scholarly journals Black Pete, “Smug Ignorance,” and the Value of the Black Body in Postcolonial Netherlands

2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 262-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvon van der Pijl ◽  
Karina Goulordava
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Invented Tradition

This article discusses the controversies over the blackface figure Black Pete (Zwarte Piet)—central to the popular Dutch Saint Nicholas holiday tradition—and the public uproar surrounding the Saint Nicholas feast in 2013. It combines history, social theory, and patchwork ethnography, and draws on theoretical approaches discussing race, capitalism, and the commodification of cultural difference to establish an understanding of the controversial character. In doing so, it argues that Black Pete is an invented tradition that marks a “white Dutch habitus” in which the historical context of colonialism and the legacy of slavery is repeatedly ignored or denied.

The democratic drama of whistleblowing

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Olesen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Foundations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Theory Research

While major cases of whistleblowing may not be an everyday occurrence, their effects are often wide-ranging, celebrated, and controversial. Given this potent cocktail, the whistleblower is conspicuously undertheorized within sociology and social theory. Research today takes place mainly within management, business, psychology, law, and public administration studies. While some of this work does draw on sociological theory, we lack a general theory that combines attention to the historical context of whistleblowing, the nature of its critique and intervention, and the democratic meanings with which it is associated. This article offers such a framework. The argument consists of three components. First, whistleblowing is historically tied to the decline of authority in the 1960s and the 1970s. Second, building on field and systems theory, the whistleblower is seen as a field transgressor who, with a democratic intent, exposes information ‘belonging’ to a specific field in the public sphere. Third, in doing so, he/she is cast as both a hero and a villain in a democratic drama about the moral-political foundations of society.

Value Creating Education Philosophy and the Womanist Discourses of African American Women Educators

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (SI) ◽  
pp. 102-113
Author(s):  
Paula Estrada Jones
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Women Educators ◽  
African American Women ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Education Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Educational Challenges ◽  
Helping Others

The paper documents the initiative of two African American women educators who have utilized these theoretical approaches to solve the educational challenges in their respective communities. Marva Collins and Corla Hawkins decided to build schools in their own communities after realizing that the public schools were not equipped to educate minorities. The story of these two women demonstrates that individuals can address systemic injustices in their communities. Collins and Hawkins were not wealthy. What they possessed was a passion for helping others. Their example can inspire more individuals to take steps using liberating philosophies, like value-creating education and womanist approaches in education, to transform the state of education in their communities.        

Archaeologists and the Dead

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
International Context ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Experience Effect

This volume addresses the relationship between archaeologists and the dead, through the many dimensions of their relationships: in the field (through practical and legal issues), in the lab (through their analysis and interpretation), and in their written, visual and exhibitionary practice--disseminated to a variety of academic and public audiences. Written from a variety of perspectives, its authors address the experience, effect, ethical considerations, and cultural politics of working with mortuary archaeology. Whilst some papers reflect institutional or organizational approaches, others are more personal in their view: creating exciting and frank insights into contemporary issues that have hitherto often remained "unspoken" among the discipline. Reframing funerary archaeologists as "death-workers" of a kind, the contributors reflect on their own experience to provide both guidance and inspiration to future practitioners, arguing strongly that we have a central role to play in engaging the public with themes of mortality and commemoration, through the lens of the past. Spurred by the recent debates in the UK, papers from Scandinavia, Austria, Italy, the US, and the mid-Atlantic, frame these issues within a much wider international context that highlights the importance of cultural and historical context in which this work takes place.

Realising immigration as a human right: public justification and cosmopolitan solidarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102098713
Author(s):  
David Martínez ◽  
Alexander Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Public Justification ◽  
Human Right ◽  
National State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The Right ◽  
Normative Justification

According to David Miller, immigration is not a human right. Conversely, Kieran Oberman makes a case for immigration as a human right. We agree with the latter view, but we show that its starting point is mistaken. Indeed, both Miller and Oberman discuss the right to immigration within the liberal paradigm: it is a right or not depending on the correct balance between the interests of the citizens of a given national state and the interests of the immigrants. Instead, we claim that public justification can underpin immigration as a human right. That said, the public justification of the right to immigration has several counterarguments to rebut. Before we deal with that issue, relying on Jürgen Habermas’s social theory, we examine the legal structures that could support the right to immigration in practice. To be sure, this does not provide the normative justification needed, instead it shows the framework that allows the institutional realization of this right. Then, through a combination of civic and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity, the article discusses the formation of a public sphere, which could provide the justification of the right to immigration.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

Social Control of Intellect: Four Features of the Academic–Media Nexus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McDevitt
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Strategic Management ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
The Public ◽  
Field Dynamic ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Intellect in social theory is often presented as an ideal type—the critical, iconoclastic side of the mind—but it must anticipate an audience in mediated contexts, unlike in the Kantian realm of transcendent reason. The terrain in which academia and media meet, consequently, is ripe for exploration into the fate of intellect when transgressive. This article explicates four features of the academic–media nexus that contribute to social control of intellect: instrumental rationalism of faculty, strategic management of university communication, journalistic appropriation of the “public intellectual” role, and surveillance of academic discourse. The article situates the features in a framework to recognize whether they originate primarily in academia or media, and whether the controlling process occurs through internalized norms or calculated practice. While social control is understood as recursive and reinforcing, reflexivity induced in an inter-field dynamic implies the possibility of reconciling intellect with news work.

