This study investigates how social franchises extend health care in rural areas, thus addressing vast and persistent disparities in health care access. We conducted an inductive study of Unjani, a South African organization that extended primary health services to disadvantaged rural communities through a network of 135 health clinics. Our analysis focused on the process of impact intermediation—the propagation of impact across multiple layers of the franchise network, including franchisees and downstream beneficiaries. To facilitate impact intermediation, the franchisor harmonized (...) the mission of the franchisees with its own mission and integrated community impact among franchisees. Such coordination and monitoring activity exposed franchisees to intermediation problems in the form of mission conflict and impact divergence. Our analysis reveals how Unjani nurtured network stewardship that afforded the franchisee nurses with greater support, autonomy, and ownership, thus overcoming intermediation problems in their pursuit of shared communal responsibilities to extend health care to rural communities. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities have become increasingly prevalent in retail settings. In franchised organizations, franchisors typically design and coordinate these activities, leaving operational execution to franchisees. Meanwhile, franchisors may introduce new corporate-led CSR activities over time. Even though changes to CSR activities may refocus outlets’ attention on a CSR initiative, they may also disrupt an outlet’s ongoing CSR routines. Using a longitudinal, secondary dataset consisting of an eight-year panel for a national, franchised restaurant chain, we examine CSR performance (...) dynamics in the presence of two distinct types of CSR activities: an ongoing CSR routine and a distinct, temporary CSR campaign. We find that, when resuming the CSR routine after a temporary CSR campaign, outlets’ performance in CSR routines drops significantly (i.e., immediate decay), then improves gradually (i.e., protracted recovery). We also consider the moderating role of an outlet’s experience, finding that experience stabilizes these decay and recovery cycles. Our findings represent a first step in developing a longitudinal understanding of how a firm’s short-term CSR campaigns may impact ongoing CSR routines, thus contributing to the knowledge of CSR activity development and routinization. (shrink)

As with many science fiction works, the Star Trek franchise uses allegory to address contemporary social issues. Taking a liberal humanistic stance, it addresses race and racism using aliens as allegorical stand-ins for humanity. However, the producers of the Star Trek franchise were inadvertently perpetuating the racism they were advocating against. Operating within the framework of normative Whiteness, the producers privilege the White American male as the average human being. The characters of other racial and cultural backgrounds try to (...) assimilate into the normative Whiteness defined by the producers or they are simply in the background to support the White lead characters. By drawing on previous work on the original series and The Next Generation, this article examines episodes from Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise to determine how the Star Trek franchise reinscribes, or sometimes destabilizes, the mode of racial and cultural homogeneity assumed by the producers. (shrink)

