Sponsored by the Region of Central Greece
The overarching topic of the Academy’s seminar program 2026 is Technology, Society, and Politics.
SEMINAR PROGRAM
On The Uses of Democracy: A Biopolitical Inquiry
by Timothy Campbell | Professor of Italian, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University
Description
From its origins in the work of Michel Foucault to its later elaboration in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, biopolitics has come to name a kind of deformation of politics, the space where a power of and over life collapses distinctions among forms of government. In such a scenario of political realism, the rise of biopolitics signals the end of the political, understood as the life of the polis and the possibility of deliberating collectively about the city, its present and future. The following course offers students an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of both the political and biopolitical today, specifically with regard to a particular form of government that is under pressure everywhere, namely democracy. After reading the founding texts of biopolitics (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito, Mbembe), we will turn to the question of what uses democracy might serve. Here the concepts of Berlant’s “infrastructure” and Negri’s “constituent power” are featured in the construction of what we will call “democratic objects.”
Automation and the History of Knowledge
by Alex Csiszar, Professor of the History of Science, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Description
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has led to grand predictions of a revolution in scientific method and of knowledge production more generally. But it has also prompted dire warnings about the erosion of human judgment, epistemic distortion, and of the end of university training as we know it. In this course we will build a framework for evaluating such claims by examining the long history of attempts to invent algorithms and technologies for producing, justifying, and judging knowledge claims. What is the history of the relationship between craft and code? What becomes of expertise when algorithms are used to exercise judgment? How have conceptions of human intelligence and reason themselves been transformed through attempts to produce machines that mimic them? What happens to citizenship as identity becomes increasingly defined through data and metrics? Topics will include the history and philosophy of quantification, data, algorithms, and technologies of governance.
Instruments and Instrumentalities
by Emily I. Dolan, Professor and Chair of Music Department, Brown University
Description
Today, in a variety of fields, the definitions of instrument and instrumentality are transforming. While retaining their older connotations of means to ends and tool-use, the terms instrument—and instrumental—now also imply bigger, messier complexes of technologies, bodies, and rationalities. Over the course of this week, we will think transversally, across categories and contexts, to consider the forms and meanings of instruments and ideas of instrumentality. Themes include control, innovation, mediation, and labor and our readings are drawn from a diverse set of disciplines that deal with instruments, including History of Science, Media Studies, English, Science and Technology Studies, and Music Studies. A strong musical focus in our readings reflects the ways in which music and music making have long served as ways of testing the “instrumentalizability” of new technologies and as conceptual model for technological organization.
