Art as a Political Witness

This section, sponsored by the ECPR Standing Group on Politics and the Arts, invites panels exploring the practice of witnessing politics through the arts (widely understood, i.e. including popular culture) thus expanding the range of what political science normally does. Panels may problematize the concept of art in connection with political witnessing, or elaborate the political-ness of artistic witnessing, or explore the concept of artistic witnessing as political activity. Panels may address the conceptual/theoretical level or present theoretically informed case-studies. Events witnessed – or constructed in the process of artistically dealing with them – may be fragments from the past, different images of history, or connected to the contemporary political world. This may include reflections of the past in the present or anticipations of the present in the past thus engaging with the complexities of temporality in connection with memory and trauma reflecting, e.g., experiences of violence and horror. Panels may explore the political activities of professional artists or non-artists’ use of artistic forms of expression (photography, film, poetry, dance, theatre, performance, video) pertaining to witnessing politics, thus running counter to elitism, and deal with the relations and dynamics among individuals and/or groups of people. The potential sphere of politics opened up by artistic testimony is a move towards new ways of understanding political discourses. Section chair: Frank Möller, Senior Research Fellow, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere; section chair ECPR Standing Group on Politics and the Arts in the ECPR General Conferences 2009, 2011 and 2013. Most recent publication: Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (Palgrave, 2013).