Clementina Gentile Fusillo

Aufenthalt

Oktober 2024 – Juli 2025

Forschungsthema

»Power and the representative: Towards a new normative theory of democratic representation«

Projektbeschreibung

From the changing significance of national borders and the crises of party politics to fast-paced innovations in information technology and the despair over »post-truth politics«, democratic representation today faces unprecedented challenges on many fronts. In this context, the past twenty years have seen a revival of academic debates around democratic representation, which increasingly point towards the need for a new normative account of representation – something that could be of vital help in advancing public debate and sculping policy responses to many of democracies’ most pressing challenges. To date, however, the literature has yet to yield such an account. One important impediment to the development of a new normative account of representation, I suggest, is a continued tendency within the current literature to fall back on overly simplistic assumptions about the status of representatives as holders of power. Building on Rainer Forst’s notion of noumenal power, I propose to investigate the specific ways in which democratic representatives both exert and are subject to power in the fulfilment of their function. In particular, I will carry out a descriptive and normative analysis of power dynamics in the four relationships and relative spaces of justfication, that are constutive, I argue, of all instances of democratic representation: the relationship between the representative and their group/party/faction/movement; between the representative and the general public; between the representative and representatives of other groups; the relationship of the representative to themselves. In doing so, my research will illuminate new possible paths out of the so-called »normative dead end« in theories of representation.

Wissenschaftliches Profil

Clementina Gentile Fusillo promovierte 2021 in Politik und Internationalen Beziehungen an der University of Warwick mit der Dissertation »On the Virtues of Truth: Generativity and the Demands of Democracy«. Vor ihrem Promotionsstudium erwarb Fusillo einen MA in Internationaler Politik an der SOAS, University of London, und einen MA in Entwicklung und internationaler Zusammenarbeit an der Universität Neapel. Ihre akademische Laufbahn umfasste Positionen als Dozentin für PPE an der Universität Sheffield und verschiedene Lehrtätigkeiten an der Universität Warwick und der Universität London.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• »On Arendt’s Conception of ›Factual Truth‹«, in: Arendt Studies 8 (2024), S. 115-134.
• »Between the square and the circle: a view from the ›representative standpoint‹«, in: European Journal of Political Theory 24, 1 (2023), S. 27-48.
• »Seeing Like a Representative: A Conversation with Lisa Disch«, in: Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 9, 2 (2022), S. 111-120.

Forschungskontext

Clementina Gentile Fusillo folgt einer Einladung von Rainer Forst, Professor für Politische Theorie an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, und dem an der Universität angesiedelten Justitia Centre for Advanced Studies, das von der Alfons und Gertrud Kassel Stiftung gefördert wird.