Trust in Latin American Governing Institutions

The end of dictatorships, civil wars, and exclusive party systems by the close of the 20th century was a genuine cause for optimism about democracy in Latin America. Once the euphoria surrounding transitions subsided, the cold realities of transitioning to open market economies thrust the region into a crisis of representation. That is, Latin America’s parties, elected officials, and voters struggled mightily to achieve the democratic ideals of representation, accountability, effective citizenship rights, and rule of law (inter alia, Frances Hagopian’s “After Regime Change: Authoritarian Legacies, Political Representation and the Democratic Future of South America”; Jorge Domínguez’s “Latin America’s Crisis of Representation”; Kenneth M. Roberts’s “Party-Society Linkages and Democratic Representation in Latin America”; Scott Mainwaring’s “The Crisis of Representation in the Andes”). In many Latin American countries, a general malaise set in that bubbled over (again) with protests in 2019. COVID-19’s global pandemic placed a temporary lid on this simmering situation but likely exacerbated the region’s crisis of representation. Viewed as a barometer for democratic viability, political trust has become a lynchpin among institutional, behavioral, and cultural theories of democratization. Though “political trust” could refer to myriad institutions, we conceptually circumscribe it to governments, legislatures, political parties, local government, the judiciary, the police, the military, and the civil service / bureaucracy. We acknowledge that a research tradition built on David Easton’s conception of political system support (A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965; “A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 1975) views presidential approval and satisfaction with democracy as conceptually kindred to political trust. We nevertheless distinguish these concepts because satisfaction with democracy remains in conceptual and empirical limbo after decades of debate. Moreover, early-21st-century work from the Executive Approval Project and others diverges theoretically from political trust by considering characteristics (e.g., gender, ideology) and actions (e.g., scandals, executive decrees) of a single person, the president, as opposed to institutions more broadly. We also acknowledge the tradition of Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963), which analyzes interpersonal trust alongside political trust. Research on interpersonal trust in the region has, unfortunately, lagged behind research on political trust and, if anything, has hewn more closely to the multidisciplinary work on prosociality than the culturalist tradition. In sum, interpersonal trust, presidential approval, and support for and satisfaction with democracy arise in the works cited in this article. But we view them as conceptually distinct from political trust and judge the scholarly advances related to the latter as worthy of separate treatment. Scholars have invested vast resources into measuring political trust, theorizing its drivers, and modeling its implications. This article explores advances on those three fronts. Along the way it highlights major breakthroughs and unresolved questions.

Situating the ‘Crisis of Representation’ in Ethnographic Approaches to Theology and Working Toward Community-Centered, Dialogic Approaches

In this article we unpack the significance of the ‘crisis in representation’ in the field of anthropology for ethnographic approaches to academic theology. The article summarizes and draws connections among other works in this themed issue and presents possibilities for moving forwards with ethnographic theologies that attune carefully to issues of representation. Attending to questions of method, identity, and ethnographic writing, it lifts up some of the diverse and genuinely collaborative approaches to fieldwork that are made possible by the hybrid and complex roles theologians play in relation to the communities and cultures with which they engage.

Niemożliwa ale niezbędna? – wokół informacji historycznoliterackiej w szkole średniej

This text is about the methods, employed in schools, of putting high school students in touch with cultural tradition. My interest in this issue is connected to the recent appearance of meaning of the “historical and literary order” in the 2018 syllabus, despite the fact that since 1990, the weight attributed to that meaning in syllabi has gradually shrunk, to almost completely disappear in 2002. To answer a question: “why is the history of literature needed to be taught in schools?”, I started my analysis from pointing out the disappearing trust in historical and literary syntheses. This trust has been plummeting for over 40 years, which is connected to the so-called crisis of representation. In my view, the answer to my question may lie in the analysis of the 1949 syllabus document, in which the vision of the past is construed with a very apparent ideological intention, despite efforts to keep up the pretense of objectivity. By exposing the mechanisms that lead the authors of the 1949 document, I try to show to what extent the domination of chronological order opens up the potential of school documents to manipulate the past, which can lead to falsifying the images of cultural tradition.

Visualizing Agbogbloshie and Re-envisioning E-Waste Anthropology

Chapter 5 engages a critical discussion of the visual economy of e-waste ruination in Agbogbloshie. It explores how, through ethnographic research in general and participatory photography in particular, images make meaning and shape e-waste imaginations. Circulating e-waste images of Agbogbloshie, the author argues, expose the power and utility of e-pyropolitical imagery to make, tell, and even distort and mystify life in Ghana’s e-wasteland. The chapter interrogates the e-pyropolitical gaze conditioning how digital rubble and toxic colonialism are seen. Countering the e-waste “crisis of representation” in Agbogbloshie, the author considers the possible role of participatory photography as an alternative technique of e-waste visualization, in addition to considering the ways in which these worker-based forms of witnessing e-waste can help justify and provide a methodological grounding for the very decolonization of e-waste studies in Ghana in particular.

