Research Seminar

Lea Ypi: Can beauty save the world? On historical injustice, reconciliation and the role of aesthetic education

Date: 7 February 2024
Time: 10:00-11:45

Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13, Stockholm, or online. 

Research seminar with Lea Ypi, Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University.

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Abstract

'Beautiful world! Where hast thou gone?" asks Friedrich Schiller in his famous poem The Gods of Greece. He laments the loss of harmony in a world divided by injustice both past and present. In this lecture, Lea Ypi reads from her forthcoming book on human dignity. In it, she reflects on the relationship between politics and art by focusing on historical injustice and its legacy in a divided world. Through the life of her grandmother, Leman Ypi, she travels from the utopia of classical Greek unity described by Schiller to the dystopia of her own past. A journey that begins in 1918 in Saloniki a few years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and ends in 2005 in Tirana, just over a decade after the fall of communism.

 

In December 2022 Lea Ypi came for a visit to the Institute for Futures Studies where she and our director Gustaf Arrhenius had a conversation about her book Free. See the conversation here: 

 

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