Politics and the Arts (Polarts)
The team Politics and the Arts has its starting point in reading the arts politically, which encourages the mutual exchange of ideas between the arts and political thought. Reading the arts politically implies embarking on a mission to re-vitalise politics and political thought by resisting the institutional fragmentation and reification of politics. The Politics and the Arts Group (PAG) is an international network, around which the team is largely constructed.
A systematic study of the interrelationships between ”art” and ”politics” (both as concepts and activities) can benefit political understanding by ”bringing the arts back in”. This happens across a wide range of approaches in political theory and cognate disciplines and artistic practices in the context of current attempts to redefine the scope of politics and the concept of the political. The team combines work on literature, political images, visual arts and music, as well as studies the perspectives of authorship, spectatorship and readership.
During the years 2006-2011 the main aim is to strengthen the co-operation with the PAG group, to offer scholars and doctoral students a channel through which to present and exchange their ideas within this field and thus methodologically study the relations between political theory, philosophy and the different artistic practices. Conferences and doctoral courses that focus on politics and the arts/aesthetics as a perspective of political understanding will be organised in Jyväskylä.
Politics and the Arts Group (Pag) (Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research ECPR)
Politics and the Arts Group was established in 1995 by political scientists having an interest in arts from the perspective of political thought. The group maintains an email list (Polarts), organizes workshops and panels within the ECPR and other conferences, and arranges its own symposia. The current director of the group is Kia Lindroos (secondname (at) cc.jyu.fi). You can join the group by sending a message to its secretary Matti Hyvärinen (firstname.secondname (at) uta.fi).
The aim of the Politics and the Arts group is to uncover /open / establish the discussion on the connections between politics and the arts – and question what these connections might be about. The general research questions that arise from the several issues discussed among the scholars are, for instance, the politics of narrative, politics and film, politics of music or political poetry. In short, we are interested in the political significance of imaginative constructs, in the relationship between politics and the art object, and the connections between art and politics from the specifically political point of view. The group has established itself as contributing mainly to the research, conferencing and teaching activities of Political Science and Political Theory.