The collapse of Communism in the regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has brought forth a plethora of alternative political and economic models for the reorganization of those societies. The vacuum that has been left could be regarded as an ideal laboratory for the testing of competing theories, and the temptations to experiment with the more benign forms of constructivist rationalism are likely to prove irresistible. If liberal capitalism is to be successfully created, it will clearly not (...) have the same biography as it has had in the Western European and Anglo-American countries, where its emergence was the result of slow evolution: often its appearance and survival were due to a quite fortuitous combination of circumstances. In those countries it was not the result of any deliberate democratic choice but the outcome of a happy confluence of traditional rules and customary practices, and the participants in them had little idea of the form of the system that they were creating. Indeed, ideological sanctification was almost an afterthought, and democratic approval was belated and in most cases not enthusiastic. Britain was a liberal capitalist society, and possessed the necessary body of private law, some time before the franchise was significantly democratized . It is, of course, recent theoretical and empirical research which has revealed that the political choice mechanisms that developed haphazardly after the success of the market are a potential threat to it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White FranchiseSunny Heenenin the introduction to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you—from the new mestizas” (Anzaldúa 20). Mestiza is a specifically feminine descriptor for a Latin female-identifying person of mixed descent. What Anzaldúa proposes in this theory of the new mestiza is a consciousness rooted (...) in “the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (Anzaldúa 103). Just as the mestiza gracefully learn to navigate their complex multicultural identities, fashioning a new hybrid culture within which to flourish, so can we all develop an enlightened conception of who we are. The invitation extended by Anzaldúa is not meant only for those who identify as mestiza. The who being invited to help build this new culture is the group that identifies as white; Anzaldúa believes that those she invites are capable of learning to improve their behavior and their consciousness regarding their relation to other human beings. In fact, it is this dominant group who is needed for this new story because collectively dismantling hegemonic whiteness is the only path toward the kind of inclusive culture that Anzaldúa envisions. I will argue that a proposal like Anzaldúa’s first requires a new worldview for white people: one that restructures cognition toward communal activity.An ushering in of this new worldview can be made practical, I submit, through Audre Lorde’s theory of difference. Lorde advises that it is the recognition of and embracing of our differences that has the potential to move us forward. To reclaim difference and celebrate our pluralistic world, we require an in-depth look at the ways in which identity is formed through difference, especially white identity. In an essay on defining difference, Lorde worries that it is something we respond to with fear and contempt, when instead, [End Page 32] these differences have the capacity to be the strength of our foundation as social beings: “We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.... Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation” (Lorde 115). According to Lorde, we misunderstand and misuse our differences, relying on them to form dualistic identities in negation to one another, identities that sow hatred and division. It is through confronting these identities based on difference that we might begin to approach them in new ways that take us forward together and that build these patterns of relating as equals.The new worldview that I am suggesting must be, primarily, a form of education. In examining the epistemic problems of white identity, I have developed something that I call “sodalism.” The word is derived from the Latin sodalis, which holds various meanings for our purposes, including comrade, fellow, and conspirator. The theory of sodalism connotes a sense of conspiring together toward a collective purpose of betterment, toward a world in which we perceive each other as comrades and fellow humans with beneficial and beautiful differences. Sodalism refrains from becoming totalizing by making visible and celebrating a plurality of identities and experiences. This skill can be developed through educated interchange, of which Anzaldúa writes hopefully: “Whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way” (90). But how can white people adopt a new open consciousness that will allow this interchange? After all, according to sociologist Anibal Quijano, the colonial structure of power—whiteness—“was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations” (168). If white perceptions are still lodged in these hierarchical epistemologies, where can we begin to break down these mental barriers and decolonize minds? Anzaldúa suggests... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on the retail industry around the globe, including in the vast market of India. The response to the pandemic required stores to close and develop new ways to approach shoppers more efficiently. The worldwide usage of social media enabled the growth of social commerce. Influencers on s-commerce platforms use live broadcasting on their channels to promote endorsed products. The features of s-commerce influencers enhance users' trust in the online community and (...) s-commerce intention, impacting their online purchasing intentions. In this study, we collected data from 379 Indian consumers to test the measurement and structural model using Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling to verify our conceptual framework. We found that trust in the online community and s-commerce intention are antecedents of online purchase intentions. Additionally, the results demonstrate that trust in Indian social media influencers and s-commerce intentions are vital for boosting consumers' purchase intention, verifying the hypothesized mediating effect of these factors. Based on these results, we suggest several managerial actions that could enhance the value of s-commerce for franchises, executives, e-retailers, and e-marketplaces. (shrink)

The social and cultural model of disability has challenged the historically powerful perception of disability as a deficiency. Disability is no longer conceived of solely in terms of an individual lack of capacities but also considered as a structural effect of disabling social institutions and normalizing thinking. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) from 2006 marks a decisive step towards the recognition of humans with (cognitive) disabilities as legal subjects who are entitled to (...) enjoy all human rights on equal terms with others. A central claim of the CRPD refers to full political participation of persons with (cognitive) disabilities. This paper argues for strengthening the political participation of persons with severe cognitive disabilities. The normative starting point is the claim that they are our equals, both morally and socially. In spelling out this status equality for the realm of the political, I focus on what political equality and inclusivity means concerning franchise. I will argue that the disenfranchisement of persons with cognitive disabilities, as practiced in many countries, cannot be justified. Furthermore, enfranchising persons with cognitive disabilities is deemed a central expression of their recognition as equals. Thus, it marks a crucial moment of emancipatory transformation towards a more inclusive political system. In cases where severely cognitive disabled persons cannot exercise the right to vote themselves, forms of assisted voting and supported decision-making must be available. (shrink)

