scholarly journals Awakening the "Walking Dead": Zombie Pedagogy for Millennials

2017 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
Nancy Dawn Wadsworth
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Global Problem ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Walking Dead

This article lays out the pedagogical benefits of using popular zombie productions, particularly AMC's The Walking Dead, to teach a critical introduction to modern political theory. Based on my undergraduate course: "Political Theory, Climate Change, and the Zombie Apocalypse," the article outlines how The Walking Dead can be used to critique the mythic assumptions built into modern social contract theory; to introduce other political ideologies, including conservatism, anarchism, fascism, and communism; and to consider the political challenges raised by a global problem such as climate change in an increasingly neoliberal environment. Zombie productions are offered as a particularly salient pedagogical tool that can help awaken critical political analysis for the Millennial Generation.   

Umstrittene Expertise

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Controversial Nature

The current political debates about climate change or the coronavirus pandemic reveal the fundamental controversial nature of expertise in politics and society. The contributions in this volume analyse various facets, actors and dynamics of the current conflicts about knowledge and expertise. In addition to examining the contradictions of expertise in politics, the book discusses the political consequences of its controversial nature, the forms and extent of policy advice, expert conflicts in civil society and culture, and the global dimension of expertise. This special issue also contains a forum including reflections on the role of expertise during the coronavirus pandemic. The volume includes perspectives from sociology, political theory, political science and law.

scholarly journals The Sociology of Global Warming: A Scientometric Look

Studia Humana ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-33
Author(s):  
Riccardo Campa
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
The Political ◽  
Anthropogenic Global Warming ◽  
Environmental Disasters ◽  
Political World ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) enjoys considerable consensus among experts. It is widely recognized that global industrialization is producing an increase in the planet’s temperatures and causing environmental disasters. Still, there are scholars – although a minority – who consider groundless either the idea of global warming itself or the idea that it constitutes an existential threat for humanity. This lack of scientific unanimity (as well as differing political ideologies) ignites controversies in the political world, the mass media, and public opinion as well. Sociologists have been dealing with this issue for some time, producing researches and studies based on their specific competencies. Using scientometric tools, this article tries to establish to what extent and in which capacity sociologists are studying the phenomenon of climate change. Particular attention is paid to meta-analytical aspects such as consensus, thematic trends, and the impact of scientific works.

Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
ROSS MITTIGA
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
Basic Rights ◽  
Climate Action

Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.

From Scientific Socialism to Political Science?

1994 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 63-66
Author(s):  
David Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Scientific Socialism

Ira Katznelson has proposed that we labor historians can recover our lost élan by engaging the agenda of liberalism. Although he acknowledges that today's writings on working-class history are variegated and richly rewarding, he regrets that they have become uncoupled from controversies over public policy and social change and run the risk of becoming little more than “sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed.”To revitalize our sense of engagement he recommends that we call a halt to “the continuing flight within labor history from institutional-political analysis.” We should focus our attention on historical relationships between the state and civil society, and we should inform our analyses with the political theory that historically has assumed its shape around those relationships: liberalism.

scholarly journals Want to Study the Nature of Power? Start by Moving the Chairs!

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (03) ◽  
pp. 488-491
Author(s):  
Meg Mott
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Theory Use ◽  
The Chairs

ABSTRACTAt first glance, the political-theory classroom can seem like a “philosophy class in disguise.” How can we make our text-based classes more “political”? This article considers how three teaching formats—debate, fishbowl, and forum theater—enact different types of power in the classroom and how those enactments necessitate political judgments. In addition to creating the need for political analysis, each of these formats embodies a particular rhetorical strategy often used by political theorists. By physicalizing the argumentative, introspective, and descriptive devices that writers of political theory use, students become better readers of these often old and usually dense texts.

scholarly journals Deadly force: Contract, killing, sacrifice

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
Drone Warfare

This article proposes a political prehistory of drone theory that traces its juridico-political evolution from the 17th century to the present day. To outline my argument, I construct a constellation between Hobbes’s theory of sovereign punishment in Leviathan and Chamayou’s critique of drone warfare in Drone Theory to illuminate the political origins of drone violence. First, I argue that Hobbes’s social contract theory lays the conceptual groundwork for Chamayou’s drone theory. Second, I contend that Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign punishment of domestic citizens preempts Chamayou’s critique of drone warfare against foreign enemies. Finally, I speculate that Hobbes’s theory of punishment is founded upon a sacrificial paradigm that returns in the phenomenon of domestic drone strikes. In summary, I argue that Hobbes might be something close to the first drone theorist insofar as his political theory systematically produces the state of exception between citizen and enemy in which the drone operates today. What, then, are the theoretical origins of drone warfare? How does the punishment of citizens prefigure drone warfare against foreign enemies? To what extent might even citizens themselves be a species of drone who may be activated by the sovereign at any point?

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
Blake Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
The Political ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Administrative State ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Government ◽  
Administrative Legitimacy

This conclusion explains how the Progressive theory offers a critical perspective on our present political moment and the political ideologies that underlie it. Using examples from the Obama and Trump administrations on topics such as fair housing, climate change and immigration, I show how cost-benefit analysis and presidentialist theories of administration undermine deliberative democratic values. Cost-benefit analysis tends to restrict the administrative state to the task of simulating a perfectly competitive marketplace. Progressivism insists that the state should more broadly further public freedom, providing the goods, services, and institutions that allow democratic self-government to function. Presidential administration equates democracy with plebsicitary legitimacy, and aligns with Carl Schmitt’s illiberal, authoritarian political theory. While Progressivism acknowledges that the president has an important role to play in supervising administration, it aims to anchor administrative legitimacy in broader, plural, and discursive interactions between the government and its citizens.

PUBLIC SERVICE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
A.M. VAFIN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Normative Documents ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Common

The article analyzes the normative documents of the European Union concerning the phenomenon of public service. The analysis is built not as a strict legal interpretation, but as a qualitative political analysis. The legal side of this work is only a descriptive form, while the political content concerns the question of values, first of all, the value of serving the common good, the dogma that an official should and must serve society. The author concerns that even in non-ideological states there are ideologies (non-political ideologies) that, in the case of officialdom, bureaucracy, manifest themselves as an ideology of service, service to society and the common good. The codes of European officials are also analyzed in the article, the norms regulating corruption issues, the political participation of officials, their education and cultural level.

Friends and Citizens in Plato’s Crito

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-67
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Lanphier ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Equal Consideration

I propose a revisionary reading of Plato’s Crito focusing on the dramatic rendering of the friendship between Crito and Socrates, which I argue affords a model for political participation in a social contract. Their friendship models how citizens can come to be conventionally related to one another, and how they should treat one another internal to that relationship. This approach is apt for contemporary democratic theory, perhaps more so than standard interpretations of the political theory traditionally mined from the text, rather than drama, of the Crito. My account moves beyond questions of civility in deliberative democratic politics and deepens an account of how and why we ought to regard those with whom we disagree, but to whom we have nonetheless quasi-voluntarily bound ourselves within the same project of democracy. Friendship also addresses regard for those who have not previously received equal consideration within a putatively democratic social contract.

No Right to Resist? Elise Reimarus's Freedom as a Kantian Response to the Problem of Violent Revolt

Hypatia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-773
Author(s):  
Lisa Curtis‐Wendlandt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Philosophical Dialogue ◽  
Public Expression

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document