Democracy refers to a form of government in which the people either have the authority to choose their governing legislators, or the authority to decide on legislation. Who is considered part of the people and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people has changed over time and at different speeds in different countries, but more and more of the inhabitants of countries have generally been included. Cornerstones of democracy include freedom of assembly and speech, inclusiveness and equality, membership, consent, voting, right to life and minority rights.
Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics and government is referred to as political science.
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri. It has been praised by Slavoj Žižek as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century".
Sir Mark Edward Welland, is professor of nanotechnology at the University of Cambridge and head of the Nanoscience Centre. He has been a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, since 1986 and started his career in nanotechnology at IBM Research, where he was part of the team that developed one of the first scanning tunnelling microscopes. He was elected as the master of St Catharine's College, Cambridge and took up office on 1 October 2016.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Jean W. Sacks, Head of the Journals Division, with Catharine R. Stimpson as its first editor in Chief, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization.
David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher serving as Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona, and editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy and Policy. He was also the inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science at the University of Arizona.
David Jonathan Andrew Held was a British political scientist who specialised in political theory and international relations. He held a joint appointment as Professor of Politics and International Relations, and was Master of University College, at Durham University until his death. He was also a visiting Professor of Political Science at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli. Previously he was the Graham Wallas chair of Political Science and the co-director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics.
David Walter Runciman, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford is an English academic who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, where he is Professor of Politics. From October 2014 to October 2018, he was also Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies.
Mark Turin is a British anthropologist, linguist and radio broadcaster who specializes in the Himalayas and the Pacific Northwest. From 2014-2018, he served as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Acting Co-Director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology and director of the Digital Himalaya Project.
Johan 'Hans' van de Ven is an authority on the history of 19th and 20th century China. He holds several positions at the University of Cambridge, where he is Professor of Modern Chinese History, Director in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St Catharine's College and previously served as Chair of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He studied sinology at Leiden University. Then, after studying with Susan Naquin at the University of Pennsylvania for a period of time, he moved to Harvard University, where he studied modern Chinese history under Philip Kuhn and received his PhD.
The Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Science at the University of Cambridge was created in 2011 out of a merger of the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies. According to the Cambridge HSPS website: graduates pursue careers in "research, the Civil Service, journalism, management consultancy, museums, conservation and heritage management, national and international NGOs and development agencies, the Law, teaching, publishing, health management, and public relations."
Timothy James Brook is a Canadian historian, sinologist, and writer specializing in the study of China (sinology). He holds the Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia.
Christian Welzel is a German political scientist at the Leuphana University Lueneburg and director of research at the World Values Survey Association. He is known for the model of cultural dimensions which measures emancipative values and secular values.
Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies.
Bjørn Thomassen is an anthropologist and social scientist. He is associate professor at Roskilde University in the Department of Society and Globalisation. From 2003-2012 he worked at The American University of Rome where he was Chair of the department of International Relations.
Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted and gathered are shared with all members of a group, in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for originating, who wrote that hunter-gatherer societies were traditionally based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.
Jack Lewis Snyder is an American political scientist who is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, specializing in theories of international relations.
Bernd Reiter is a political scientist and professor at Texas Tech University. He formerly served as the Director of the Institute for The Study of Latin American and the Caribbean (ISLAC) and professor of political science for the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on democracy, race and decolonization. Reiter is a decolonization scholar and has collaborated with such authors as Arturo Escobar (anthropologist), Sandra Harding, Raewyn Connell, Catherine Walsh, Gustavo Esteva, Walter Mignolo, and Aram Ziai. He has also made contributions to Critical Whiteness Studies. In 2017, he gave a TEDx talk on The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead.
Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. He is based at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). He works principally on the history of modern British and American political thought, with a particular focus on ideologies of empire and international politics. His book "The Idea of Greater Britain" won the Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society.
Carrie N. Baker is an American lawyer, Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She teaches courses on gender, law, public policy, and feminist activism and is affiliated with the American Studies program, the archives concentration, and the public policy minor. She co-founded and is a former co-director of the certificate in Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Program offered by the Five College Consortium.
