptualization and understanding of political emergence – a term drawn from Pierre Nora’s idea of historical emergence, Keith Sawyer’s definition of social emergence, Raymond William’s idea of emergent cultural formations, and Bernardo de Souza Santos elaboration of a sociology and history of emergences. Examples will be drawn from the Ukrainian Revolution of 2013–2014. The context of the talk is a research project in which aesthetic figurations are used as knowledge tools in analyses of political emergences.

Spearker Bio
Stefan Jonsson is professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, REMESO, Linköping University. His writings include A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (Columbia UP 2008) Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (Columbia UP 2013), and Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (Bloomsbury 2014).