Professor Leïla Choukroune invites you to join an All University Interdisciplinary Webinar Series:

The extraordinary circumstances we are now facing call for renewed research and thinking.  Interdisciplinary research is particularly relevant to address the most pressing issues of our time and reflect upon pathways for the future. This intellectual journey is key to the development of our own scholarships as much as it is to the evolution of our University. 

UoP Themes have been designed to trigger and further this dialogue between disciplines. 

To interact while in isolation, support your projects and indeed create fruitful conversations, I propose to design an all University Interdisciplinary Research Webinar Series. 

This will take place on Wednesdays (2pm-3pm). It is open to all UoP colleagues. External experts and colleagues are also welcomed to join. 

The topics are yours. There is only one rule: interdisciplinarity and so a form of accessibility to a larger academic audience. 

This Webinar Series could be further developed into a permanent project for the University.

Prof. David Andress kindly agreed to open the first seminar with me this Wednesday (see below). 

I will plan ahead the next sessions with colleagues interested in presenting. 

Seminar 1: Wednesday 1st April, 2pm-3pm

Bodies and Citizens in Times of Pandemics: Longitudinal Perspectives 

Prof. David Andress and Prof. Leïla Choukroune

In times of crisis, the rule of law and democracy no longer go hand in hand. Faced with global threats, governments are increasingly derogating from common law. This time, it’s the body that we discipline, that we confine. What Michel Foucault had brilliantly exposed is replayed again to satisfy a form of economic utility.

In reflecting upon the extraordinary times we are living in, this Webinar proposes to address the reaction of States and societies when bodies become dangerous in themselves, not as individual persons who could be held to account, but as physical carriers of contagion (1). It will also highlight the temptation to escalate emergency powers and the potential pressure from the general population to do so, which creates a sort of existential dilemma for democracy, a narrow path to navigate between rejecting what is necessary for survival, and abandoning what is vital for empowered citizenship (2).

To join this session please follow this link:

https://uop.webex.com/uop/j.php?MTID=m8219b94fc08af891dab4016fb870834c

If required:

Meeting number (access code): 146 117 069 

Meeting password: Pedagogy2020

Please feel free to get back to me with suggestions and proposed topics of discussion for the next sessions. 

Looking forward to these events and conversations to come. 

With all best wishes, 


Prof. Leïla Choukroune 

Director of the Democracy and Citizenship Theme