Feminists against Fascism: The Indian Female Muslim Protest in India

This article explores contestations around ideas of India, citizenship, and nation from the perspective of Indian Muslim female university students in Delhi. In December 2019, the Hindu majoritarian government introduced new citizenship legislation. It caused widespread distress over its adverse implications for Muslims and a large section of socio-economically deprived populations. In response, millions of people, mainly from Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan backgrounds, took to the streets to protest. Unprecedentedly, young Muslim female students and women emerged at the forefront of the significant public debate. This situation disrupted the mainstream perception of oppressed Muslim women lacking public voice and agency. Drawing on the narratives of the Indian Muslim female students who participated in these protests, this article highlights their conceptions of, and negotiations with, the idea of India. In doing so, this article reflects on the significance of critical feminist protest as a form of “public pedagogy” for citizenship education as a powerful antidote to a supremacist, hypermasculine, and vigilante idea of India.

Five Letters to Georgia O’Keeffe

In her lifetime, US American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) wrote thousands of letters to those closest to her. However, she relied on painting as her primary public voice. This essay takes the form of five letters, composed through posthumanist performative writing,1 addressed to O’Keeffe. I work through the process of experiencing the death of my father in a material landscape as it was painted by O’Keeffe. The southwestern landscapes O’Keeffe painted were the same landscapes in which my father and I negotiated material relations to live a life of what Donna Haraway calls “significant otherness.”2

Moving Urban Students Beyond Online Public Voices to Digital Participatory Politics

The authors explore a teacher's 10-year journey to foster his urban middle school students' public voice and then their ability to engage in participatory politics. The authors first provide a conceptual and experiential context for how the teacher came to question whether cultivating 8th grade students' online public voice in a U.S. history was enough. Second, they discuss how two teachers created online interschool deliberations about contemporary issues and how a third teacher used low and high tech to enable her students to take civic action. Third, they discuss the essential elements of an online participatory learning space. Fourth, they address the challenges of integrating digital deliberations about contemporary public issues and online civic action into a U.S. history curriculum. Finally, they present how they adapted a site devoted to deliberations about just war in the context of U.S. history to a focus on just action in a contemporary setting.

Women, Gender, and the Kirk Before the Covenant

This article explores the ways women interacted with the Scottish kirk in the decades prior to the National Covenant of 1638, mainly focusing on urban areas especially Edinburgh and environs. The written records, especially those of the kirk session, are skewed toward punishing women who engaged in sin, especially sexual sins such as adultery and fornication. Indeed, these records show that while women’s behavior and speech was highly restricted and women were punished more frequently than men for their sexual behavior or for speaking out of turn, there were moments when women had a significant public voice, albeit one that was highly restricted and required male sanctioning. For example, women were often called on to testify before kirk sessions against those who had committed sins, even if the accused sinners were male or social superiors or both. Perhaps the most important moment where women used their male-sanctioned voice to speak out in public came at the Edinburgh Prayer Book Riots of 1637, which was led by women. This article argues that women were given the opportunity to act in public because the church had been characterized by many Scottish male preachers in gendered language – they called the church a “harlot mother” and a “whore” that needed correction. Therefore, the women of the Prayer Book Riot were sanctioned to speak out against a licentious sinner, much in the way women were called on to testify against sinners in front of kirk sessions.

Do State Boards of Education Offer an Avenue for Public Voice?

Digital technologies provide new opportunities for increased participation by the general public in state and federal governance. In this article, we examine opportunities for public engagement in one type of state-level governmental body: the State Board of Education (SBOE). Limited research has focused on SBOEs, particularly the extent to which these powerful policy actors are accessible to the public. Drawing on the Open Government Maturity Model (OGMM), we examine data on the accessibility and opportunities for public engagement offered by 47 SBOEs to interrogate the validity of the assumption that SBOEs are avenues for public voice. We considered each SBOE to be a unique study participant and their websites to be their “electronic public faces.” Data were collected from SBOE websites on 39 different variables related to SBOE accessibility and used to create an SBOE E-Accessibility Index. Findings suggest that while most SBOEs meet lower levels of the OGMM’s criteria, they do not support meaningful public engagement in SBOE work.

Public Voice via Social Media: Role in Cooperative Governance during Public Health Emergency

With the development of the Internet, social networking sites have empowered the public to directly express their views about social issues and hence contribute to social change. As a new type of voice behavior, public voice on social media has aroused wide concern among scholars. However, why public voice is expressed and how it influences social development and betterment in times of public health emergencies remains unstudied. A key point is whether governments can take effective countermeasures when faced with public health emergencies. In such situation, public voice is of great significance in the formulation and implementation of coping policies. This qualitive study uses China’s Health Code policy under COVID-19 to explore why the public performs voice behavior on social media and how this influences policy evolution and product innovation through cooperative governance. A stimulus-cognition-emotion-behavior model is established to explain public voice, indicating that it is influenced by cognitive processes and public emotions under policy stimulus. What is more, as a form of public participation in cooperative governance, public voice plays a significant role in promoting policy evolution and product innovation, and represents a useful form of cooperation with governments and enterprises to jointly maintain social stability under public health emergencies

The Jewish Blogosphere and the Heretical Counterpublic

This chapter ethnographically traces the contemporary crisis of authority to the Jewish blogosphere or “Jblogosphere” in the mid-2000s, which created an alternative, anonymous heretical public both online and in person. It analyzes the public that referenced an earlier crisis of authority, the Jewish Enlightenment from mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries in Europe. The chapter describes the generation of Jewish men that were exposed to the European Enlightenment and used innovations in print culture to take on traditional Judaism and its leadership. It looks into the connection between secret life-changing doubt and the internet that began roughly in 2002 or 2003 when disillusioned Modern Orthodox and ultra–Orthodox Jews began to blog. It also discusses the Jblogosphere that gave anonymous public voice to a range of private interior life-changing doubt.