Center of Excellence

The EDDA Research Center,  in cooperation with the ReNEW Excellence Hub, hosts an international conference—to be held at the University of Iceland on 19–20 October 2018—on emergency politics. It brings together scholars in diverse academic fields to explore “states of exception” from historical and contemporary perspectives and in different geographies, with emphasis on Europe, the Nordic region, and the United States.

In the past two decades, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben’s accounts of the “state of exception” have captured the imagination of scholars working in the fields of history, politics, law, economics, and literature. What has accompanied the resurgence of interest in “exceptions” is the proliferation and increasing use of government or supranational emergency powers or other extraordinary measures to deal with political and social unrest, terrorism, and financial crises. Read more »

The EDDA Research Center, in cooperation with the Icelandic Prime Minister’s Office will host an international conference entitled “Democratic Constitutional Design – The Future of Public Engagement,“ which will be held at the University of Iceland 27–29 September 2018.

The conference offers venue for exploring the most recent developments in democratic participation and public engagement in policy- and decision-making. The discussion will review past efforts in Iceland and elsewhere to base constitutional design and lawmaking on direct public input. On the final day of the conference The Constitutional Society of Iceland will invite participants to meet with Icelandic citizens, have fun and enjoy the nature of Reykjavík while discussing democratic engagement. Please bring swimming suits.

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NORA Conference 2019 — Call for Abstracts: Border Regimes, Territorial Discourses and Feminist Politics

Gender and feminist researchers are invited to participate in the NORA 2019 Conference on critical feminist cross-disciplinary research and activities.

The conference is co-hosted by RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference, the EDDA Research Center and the United Nations University Gender Studies and Training Programme at the University of Iceland.  The 2019 NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research – conference focuses on the theme of material and symbolic borders in a period of nationalist revival.

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Inequality in Iceland has just been published by the University of Iceland Press in cooperation with the EDDA center. The book will be launched at a public event at the Nordic House on 1 December 2017, 12:00-13.30.

The book is about inequality of income and wealth in Iceland, covering the period from 1927 to the present. It shows that inequality was quite pronounced before the Second World War. From the 1940s onward, the distribution of both income and wealth became much more equal. For about half a century, Iceland, along with the other Nordic countries, probably had the world’s highest level of equality. This age of equality was a period of extensive economic growth, rapid modernization of society and the economy, improved standards of living and the build-up of a Nordic-style welfare state. Read more »

EDDA hosted the final workshop in the NOS-HS funded exploratory workshop series “Democratic Experiments” in cooperation with Guðni Elísson’s Climate discourse project “Earth 101”, 19-21 October 2017. The project has earlier held workshops on Epistemic Democracy (Turku 16 October 2016) and on the Future of Democracy (Reykjavík 20-21 May 2016). The focus of this third and final workshop in the project was on two issues that have attracted public and scholarly attention to an ever greater extent in recent years:

1. How can/does democracy (today) deal with climate change? Can democratic publics or democratically elected leaders respond to climate change forcefully enough to avoid environmental catastrophe?
2. What are the political consequenses of a failure to respond forcefully to climate change? Is there a future for democracy if democratic governments are unable to respond to environmental disasters?

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