CFP: "Speech and Politics" with Miranda Fricker

12th Graduate Conference of Political Theory 

Speech and Politics with Miranda Fricker

Sciences Po Paris, May 27-28th, 2026

Call for papers

Key words: Attentiveness, listening, discourses, representation, political language, democracy, margins

The relationship between speech and politics has recently become the object of renewed scholarly interest. Following Michel Foucault’s analyses of parrhesia and the courage of truth (2008, 2017), political theory has increasingly interrogated the force of “truth-telling” within practices of resistance to power, as evidenced by studies on the so-called “liberation of speech” among women in the #MeToo movement (Châteauvert-Gagnon, 2025). In the era of social media, speech re-emerges in its fundamental ambiguity: it is at once potentially harmful to others (Butler, 1997) and constitutive of a shared world (Wolff, 2004). Developments associated with the concept of recognition (Honneth, 1995) underscore that democracy requires each singular voice to be heard so that pluralistic deliberation may unfold within the egalitarian polyphony of voices (Rancière, 1995), a condition that remains far from fulfilled today (Fricker, 2007). Speech is, at its core, relational: it presupposes both an addressee and a listener, whose conditions of possibility are invariably fragile. At a moment when regimes of sayability and audibility are being reconfigured, this twelfth Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Sciences Po, in presence of Miranda Fricker, suggests to analyse this vulnerable nexus between speech and politics by reconsidering it through the three lenses of voice, silence, and listening.

Axis 1: Voice

From the parrhesia of the ancient Greeks to the “voiceless” of contemporary democracies, and from the Roman voxpopuli to modern political representation, “voice” appears to designate the essential thread binding language to the political realm. Whether one speaks of “giving” voice or “carrying” it (Hayat et al., 2022), modern democracy inaugurates a political regime grounded in ostensibly free and egalitarian speech, yet governed by the norms of representation, participation, and liberal reason (Gourgues et al., 2013; Talpin, 2006). Considered through the lens of deliberation, voices lie at the foundation of an ethics of discussion. Although political language and discourse have given rise to extensive scholarship (Lamizet, 2011), such analyses have often proceeded in terms of a theorization of democratic reason (Habermas, 1992), examinations of discursive strategies (Fairclough, 2013; Charaudeau, 2005, 2017), of the ideas mobilized (Gaboriaux & Skornicki, 2017), and of the symbolic positions that follow (Bourdieu, 2001).

While reaffirming the value of these approaches, this axis invites instead an inquiry into the material and institutional matrix of political voice. It proposes shifting the analytical focus from the “content” to the “container” of language. Whispered or shouted, high-pitched or low, singular or collective: what are the various materialities of voice? Asking who has the right to speak also requires asking who has only the right to speak, in contrast to the sanctification of writing. Do voices that reach us in written form benefit from the same kinds of legitimation and recognition? What determinants (gender, class, race, disability, etc.) shape the production and reception of voice in political discourse? How is the authority of certain voices constituted? How does the production of knowledge depend on diverse discursive frameworks? Finally, what can be said about the dispositives of circulation or control of voices that structure the political field (speaking time, media constraints, volume, etc.)? Albert Hirschman’s now-classic triptych — Exit, Voice, Loyalty — has shown that every collective organization distributes the possible modalities of reacting to disagreement and reveals the asymmetries between those who can “make their voices heard” and those for whom exit or enforced loyalty remains the only option. Reinterpreting this intuition through the lens of political theory requires understanding not only who can speak, but above all what it means to speakpolitically.

Axis 2: Silence

Since speech has historically functioned as a condition of political participation, silence appears apriori as a technique of political marginalization. Beyond the constitutive exclusion of “mute” populations from the social contract — children, certain persons with disabilities (Rollo, 2020), animals (Sénac, 2024), and nature (Latour, 1999) — many work now investigates the practices of “silencing” directed at discriminated groups (Machikou, 2024). In particular, it has become clear that women, racialized and gender minorities are routinely silenced (Dotson, 2011; Paveau & Perea, 2014) and deprived of the conceptual resources needed to articulate their experiences through speech (Fricker, 2007). When opinions of a group are stigmatized, “silencing” may also take the form of self-censorship (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). Because representative democracy places its emphasis on voice, silence is often taken as absence or as a mark of political passivity (Cavarero, 2005). Identifying it instead as a signal or a practice requires a form of critical conceptual reversal, itself indicative of the difficulty of such an undertaking (Brito Vieira, 2020). By showing that there exist modes of “speaking for” and “speak about” that construct silence as a political signifier rather than as absence, Vieira’s analysis underscores the extent to which representation can betray, translate, or reconfigure muted or marginalized voices. Her perspective thus offers a valuable framework for examining the tensions between endured silence, strategic silence, and represented silence. 

