The interuniversitairy project Politisations ordinaires / Common Politisations organizes a workshop titled Les institutions de mobilisation populaire / Institutions of Popular Mobilisation. The workshop will be convened on 5 december in Ghent, Belgium. The objective of this workshop is to identify how urban institutions functioned and how they provided the common people with a political culture necessary to build up a critical public discourse and a set of resources for popular mobilisation. Whether the elites ignored this capacity or took it into account, in the end these discourses created a practice of power by themselves. Keynotes will be held by Marc Boone (Gent) and Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam).

In the middle ages and the early modern period, the common people were part of various institutions that regulated collective life. Some of these were structured formally and had statutes, for instance guilds, confraternities and church-fabric committees. Workers as well as urban elites belonged to these groups, which means they involved people from different social groups in their practices. These institutions regulated the organisation of labour, organised collective devotion, financed and took care of church buildings. Men and women were active in these institutions and they regularly assembled to decide for instance about rules and regulations regarding labour time, the duration of contracts, the age of apprenticeship, or the nature and quality of production.

In order to come to agreements, the members negotiated and discussed, imposed their views on others, followed or resisted the leaders’ ideas and proposed alternatives. These spaces and moments of collective life provided occasions for the commoners to elaborate upon and discuss the frameworks and rules of their communities and to come to a shared understanding, whether tacit or explicitly formulated on codes of action and of reflecting on the common good. This implied integrating the rules of negotiation in a habitus of collective deliberation, of learning how to convene, how to behave, how to vote and how to discuss.

Programme :

8.45 : Introduction – Jan Dumolyn, Claire Judde

9-11 : Tineke van Gassen (Ghent) – The archive of the city: the social memory of 15th century Ghent
Jelle Versieren (Antwerp) – The persistence of statements on labor skills in corporative and early-industrial discursive practices
Kristof Dombrecht (Ghent) – Rural parishes and collective life in the Flemish coastal area, 15th-16th centuries
Andy Ramandt (Ghent) – Castellany Institutions and Popular meetings in the countryside around late medieval Bruges
Eline van Onacker (Anvers) – Between cohesion and control. Social and political bonds and divisions between village elites and ordinary commoners in the 15th and 16th century Campine area »
Jelle Haemers (Leuven) – Dutch-speaking Ciompi? The mobilisation of craftsmen in fourteenth-century Flanders and Brabant
Rafael Oliva Herrer – Institutions and relationships: Some forms of popular mobilisation in Late Medieval Castile
Jan Dumolyn (Ghent) – What is a ‘political guild’? Concepts and implications
[two more younger scholars yet to be selected after the call for papers]

11.30-1 pm : Round table n°1
Coord.: Jelle Haemers and Claire Judde de Larivière
Discussant: Christian Liddy (Durham)
– Sources and documents
– Institutions and instances (Inventory, composition, place of gathering)

1-3 :
Lunch break

3-5 : Round table n°2
Coord. Jan Dumolyn and Rafael Herrer
Discussant: Claire Judde de Larivière (Toulouse)
– Forms and means of action
– Topic of discussion. Justifications and political arguments. Resources and tools of action

5-6 : Concluding Keynote Papers:
Marc Boone (Ghent) – Habermas, Bourdieu and Derrida revisited: changing paradigms concerning late medieval urban uprisings
Marcel Van der Linden (Institute for Social History, Amsterdam) – Institutions of Popular Mobilisation: Accomodation and Resistance

Informations pratiques :
Gand,
05-12-2014, de 9h00 à 18h00.

Project « Politisations ordinaires »/« Common Politisations »
Labex SMS, University of Toulouse, University of Ghent, University of Leuven, University of Sevilla

Coordinated by Jan Dumolyn (Ghent), Jelle Haemers (Leuven), Rafael Oliva Herrer (Sevilla) et Claire Judde de Larivière (Toulouse)

Source de l’information : KU Leuven