International Call for Applications for Postdoctoral Fellowship: Concentration of Economic Power and Crisis of Democracy

The Law and Democracy Nucleus (NDD) of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) is opening a call for applications to one (1) funded postdoctoral fellowship to work within the scope of the Thematic Project “Crises of Democracy: Critical Theory and Diagnosis of Present Time” (FAPESP Process nº 2019/22387-0). The project is hosted in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, under the coordination of Professor Rúrion Soares Melo. The fellowship contributes to the project’s general goal of reconstructing the theses and critical concepts of the intellectual heritage of Critical Theory in order to comprehend the current crisis of democracy and the simultaneous crises of democratic theories, with focus in the distinctive character that the concept of public sphere in the critical-theory tradition, and the concept of counterpublics and its economic, cultural and political dimensions. For more information regarding the project, see : Auxílio à pesquisa 19/22387-0 - Filosofia social, Teoria crítica - BV FAPESP.

The candidate's research should focus on the analysis and reconstruction of the scientific literature about the relationship between the concentration of economic power and crisis of democracy and to assess the possibility, especially departing from the diagnoses presented by the literature, of the analysis of the relationship between economic power and democracy in Brazil. In structural-economic terms, the democratic tension may be presented as having at least two questions: on the one hand, the state is progressively less capable of being a channel to realize democratic demands that would determine the course of the economy in a scenario where gigantic economic actors dominate, something that undermines the dominant public sphere; on the other, these actors begin to represent, themselves, threats to the functioning of democratic institutions, when they start to impose their own agendas. This relationship is central in diagnoses of time in central countries of capitalism but departing from a fragile framework from the standpoint of a theory of democracy. Moreover, this relationship is rarely explored in non-central political economies, such as Brazil. Among the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon, we are interested mainly (although not exclusively) in the relationship between the concentration of economic power and the crisis of democracy in Brazil.

The following aspects will be evaluated in the 4-page proposal to be submitted with the application (item 3, below):

a. Reference to the main bibliographical references on the concentration of economic power and the crisis of democracy, including classic and contemporary scholarship;
b. Explicit dialogue with the Thematic Project in which this call is embedded (above);
c. The guiding questions of the research proposal should be political in nature, in the broad sense of the term;
d. The object of investigation can be theoretical or historical, but it must consider somehow the current discussions on concentration of economic power and crisis of democracy;
e. The proposal must be written in a concise and objective way, and it must include an abstract, clear objectives as well as a work plan that can be executed within a two-year timeframe. It is also important to anticipate the submission of at least one academic paper in a high-impact journal.