Because silence can be an imposed experience, it is often lived as a trap: silence does not protect, nor does it yield anything of “value” (Lorde, 1980, 1984). From this standpoint, moral philosophy has asked whether we ought to speak on behalf of those who have no voice (Boutillier Biran & Mourman, 2025). Some silences have even been accused of being complicit in, or even culpable for, injustice (Donohue, 2024; Guiora, 2024; Imhoff & Quirós, 2022). On pourrait peut-être écrire : yet, one could also state that silence could be a technique of desubjectification? Beyond the fact that a certain philosophical tradition valorizing silence as a space of reflection and dialogue with oneself finds resonance in contemporary feminist theory (Malhotra & Rowe, 2013), one might also consider that silence may serve as a means of resisting power in our “society of exposure” (Harcourt, 2020) where surveillance increasingly relies on what we say about ourselves. In postcolonial critique, silence has even emerged as a practice of resistance, enabling a form of non-vocal, intercultural communication (Lugones, 2007, 2010; Veronelli, 2016; Ferrari, 2020).

This axis therefore seeks to address the following questions: What are the boundaries of the sayable and the unsayable that structure “silencing” practices? How is this “silencing” materialized, and whom does it target in particular? How, and to what extent, can silence under these conditions become a tool of disobedience? What outcomes can be achieved through strategies of silent resistance (Deleuze, 1993)? Do such strategies not always risk reproducing forms of power tied to the exclusion and marginalization of certain populations?

Axis 3: Listening

While the distribution of speech is regularly examined through the lens of social justice, listening often remains a blind spot of the politics of speech. Studying the inaudibility of certain voices requires distinguishing between levels of hearing and listening. On the one hand, hearing without listening — or listening selectively — constitutes an epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Medina, 2012) when it denies certain agents the capacity to produce knowledge. Such a denial of epistemic agency is often less a matter of difficulty hearing or being heard than of a deliberate form of political exclusion (Dotson, 2011, 2012; Pohlhaus, 2012). This deficit of listening thereby produces marginalized political identities (Alcoff, 1999, 2010) by preventing the emergence of new epistemic voices. On the other hand, listening constitutes a form of engagement that enables marginalized voices to acquire political significance. Care feminist theories have proposed various approaches for placing listening at the center of political thought. From the identification of “different voices” (Gilligan, 1982) to the notion of a “caring democracy” (Tronto, 2013), situated forms of attending to others require a cultivated sensitivity to listen and to allow oneself to be affected. In response to the crisis of liberal subjectivities, current projects increasingly turn toward a “democracy of listening” (Brown, 2025), which places at the heart of a reparative political project the act of lending an ear to those who remain unheard.

This axis seeks to explore this line of inquiry on listening within political theory and to question its limits. How might we organize the conditions for epistemico-political listening? It appears that the practice of “reasoning together” (Jasanoff, 1998) cannot be limited to a conversational space but must find material and institutional embodiments of listening. What forms might these embodiments take? On which normative criteria can we rely in order to regulate — or, conversely, to liberate or disorganize — this listening? If listening is not a passive stance but an active commitment to sustaining a shared world, a shared resonance (Rosa, 2018), how does this commitment manifest itself? What difficulties arise in listening once we account for the unequal materiality of vocal circulation and the intrinsic limits of any hermeneutics of human speech? Does a possible extension of the spectrum of listening to the non-human grant nature a new form of epistemic agency? Finally, how might we listen reciprocally and otherwise in order to repair our democratic practices?

Submission Guidelines

Paper proposals be written in English or French (title, 300 words, excluding indicative bibliography), along with a brief biographical note, should be sent to the following email addresses: [email protected] ; [email protected] ; [email protected] ; [email protected] ; [email protected] . Please include the following subject line in your email: “Parole et Politique – Proposition.” 

The deadline for submitting a proposal is 31st January 2026. Participants will receive confirmation of acceptance during February.

To allow for in-depth discussion of the presentations at the Graduate Conference, a final written version must be submitted by email no later than 25th April 2026 so that it can be circulated to the discussants. A selection of papers may be considered for later publication with the consent of the authors.