The Elaine Stavro Visiting Scholar series explores ideas that challenge assumptions and invite deeper reflection on power, identity, and social change. These talks are for anyone interested in understanding how theory and social research shape our perspectives about justice, politics, and lived experience.
Upcoming Lecture
Abolition Democracy (here and now)
Dr. Melissa Williams
Professor, University of Toronto
Lecture Abstract
Democratic backsliding is not just the erosion of existing democratic institutions, but also the resurgence of old forms of racial, colonial, and patriarchal authoritarianism and the rollback of hard-won rights against these forms of domination. This lecture turns to W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “abolition-democracy,” coined to capture the brief moment of multiracial democracy in the United States after the abolition of slavery and the end of the Civil War, as an essential resource for meeting the challenges of our own times: how to hold onto our ideals of democracy while also combating the most anti-democratic tendencies in contemporary politics.
About Dr. Melissa Williams
Melissa Williams is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where she also served as Founding Director of the Centre for Ethics. A political theorist, her work has focused the relationship between democratic ideals and structural injustices, and on decentering Euro-American political thought in the field of political theory. Her published works include Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (1998) and (as editor) Deparochializing Political Theory (2020).
For more information email communityspeakerseries@trentu.ca.