Sortition-infused democracy: Empowering citizens in the age of climate emergency

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power (providing citizens’ assemblies with clear agenda-setting prerogatives beyond non-binding consultation); expertise (allowing assembly participants to influence which stakeholders and experts to solicit inputs from); and participation (engaging wider parts of the citizenry in the deliberative process).

THE FOURTH HISTORICAL MOMENT IN SOCIAL RESEARCH ‘THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION’: A CHAPTER REVIEW

The historical moments of qualitative research reflect socially constructed quasi-historic conventions that remain crosscut and overlapping till the present. This progressive narrative is well represented and assessed in a historical overview by Denzin & Lincoln (2018) in their book “The Sage handbook of qualitative research” in the introduction “The discipline and practice of qualitative research”. Through a chapter review, this article particularly discusses the fourth moment of Quantitative research coined as “The crisis of representation”, which is believed to be the crossroads where social scientists remain entangled between the science and humanity perspective while conducting social research in order to forward social realities. This period of confusion simultaneously forwarded the multi-paradigm (positivism, postpositivism, and interpretivism), all of which have unique characteristics that are suitable for specific research. Thus, this paper sheds light on the overview of the crisis of representation and further explains the types of crises that occurred during this historical moment, including the crisis of representation, the crisis of legitimation, and a crisis of praxis. It is expected that apart from extending current literature this paper would support social scientists for selecting appropriate methods and paradigms as well as to justify their selection.

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden's Queer Colonial Intimacies

The Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–45) implicates a crisis of representation in South Korean national history. Both the traumatic wounds and complex intimacies of Japan's rule over its Korean subjects were met with postcolonial suppression, censorship, and disavowal. This article examines Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, South Korea, 2016), a period film set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, in relation to the two nations’ fraught but interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories. By analyzing the film's explicit sexual depiction through discourses of ethnicity, gender, and nation, it argues that the lesbian sex scenes encode and eroticize latent anxieties and tensions surrounding Japan-Korea relations, making explicit the ambivalent longing and lingering identification shared between the colonizers and the colonized. Furthermore, through intertextual reference to the intertwined and imitative relations between the national cinemas of Japan and Korea—relations mediated and elided by a long history of state censorship—Park's film repudiates an essentialist South Korean identity propped up by both nationalist narratives and market liberalization policies. Through palimpsestic projection of the colonial era onto South Korea's neoliberal present, the film invites parallels between colonialism's unresolved legacy and contemporary modes of cultural production. Simultaneously, the film offers a utopian vision of a national self that surfaces—rather than suppresses—the violence and pleasure incurred in confrontations with the colonial or transnational other.

Innovation of the director's vocabulario of Oskaras Korshunovas

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the theatrical direction of O. Korsunovas and analyze the innovation of his director's vocabulary. Methodology. Comparative and structural methods were applied, which contributed to the identification of the originality and diversity of innovative directorial vocabulary; the method of art history analysis, the typological-structural method, and the method of artistic-compositional analysis of stage works, thanks to which the director's "toolbox" has been studied and structured, etc. Scientific novelty. The directorial activity of Oskaras Koršunovas is investigated in the context of the leading strategies of modern European theater; based on the art historical analysis of the performances "There to be here", "Old" by D. Kharms, "Hello Sonya, New Year" by A. Vvedensky, "P.S. case OK "S. Parulskis," Roberto Zucco "B.-M. Colts, “Hamlet” by W. Shakespeare and others, the innovative ways of representation applied by the director were revealed and analyzed; the characteristic features of the director's vocabulary were determined and it was proved that it is an open and dynamic system that develops under the influence of urgent problems of modern society; previously unknown factual material was introduced into scientific circulation. Conclusions. The art of directing by O. Korsunovas is one of the most striking examples of contemporary theater, which deals with the problems of a modern person, and the specificity of its content and form emphasizes the crisis of representation of the late 20th - early 21st centuries, manifests itself through deep changes in relation to action, feelings, scene perception, fragmentation, the crisis of bodily mediation and invariant supports of representation, both at the level of setting and at the level of reception. Directing by O. Korsunovas is distinguished by a fundamental innovation of views, a desire to destroy the ideological, artistic, and methodological limitations of theatrical direction, a unique interpretation of classical plays as modern ones, with an emphasis on contemporary moments, an experimental development on the basis of a theatrical laboratory of unique metaphor and imagery. The research revealed that the characteristic features of O. Korsunovas' directorial vocabulary are: application of the principle of deformation, contrast, and transformation, which take the form of a tragic grotesque; coding in elements of presentation of principles related to the specifics of drama; using the subject as an abstract construction; the use of the chorus - an element of classical Greek theater - in the performances of works of modern drama, etc.