Building Citizens

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam

This chapter explores the research behind Man: A Course of Study (MACOS). It provides insight into why, for the people involved, the curriculum project was so profoundly personal. Many of the researchers and teachers involved in its creation embraced the liberal aspirations of the decade. Anthropology promised a means by which students could come to appreciate the cultural patterns of communities vastly different from their own while recognizing the fundamental equality of all peoples. If education held the key to securing the nation's place in world, they imagined, it would also play a significant role in teaching students how to overcome any racial apprehensions they may have acquired from parents or peers. Making visible the careful labor that went into MACOS's creation at every level reveals the political and personal stakes inherent to the administrative vision, the ethnographic footage, and the finalized classroom booklets and films, where each sought to transform the way students thought about themselves and the society in which they lived.

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Marina Richter ◽  
Julia Emprechtinger

Abstract. Social work in prisons not only works with and for people who are confined; it also constitutes a form of social work that is carried out under conditions of confinement. This article draws on carceral geography to understand the corporeal and spatial aspects of social work in prison settings. Based on insights from two prisons in Switzerland, we argue that understanding carceral social work as a spatial and materially situated practice helps to gain deep insight into the intricate layers of meaning and powerful modes of functioning of prisons and of the people involved. In particular, it shows how the way social work is carried out in prison is supported and strongly structured by the spatiality of the prison itself, allowing for counselling, desk-type social work, rather than for social work that actively initiates and creates spaces for encounters or activities.


Author(s):  
Raphael Hallett ◽  
Charlotte Tomlinson ◽  
Tim Procter

The idea of student/staff partnership has become ubiquitous in the way universities market their institutional ethos and enshrines an idealised 'dialogic structure' within curriculum design. Which universitities are actually putting this into practice and allowing their students a significant role in the machinations of curriculum design and enhancement?This case study investigates the emerging co-operation between the University of Leeds Library, a team of Special Collections interns and the academic and student communities they reach out to. It suggests, in microcosm, a model for the co-creation of the curriculum which positions the student as co-creator, certainly, but also as mediator, tutor, mentor and communicator.The project case study adds insight into the fascinating hybrid identity that students can occupy within the contested territory of university-wide curriculum design, and explores the complex status and authority of students and tutors as they explore fresh relationships of opportunity and expertise.


Author(s):  
T. C. Smout

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Sharon Y. Small

Wu 無 is one of the most prominent terms in Ancient Daoist philosophy, and perhaps the only term to appear more than Dao in both the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. However, unlike Dao, wu is generally used as an adjective modifying or describing nouns such as “names”, “desires”, “knowledge”, “action”, and so forth. Whereas Dao serves as the utmost principle in both generation and practice, wu becomes one of the central methods to achieve or emulate this ideal. As a term of negation, wu usually indicates the absence of something, as seen in its relation to the term you 有—”to have” or “presence”. From the perspective of generative processes, wu functions as an undefined and undifferentiated cosmic situation from which no beginning can begin but everything can emerge. In the political aspect, wu defines, or rather un-defines the actions (non-coercive action, wuwei 無為) that the utmost authority exerts to allow the utmost simplicity and “authenticity” (the zi 自 constructions) of the people. In this paper, I suggest an understanding of wu as a philosophical framework that places Pre-Qin Daoist thought as a system that both promotes our understanding of the way the world works and offers solutions to particular problems. Wu then is simultaneously metaphysical and concrete, general, and particular. It is what allows the world, the society, and the person to flourish on their own terms.


2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANCISCO PANIZZA ◽  
GEORGE PHILIP

Uruguay and Mexico have both passed laws aiming to professionalise the public sector bureaucracy according to what might be considered ‘second generation’ reform principles. They did so under what might initially have seemed to be politically unpropitious circumstances. The reforms might have been vetoed by interests that feared that they would lose out from the changes, but were not. They might have been blocked by conditions of minority presidentialism, but were not. This article seeks to explain the successful passing of this reform legislation. Framing issues played a significant role in reducing opposition. Notably important was the way in which the reforms were presented, and specifically the ability of their proponents to avoid presenting them as market-friendly reforms. The political context also provided the reformers with arguments that in the end proved persuasive.


Soundings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (72) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
David Featherstone ◽  
Lazaros Karaliotas

Populism refers to forms of politics that put 'the people' at their centre, but the way 'the people' is understood varies widely. Questions of left populism have gained significant traction and engagement in the last decade - and this is a key focus of this article. While recognising the importance of Ernesto Laclau's analysis in On Populist Reason, the authors argue that his work is hindered by an overly formalist account of the political. Stuart Hall's writings on Thatcherism offer a more contextual and situated engagement with particular populist strategies, and have continuing relevance for understanding right-wing populism. Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece offer actually existing experiences of left populism. We discuss three limitations in their strategies: their 'nationed' narratives of the crisis; the relationship between the parties' leadership and grassroots politics; and the nature of their engagement with internationalist political projects. Part of the critical terms series


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Putra Perdana Ahmad Saifulloh

This article aims to answers the problem of organizing the Political Parties Wings in Positive Law. This research used a normative juridical research method, with a statutory, historical, and conceptual approach. The result of this research shows that Legal Politics of the Wing of Political Parties in the Law on Political Parties in Indonesia is to strengthen political parties in carrying out broader articulation and aggregation of interests. As well as imparting significant role of political parties in carrying out their functions to connect with the people directly, especially in bridging and fighting for the people interests.


Author(s):  
Martin C. Njoroge ◽  
Purity Kimani ◽  
Bernard J. Kikech

The way the media processes, frames, and passes on information either to the government or to the people affects the function of the political system. This chapter discusses the interaction between new media and ethnicity in Kenya, Africa. The chapter investigates ways in which the new media reinforced issues relating to ethnicity prior to Kenya’s 2007 presidential election. In demonstrating the nexus between new media and ethnicity, the chapter argues that the upsurge of ethnic animosity was chiefly instigated by new media’s influence. Prior to the election, politicians had mobilized their supporters along ethnic lines, and created a tinderbox situation. Thus, there is need for the new media in Kenya to help the citizens to redefine the status of ethnic relationships through the recognition of ethnic differences and the re-discovery of equitable ways to accommodate them; after all, there is more strength than weaknesses in these differences.


Author(s):  
Wang Shaoguang

This chapter criticizes the emphasis on privatization, the destruction of the Maoist-style emphasis on social welfare, and the growing gap between rich and poor. It argues that more needs to be done to combat the inequalities generated by capitalist modernization in China. Political legitimacy is not something to be defined by moral philosophers in total abstraction from the political reality. Rather, it is a matter of whether or not a political system faces a crisis of legitimacy depends on whether the people who live there doubt the rightness of its power, and whether they consider it the appropriate system for their country. The chapter ultimately endorses a definition of legitimacy as the legitimacy of the popular will.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser

This article brings disability theory and activism into conversation with environmental justice, a conversation that has often been stymied by a fundamental difference in approaching disability. Environmental justice movements position disability as a visceral marker of environmental harm, while disability movements claim disability as a site of value and vitality, a position I call "disability embrace." Rather than adjudicate these differences, I use them to pinpoint a barrier to political alliance: environmental disability is a consequence of structural violence. I argue that disability politics offer vital resources for grappling with climate change. Applying insights from disability studies and disability activism to the analysis of environmental damage reveals the political stakes of diagnosis—the way power contours how, when, and to what ends we recognize human and ecological impairment. Disability insights illuminate pervasive cultural patterns of invisibility and climate denial. Disability critiques of futurity and cure can also reconfigure the way we approach hope and help fashion a new narrative of what it might mean to live well in the Anthropocene.


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