Living Together: Exploring Modes of Political Membership

Academic Director: Dr. Raef Zreik

The “Living Together” group has been working together since February 2010 under the guidance of Dr. Raef Zreik. The overall aim of the group’s research project is to enrich the repertoire of available options for living together within a political community.

In order to develop new approaches to the question of membership in a political community, the group attempts to create space for a new vocabulary that can stretch the imagination into novel, original ways of thinking about related questions such as citizenship, friendship and love, solidarity, being a neighbor and being a native, community and civil society, the public sphere and privacy. The project draws on Muslim and Jewish sources that may enable it to rethink political community and membership beyond the perspectives opened in recent debates between liberalism and its contemporary Western critics.

The group members share common academic interests but come from different departments and have diverse academic backgrounds and work methods, and thus enhance the group’s unique interdisciplinary character.

The group’s work is conducted on three levels:

• In its bi-weekly seminars, the group reads and discusses central texts in different fields, regarding citizenship, modernity and secularism, love, friendship and respect. The main issue that occupies the group in these discussions is the possibility of rethinking political membership through new categories. The discussion aims to enrich the diverse projects of the group members.
• The group encourages presentations of its members’ individual researches in front of a receptive audience of peers. These presentations take place once a month. The individual projects of the group members are partly sponsored by the Minerva Humanities Center. The Minerva Humanities Center also helps the researchers find external sources of funding and possibilities of publishing their work.
• In addition to the regular meetings of the group, the group members organize symposiums of relevant topics of their interest, that are intended for the general public or for the academic community. The purpose is to give young researchers the opportunity to gain experience in conference organization, to meet other researchers in their respective fields, and to present their work before wider audiences.

The group encourages the development of sub-groups, guided by the group members, that will discuss topics related to those of the larger group. In the recent year one such sub-group has operated, led by Dr. Ahmad Igbaria, and its members have focused on texts on contemporary political Islam.