This essay argues that Johannes von Kries analysis of the status in the criminal law of the rationally intending subject and the doctrine of _mens rea_ so closely associated with it (cf. Kries, 1886 ; 1888 ) was well known to Max Weber, who had initially trained in law, and highly significant both for the development of his sociology of subjective understanding and his parallel view that the social sciences must be jointly committed to combining a generalizing objective with (...) an individualizing method in their research. It also sees many indications that Weber believed that social scientific investigations could and should go further toward franchising the subject of such social research by encouraging active, even critical responses in his/her testimony in the interests of better achieving both causal and meaning adequacy. From this it would have been only a short step to what I call the practical activation of Alfred Schutz’s postulate of adequacy, which requires that intellectual type constructs in the social sciences not only make sense to research subjects but accord with their perceptions, observations and views. The essay discusses the obstacles provided by the environing authoritarian social and political framework, including the trajectories of those professions on which the social sciences had little choice but to model themselves, as reasons explaining why practical activation of the postulate of adequacy has not yet fully come to pass. It concludes by addressing new Weber scholarship which sees him as a complex and dynamic probabilist whose constructivist and interpretivist theory of human social action is based much more on _Chance_ and orientation than we thought, even to the point of being a model for practical activation of the postulate of adequacy as well as a new and revised basis for the analysis of social interaction itself (see Weber, [ 1913 ] ( 1981 ). (shrink)

Beginning with his mancounters and exploring their temporality, materiality, and spatiality, the author explains in vivid detail how gaming as a gendered practice becomes possible. The author is interested in (and does really well) grounding gaming as gendered practice. Specifically, the author looks at gaming sites, humans and non-humans, infrastructures, power relations and the conditions that enables gaming a social activity. He is looking at the material conditions that make possible the phenomenological experiences and mobilities of certain kinds of (...) subjects. He connects home to gaming sites to colleges to clouds to gaming conventions and accomplishes this as a talented story-teller, which I appreciate as a scholar, reader, and teacher... Gender and the Grounds of Gaming is brilliant work, to begin with." - Ergin Bulut, author of A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry Places provided for digital game play like remote gaming setups, campus computer labs, esports arenas, and convention centers, the overall cultures of video game play, spectatorship, and production are characterized by stark gender disparities. Despite new franchises, platforms, and initiatives expanding games beyond their conventional audience of young, cis-het white men, gaming still feels off limits or unsafe for many. Gender and the Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places, any physical context in which games are played or observed, where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic gender politics. Through a series of case studies that document the gender dynamics of the various sites where video games literally take and make place, author Nicholas Taylor unpacks questions about how place matters to digital play, how issues in gaming cultures and politics are perpetuated through particular arrangements of bodies, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures. In charting the connections between place, masculinities, and play, Gender and the Grounds of Gaming makes space for marginalized perspectives, practices, and populations in gaming cultures. (shrink)

Regenerative agriculture refers to a suite of principles, practices, or outcomes which seek to improve soil health, biodiversity, climate, ecosystem function, and socioeconomic outcomes. However, recent reviews highlight wide heterogeneity in how it is defined. This impedes our ability to understand what regenerative agriculture is and has left the movement open to strategic repurposing by diverse stakeholders. Furthermore, the conceptual franchising of the regenerative agriculture debate by Western culture has omitted discussions surrounding social justice, relational values, and the (...) contribution of Indigenous and local knowledge that does not align with Western-centric producer-consumer frameworks. This is a continuation of injustice by creating barriers to representation and participation, and its confrontation will ultimately be necessary for regenerative agriculture to achieve its transformative potential. This article demonstrates that the farming techniques associated with the regenerative agriculture movement today have been practiced for centuries, and in some cases millennia, by Indigenous and local communities around the world. We propose that current Western academic attempts to define regenerative agriculture have resulted in long lists of practices, principles, and outcomes which fall short of describing the whole, because they lack the relational values component that is so integral to these Indigenous and local knowledge systems. We take an urgently needed, Indigenous-informed approach to defining regenerative agriculture, which confronts current epistemic injustice and prioritizes sociocultural and relational values. Finally, we propose an anti-colonial definition that draws on diverse knowledge systems including Indigenous ecophilosophies and published scientific analyses. (shrink)

It would be good to end the controversy over Locke's ideological orientation. In the most well-known of recent commentaries on Locke's political thought his ideological placement ranges across the spectrum. Ashcraft believes Locke's thought is that of a radical left-wing revolutionary; Macpherson argues that the Second Treatise provided a conservative justification for the class rule of the rising bourgeoisie; and Gough finds that Locke stands mid-way between the two extreme positions in politics, *¾*his position is not, however, exactly mid-way between (...) these two extremes, but inclines somewhat toward the left*¾*. Each of these analyses rests largely on a particular interpretation of Locke's view of the franchise in the Two Treatises of Government (1690), and this kind of ideological analysis is historically problematic. Yet the premise seems plausible: the authoritarian, arbitrary rule of an absolute sovereign is the position of the far right in seventeenth-century England, and egalitarian popular democracy is the position of the far left at this time. Given this structure, Locke does stand between the extremes, but he is inclined towards the right. This is the position argued for in this essay: Locke's seemingly radical arguments were designed to reinforce socially conservative beliefs. Presenting the evidence for Locke's ideological commitment may help illuminate some other unsettled, secondary, points of interpretation. (shrink)

