The “Legality and Participation” (LEPA) Center for Research and Advanced Studies is an interdisciplinary research center of the University of Perugia, founded in 2018.
The pairing Legality and Participation expresses a constitutive tension: that between the forms and constraints through which collective life organizes itself, and the forces that continually animate, challenge, and renew them.
On the one hand, there are normative orders and frameworks: what constrains, stabilizes, normalizes, and directs. On the other hand, there are the processes that run through and give life to society: interests that come together, identities that confront one another, and demands for recognition seeking voice and representation.
The LEPA Research Center brings these two dimensions together not in order to resolve them, but to explore the space that both separates and connects them. It is within that space — between form and action, institution and society, structure and process — that the most vital questions of collective life emerge. And it is precisely in relation to this friction — between what constrains and what moves — that the Center intends to work, through an inherently interdisciplinary approach, indispensable for engaging with, analyzing, and understanding the complexity of reality.
The LEPA Centre main objectives
- the Centre aims to spur research and advance projects contributing to social and political transformations, whilst using the concept of legality as a means of dealing with the complexities of reality. At the same time, its goal is to help meet the challenge of critical factors such as the de-legitimization of institutions, rising inequality and the corruption of administrations;
- to serve as a reference for the planning of large scale research projects within the European funding framework, in relation to the future calls on ”Governance for the future”, ”Migration”, ”Socioeconomic and cultural transformation in the context of the fourth industrial revolution”’, ”Security”.