The project privileges Public Space to investigate human condition in modern times. It stems from the idea that Public Space is a fundament for creating social ties between people and cultures, creating common norms and aesthetic forms as well as inventing new ways of making society.  The Public Space approach is based upon understanding social fabric through the related categories between private and public, local and distant, known and unknown, familiar and strange. AgorAkademi is conceived as an assembly for social sciences, humanities, and arts to generate a broad and multifaceted field of knowledge that will enhance our comprehension of the foundations of collective life as a process of encounter, exchange, confrontation and creativity. 

In pre-modern times, the cities, ‘Polis’ in Greek and ‘Madina’ in Arabic, referred to the marketplace, to the assembly of inhabitants, to the center of public life where the athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the city shaped the contours of European as well as Islamic civilizations. The etymological meaning of Polis and Madina embraces city, rules of governance, and civilized manners in order to serve a common, unifying purpose. In the global age of communication, public space lost its original function of physical assembly and territorial character and is partially replaced by social media and the detached forms of modern, representative democracy. Series of developments lead to its corrosion such as private capital exploits common spaces, politics of state surveillance limiting public assemblies, urban segregation avoiding social intermingling and global pandemic, as we witnessed lately, leading to voluntary and forced retreat from public spaces. As we observe the reduction of public space in politics and experience personally the consequences of its retreat from our daily lives, we become aware how much public space matters, its ineluctable role in the articulation between individual well-being and vibrant social life. 

Public Space allows the expression of discontent and confrontation, provides a physical ground between different ways of believing and styles of life, norms of majority and minority rights, order and contestation. Public space ideally enables visibility of actors, expression of the intolerable and contestation of exclusionary politics and laws. It is the stage for enactment of citizenship. During the last decades, movements of occupation, street demonstrations, performative protests gained momentum illustrating the return of the Public Space, the contemporary revival of ‘Agoras’. Public spaces are turned into stages for the appearance of unwanted actors, unprecedented gatherings and undesired social encounters. The appropriation of public space by multiple actors, its enchantment by social expressivity and aesthetic creativity appear to be vital in shaping the future of our multicultural societies. Public space becomes a protagonist for social change from below, from the ground, bottom up.

AgorAkademi members will inquire the emancipatory and creative potential of Public Space, personal subjectivities, social conditions and material forms for an intercultural collective life. AgorAkademi adopts the NOMIS principle of “creating a spark” as a process both personal and collective. It implies setting new agendas of research and making a change in different spheres of knowledge and in its organization, and having an impact on other researchers. The project Creative Inquiry for Public Space can be thought of as a scientific and creative cosmopolitan agora.

The NOMIS project AgorAkademi is initiated by Nilüfer Göle and hosted jointly at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Columbia Global Centers in Paris. The sustainability of the AgorAkademi will be assured by alternating its intellectual leadership between scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, namely sociology, art history, philosophy and history. The encouragement of change in intellectual leadership will be an intrinsic principle of the AgorAkademi shedding new or different lights on Public Space illuminating its functionalities, dynamics, undefined, neglected or underestimated areas and so far undiscovered aspects. 

Meeting on the 5th of June, 2020 on Zoom with :

Nilüfer Göle, Markus Reinhard, Cosima Crawford, Catharina Kahane, David Freedberg, Manos Tsakiris, Juliane Vogel, Julia Eckert, Markus Klammer, Pablo Ouziel, Boyan Znepolski, Judith Carrera, Daniel Gamper, Thomas Kirsch, Warda Hadjab, Chan Langaret, Wolfram Pichler, Richard Rechtman, Mechtild Widrich.