scholarly journals Epistemic Activism in the United States: Examining Meetings Across the Silos of Civil Society

Author(s):  
Jen Sandler

AbstractThe realm of civic action is far from unified; studies of civil society have often been likewise divided by discipline, organizational form, and orientation to dominant institutions. In this article, I suggest the critical concept of epistemic activism, which involves both making truth(s) and making them matter, as a way to think across these divides. I argue that researchers may be able to engage with a much broader range of civic projects by using ethnographic methods to examine the knowledge practices of these projects, specifically through attention to the meetings where project actors come together in time and space. In this article, I demonstrate this approach through ethnographic attention to the meeting practices of two quite different projects: a large civic reform coalition whose meetings reveal a politics of epistemic unity, and a place-based immigrant-led justice movement whose meetings enact a politics of listening.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Di Zhu ◽  
Xinyue Ye ◽  
Steven Manson

AbstractWe describe the use of network modeling to capture the shifting spatiotemporal nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. The most common approach to tracking COVID-19 cases over time and space is to examine a series of maps that provide snapshots of the pandemic. A series of snapshots can convey the spatial nature of cases but often rely on subjective interpretation to assess how the pandemic is shifting in severity through time and space. We present a novel application of network optimization to a standard series of snapshots to better reveal how the spatial centres of the pandemic shifted spatially over time in the mainland United States under a mix of interventions. We find a global spatial shifting pattern with stable pandemic centres and both local and long-range interactions. Metrics derived from the daily nature of spatial shifts are introduced to help evaluate the pandemic situation at regional scales. We also highlight the value of reviewing pandemics through local spatial shifts to uncover dynamic relationships among and within regions, such as spillover and concentration among states. This new way of examining the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of network-based spatial shifts offers new story lines in understanding how the pandemic spread in geography.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-46
Author(s):  
Katherina A. Payne ◽  
Jennifer Keys Adair ◽  
Kiyomi Sanchez Suzuki Colegrove ◽  
Sunmin Lee ◽  
Anna Falkner ◽  
...  

Traditional conceptions of civic education for young children in the United States tend to focus on student acquisition of patriotic knowledge, that is, identifying flags and leaders, and practicing basic civic skills like voting as decision-making. The Civic Action and Young Children study sought to look beyond this narrow vision of civic education by observing, documenting, and contextualizing how young children acted on behalf of and with other people in their everyday early childhood settings. In the following paper, we offer examples from three Head Start classrooms to demonstrate multiple ways that young children act civically in everyday ways. When classrooms and teachers afford young children more agency, children’s civic capabilities expand, and they are able to act on behalf of and with their community. Rather than teaching children about democracy and citizenship, we argue for an embodied, lived experience for young children.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
TAKASHI INOGUCHI

This special issue focuses on the role of civil society in international relations. It highlights the dynamics and impacts of public opinion on international relations (Zaller, 1992). Until recently, it was usual to consider public opinion in terms of its influence on policy makers and in terms of moulding public opinion in the broad frame of the policy makers in one's country. Given that public opinion in the United States was assessed and judged so frequently and diffused so globally, it was natural to frame questions guided by those concepts which pertained to the global and domestic context of the United States.


2000 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theda Skocpol ◽  
Marshall Ganz ◽  
Ziad Munson

We challenge the widely held view that classic American voluntary groups were tiny, local, and disconnected from government. Using newly collected data to develop a theoretically framed account, we show that membership associations emerged early in U.S. history and converged toward the institutional form of the representatively governed federation. This form enabled leaders and members to spread interconnected groups across an expanding nation. At the height of local proliferation, most voluntary groups were part of regional or national federations that mirrored the structure of U.S. government. Institutionalist theories suggest reasons for this parallelism, which belies the rigid dichotomy between state and civil society that informs much current discussion of civic engagement in the United States and elsewhere.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (36) ◽  
pp. 67-73
Author(s):  
Scot M Peterson

The penitentiary in the United States of America originated as a religious institution. Its roots lie in the belief that inmates could reform if they were given an opportunity to engage in reflection, prayer, Bible-reading and work, thus establishing a new personal foundation for functioning as productive members of the larger society. Not surprisingly, given American's predilection for maintaining a secular civil society, this original foundation for the prison eventually fell from favour, and American penological theories became more sociological or psychological in nature. The fact remains, however, that society in the United States is broadly religious, and prisons continue to address the religious beliefs of inmates and how to accommodate those beliefs in a penological setting. This comment provides a case study on this topic, based on littigation concerning the provision of kosher food to Orthodox inmates in the prisons in Colorado.


Significance Such programmes contribute not only to Indonesia’s efforts to boost the cyber readiness of its booming digital economy, but are also designed to maintain China's friendly relations with South-east Asia’s largest economy amid the intensifying technology tensions between China and the United States. Impacts The Personal Data Protection Law would need to clarify key provisions and concepts to be effective. The BSSN’s extensive powers will fuel civil society concerns about excessive state surveillance. Turning down Chinese technology suppliers carries cost and wider economic ramifications for Jakarta.


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Park Y. J.

Most stakeholders from Asia have not actively participated in the global Internet governance debate. This debate has been shaped by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) since 198 and the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) since 2006. Neither ICANN nor IGF are well received as global public policy negotiation platforms by stakeholders in Asia, but more and more stakeholders in Europe and the United States take both platforms seriously. Stakeholders in Internet governance come from the private sector and civil society as well as the public sector.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
A'na Zhang

Joyce Carol Oates’ early novel art is represented by the tetralogy of Wonderland. As a representative writer of “psychological realism”, she dissolves the character consciousness with dialogue characteristics into time and space. Oates constructed a nostalgic time and homecoming space, which showing the cultural landscape of the 1960s’ in the United States.


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