Shireen Hassim, Canada150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University, Ottawa, and the 2025 Hans Speier Visiting professor at The New School for Social Research Throughout history, people have organised collectively to challenge injustices and advance projects of democracy. The movements they create are articulated in different registers and offer various ways in which to think about democracy beyond a set of procedural imperatives. These ideas are often expressed in the form of manifestos, or statements of collective purpose. In this course, we will read these manifestos not simply as mobilising documents with political-strategic aims, but also as expressions of utopian visions for just societies. What is meant by justice? What kinds of injustices are centred for action and what are understood to be the sources of such injustices? How is freedom understood? Who is to be included among the free? We will study, among others: A range of feminist manifestos such as Olympe des Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791), the SCUM Manifesto (1968), Wages for Housework (1975), the South African Women’s Charters (1954 and 1994), the Combahee River Collective Statement (1975) and Classic texts of the left such as The Communist Manifesto (1848), An Anarchist Manifesto (1895), Declaration of the Occupation of New York City (2013) Global documents such as the United Nations Declaration (1948), the Bandung Principles (1955), and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) This course is part of the 2025 Democracy & Diversity Summer Graduate Institute to be held in Wroclaw, Poland, July 4th-19th, 2025. They are open to all graduate students and advanced undergraduate students across the New School. Students interested in participating in the Institute MUST submit an application by the deadline. Please find more info on the TCDS website: https://blogs.newschool.edu/tcds/dd-institutes/2025-democracy-diversity-summer-institute/