scholarly journals Bella Abzug, queer rights, and disrupting the status quo

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor G Gates ◽  
Margery C Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Field Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status

Workers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)-identified have always been a part of the workplace in the United States, yet there has been a lack of awareness about how to advocate for the needs of these people. This lack of awareness was challenged by Congresswoman Bella Abzug. Abzug’s campaign for creating an equal working environment for sexual minorities initiated gradual changes in the public discourse concerning workplace and other broad equality measures for these communities. To frame these gradual transformations within a historical context, we use Lewin’s force field analysis framework to examine the change efforts of Abzug. Abzug had beginning success in thawing the status quo yet her visions for equality for LGBTQ people have yet to be realized. Using Abzug’s social action as an example, this article concludes that allies must continue to challenge societal oppression, power, and privilege and to demand civil rights protections for LGBTQ individuals.

scholarly journals Environmental issues, interdisciplinarity, social theory and intellectual production in Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila da Costa Ferreira ◽  
Sônia Regina Cal Seixas Barbosa ◽  
João Luiz de Moraes Hoefel ◽  
Roberto Guimarães ◽  
Dimas Floriani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Research Centers ◽  
Thematic Map ◽  
Environmental Features ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
American Academia ◽  
Intellectual Production

While dealing with both interdisciplinarity and environment and society area as fields that harbor scientific contentions regarding ideas, practices, institutions and habitus (Bourdieu), this paper aims at providing an account of the multifaceted processes implied in the institutionalization of environmental concerns in Latin-American academia and research centers. The paper discusses the extent to which one can legitimately talk about "a Latin- American scientific specificity", supposedly resulting from peculiar theoretical approaches or even from particular socio-environmental features (such as widespread poverty and high rates of social inequality, along with unparalleled levels of biodiversity). Last but not least, the paper seeks to draw a sort of thematic map (via bibliographical review) as well as a consideration of the levels of scientific institutionalization of environmental issues in six different research centers located in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Brazil.

scholarly journals Statutory regulation of financial control of public institutions: Current issues and ways of development

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 653-666
Author(s):  
Sergei V. GOLOVIN
Keyword(s):  
Regulatory Framework ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Financial Control ◽  
State Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Legislative Framework ◽  
Development Methods ◽  
Statutory Regulation

Subject. This article examines the regulatory framework of the Russian Federation that regulates financial control over government institutions. Objectives. The article aims to analyze regulations in the area of organization and implementation of external financial control over public institutions. It also aims to identify pressing regulatory issues for external and internal financial controls, and identify possible directions for its development. Methods. For the study, I used the methods of analysis, grouping, comparison, and generalization. Results. The article describes and compares the types of external financial control of public institutions and internal financial control in public institutions according to the proposed comparison base. It identifies their differences and general methodological approaches to their implementation. The article compares the provisions of the regulations on the basic elements of the system of State financial control, tax control, control in the field of procurement of goods, works, services and State control (supervision), and it reveals similarities and differences of theoretical approaches to their formation. Conclusions. The article draws conclusions about the need to implement measures to improve the regulatory framework of financial control, which involve the creation of an uniform legislative framework, standardization of control activities at all levels of its implementation. These measures will help ensure the validity of the results and improve the quality of financial control in the public sector of the economy.

scholarly journals Traces of French Culture in Palanga: The Historical Context of Palanga Botanical Park, Personalities, and Memory

Lituanistica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julija Paškevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Public ◽  
Seaside Resort ◽  
French Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

The article focuses on the origins of French culture in Palanga, a Lithuanian seaside resort, that go back to the years of the rule of the Tyszkiewicz family. The emphasis is put on Palanga Botanical Park (created before the end of the nineteenth century) as the most significant trace of French culture present in the resort and the seaside region until now. The specific symbols in the park created according to the will of the Counts Tyszkiewicz reflect the actualities of French culture. The importance of this space in the city is revealed, and Édouard François André’s principles of park creation are discussed in a new context. They are related to the dialogue that has been established between the residents of Palanga, the park, its creator, and his granddaughter Florence André since the first years of the independence of Lithuania. In order to give a meaning to Édouard André’s creation and to the relationship between the two countries, the correspondence between the great-granddaughter of the famous French landscape designer and the former director of the park, Antanas Sebeckas, is disclosed. It reflects the endeavour of these two personalities and its value for the international relations in representing French culture to the public. Florence André’s letters to the author of this article are also an important resource as she explains the reasons why the park plays an essential role in Palanga. It is shown how certain personal life events (Florence André’s wedding ceremony in Palanga, the park created by her great-grandfather) have become an inclusive part of the history of the town and represent intercultural relations and exchanges. The article is also based on some memories and narratives of the members of the local community in which the park features as a symbol and tradition of the city.

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