Implementing global citizenship education policy: The bargaining process of NGOs in some European Countries

This research looked at the growing space that Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is gaining in educational policy worldwide, and at the role Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) played in GCE agenda setting and policy implementation. Based on a comparative policy analysis carried out in 10 European countries, the political agency of NGOs was explored, underlining opportunities, tensions, and challenges, especially in their contribution to national strategies to integrate GCE into national educational systems.

Creating and unmaking the political body

The shared embodiment of humans and animals, and the notion of the ‘creaturely’ human influentially discussed by Anat Pick, have recently emerged as vital concerns within Animal Studies. Aligning its critical stance with these perspectives, this article analyses the small painting in the Rijksmuseum, traditionally attributed to Jan de Baen, which depicts the 1672 murder of the Dutch politicians Johan and Cornelis de Witt. Pamphlets, broadsheets and other contemporary responses to the murder frequently compare the bodies of the De Witts – which were eviscerated, hung upside-down, shorn of body parts and allegedly partially eaten – to animal carcasses. Drawing on these contextual sources, the essay explores how the painting works with and against period constructions of the killing in terms of inter-species violence. It uncovers tentative admissions of human creatureliness in the painting’s representation of the murdered body as a temporal, material and fragile entity.

Using Social Media Data to Analyse Issue Engagement During the 2017 German Federal Election

A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters’ minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing party statements, press coverage, or TV ads. Here we build on recent work in the areas of computational social science and eDemocracy, which studied these concepts computationally with social media. We operationalize issue engagement and related political science theories to measure and quantify politicians’ communication behavior using more than 366k Tweets posted by over 1,000 prominent German politicians in the 2017 election year. To this end, we first identify issues in posted Tweets by utilising a hashtag-based approach well known in the literature. This method allows several prominent issues featuring in the political debate on Twitter that year to be identified. We show that different political parties engage to a larger or lesser extent with these issues. The findings reveal differing social media strategies by parties located at different sides of the political left-right scale, in terms of which issues they engage with, how confrontational they are and how their strategies evolve in the lead-up to the election. Whereas previous work has analysed the general public’s use of Twitter or politicians’ communication in terms of cross-party polarisation, this is the first study of political science theories, relating to issue engagement, using politicians’ social media data.

Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021

Paternalism to Partnership provides a biographical sketch of each head of Indian affairs between 1786 and 2021 in context with each commissioner’s political philosophy. These administrators have been responsible for enforcing an Indian policy as directed by the president and/or the Congress but also influenced by their own political and social philosophy. From 1786-1848, authority was delegated to a superintendent of Indian affairs, a superintendent of the Indian trading houses, a superintendent of the Office of Indian Trade, a chief clerk, and a commissioner of Indian affairs, all of whom reported to the secretary of War. Since 1849, the commissioner of Indian affairs, and after 1977, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs have reported to the secretary of the Interior. Today, the BIA is administered by the assistant secretary for Indian affairs—all of whom have been Native Americans. Previous studies focused on the commissioners, completely overlooking the superintendents that preceded them and the colonial and early American antecedents. David DeJong’s documentary edition is the first to provide an understanding of the political philosophy of each head of the Indian bureau through the emphasis of policy.

Racist Attachments: Dakko-chan, Black Kitsch, and Kawaii Culture

This article explores the ties between anti-Black racist kitsch and kawaii culture through the history of the Dakko-chan doll. In what came to be called the “Dakko-chan boom” of 1960, tens of thousands of Japanese people lined up to purchase an inflatable blackface doll with a circular red mouth, grass skirt, and winking hologram eyes. Dakko means “to hug,” and Dakko-chan's astronomical popularity resulted in part from the way the doll could be worn as an accessory, attached to the body by its hugging arms. This article asks what it meant for Japan, a nation still recovering from World War II and the American occupation, to quite literally embrace American blackface in the form of an embraceable doll. Rejecting the claim that blackface loses its significance in a Japanese context, this article argues that Dakko-chan cannot be considered devoid of racist meanings. Emerging amid the political turmoil surrounding the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, Dakko-chan came to express a wide range of contradictory feelings about race, sex, and nation, illustrating how affective attachments to racist forms have accrued rather than dissipated through their movement into new cultural contexts.

The Hucpoldings’ Involvement in the Political Struggles of the Kingdom of Italy (847–945)

The first part of the book is dedicated to the prosopographic reconstruction of the kinship group, and to the political context and relationships in which the members, both men and women, operated from the second half of the ninth century to the beginning of the twelfth. The first chapter examines the first century of the Hucpoldings in Italy. Fundamentally, it suggests that the criteria for the inclusion into the ranks of Carolingian elite in the Italian kingdom were a relationship with the royal power and the attainment of public offices in different areas of the kingdom, such as in the palace of the capital Pavia, eastern Emilia, the duchy of Spoleto or the marchese of Tuscany.