This is the playlist for the second annual YouTube Worldbuilding Festival which will be held September 4-6th!
Curated by: Madeline James Worldbuilds (31 videos)
As a follow up to the "Worldbuilding States and Polities" stream from the Worldbuilding Festival 2025, Nikolai from @worldbuildingpasta joins Lands Unknown to explore ways of understanding a wider range of polities in conworlds by plotting Influence, Organization, Territoriality, Cohesion, and Privilege. Support Lands Unknown on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LandsUnknown Support Lands Unknown on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/landsunknown This stream is part of the 2026 Worldbuilding Festival, a free weekend of worldbuilding-related livestreams across YouTube! Check out the full playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCDMgL_bQU84&si=MUefGBos5osKk-gg The website: https://www.madelinejameswrites.com/worldbuilding-festival Newsletter Signup: https://www.madelinejameswrites.com/festival-newsletter-signup --- Correction: 27:14 I followed up with @femboynomics after the stream to discuss Athenian citizenship. The standard position in theorizing Ancient Athenian citizenship in the scholarship has been that citizenship was limited to Athenian men while women possessed "citizen status" (primary sources draw a distinction between astoi and politai, or members of the polis community and political participants in the polis, and women are more frequently referred to as astes than politis in the corpus). Scholars have disagreed over the interpretation that Athenian women weren't full citizens (Hansen 2006), pointing to their participation in civic life, religious life as priestesses, and role in transmitting citizen status (since an Athenian citizen man was the child of two astoi) (Blok 2017). However, women held citizenship in relation to men, were excluded from political institutions, and—while important for transmitting property—could not hold property with the exception of the dowry (Ma 2024). A new consensus position seems to be emerging where political participation, which was important to figures like Aristotle and the earlier standard position, is not the defining quality of citizenship. Therefore, Athenian men and women were both full citizens, though women citizens were less equal than and subordinated to citizen men (Kamen 2013). For the purpose of the Polity Chart, the framework prioritizes participation in political life and decision-making institutions, from which Athenian women citizens were excluded, so Classical Athens would still plot as "Moderately Concentrated" while other poleis like Sparta were "Strongly Concentrated." Blok, J. 2017. Citizenship in Classical Athens. Cambridge University Press. Hansen, M. H. 2006. Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State. Oxford University Press. Kamen, D. 2013. Status in Classical Athens. Princeton University Press. Ma, J. 2024. Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton University Press.