While there had been much radical thought before John Stuart Mill, Joseph Persky argues it was Mill, as he moved to the left, who provided the radical wing of liberalism with its first serious analytical foundation, a political economy of progress that still echoes today. A rereading of Mill's mature work suggests his theoretical understanding of accumulation led him to see laissez-faire capitalism as a transitional system. Deeply committed to the egalitarian precepts of the Enlightenment, Mill advocated gradualism and rejected (...) revolutionary expropriation on utilitarian grounds: gradualism, not expropriation, promised meaningful long-term gains for the working classes. He endorsed laissez-faire capitalism because his theory of accumulation saw that system approaching a stationary state characterized by a great reduction in inequality and an expansion of cooperative production. These tendencies, in combination with an aggressive reform agenda made possible by the extension of the franchise, promised to provide a material base for social progress and individual development.The Political Economy of Progress goes on to claim that Mill's radical political economy anticipated more than a little of Marx's analysis of capitalism and laid a foundation for the work of Fabians and other gradualist radicals in the 20th century. More recently, modern philosophic radicals, such as Rawls, have deep links to this Millean political economy. These links are still worthy of development. In particular, a politically meaningful acceptance of Rawls's radical liberalism waits on a movement capable of re-engineering the workplace in a manner consistent with Mill's endorsement of worker management. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He (...) became Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Volume 2, published in 1886, consists of Green's unpublished lecture notes. The Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation drew criticism upon Nettleship, Green's pupil and editor, for his editorial interventions: the idea of 'common good' was thought to vary significantly here from Green's other writings. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became (...) Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Much of Volume 1, edited by Green's pupil R. L. Nettleship and published in 1885, consists of Green's work on David Hume. In his essay, 'Introductions to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature', Green gives a detailed critique of Hume's metaphysical thought. (shrink)

The concept of the ‘infodemic’ has become a popular explanation for the rejection of anti-COVID-19 crisis governance measures. In this paper, we argue that infodemic is an inherent property of society under free institutions misused to pursue an epistemically vicious political epistemology. Furthermore, we provide an alternative account of political epistemology of COVID-19 governance and popular resistance to it. Namely, we argue that 1) pandemics represent a complex problem, and some level of resistance to governance which restricts liberties while informed (...) by ongoing scientific and political learning processes is inevitable, and 2) the resistance is exacerbated by the history of technocratization of governance and the exclusionary socio-economic inequalities which condition political and epistemic deficiencies easily exploitable by the political entrepreneurs of right-wing populism, particularly under the conditions of social media which gamifies public discourse. Thus, we argue, the correct response to the cultures of rejection of anti-COVID-19 measures is to change the underlying political and economic conditions and not to limit speech or restrict franchise as the infodemic diagnosis suggests. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 509 Mytheli Sreenivas Birth Control in the Shadow of Empire: The Trials of Annie Besant, 1877–1878 In March 1877, two London activists provoked a debate about poverty and overpopulation that reverberated across metropole and colony. These activists, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, republished a book by the American physician Charles Knowlton that outlined methods to prevent conception. TheFruitsofPhilosophy,which (...) Bradlaugh and Besant provocatively subtitled An Essay on the Population Question, had been in limited circulation in Britain since 1833, but the book’s legality was called into question when its previous publisher was charged with obscenity in early 1877.1 Determined to establish the legal right to publish information about contraception, on March 23rd, 1877, Bradlaugh and Besant delivered copies of The Fruits of Philosophy to the police department, the city solicitor, and local magistrates, and they announced their intent to sell the book from their premises at the Freethought Publishing Company on Stonecutter Street in East London. The following day, a crowd filled the narrow space outside the publishing house, and the two activists sold hundreds of copies of Knowlton’s book. When no arrests were made, Besant and Bradlaugh renotified the authorities that they were selling a supposedly obscene book and were informed in turn that papers were 1. S. Chandrasekhar, “A Dirty, Filthy Book”: The Writings of Charles Knowlton and Annie Besant on Reproductive Physiology and Birth Control and an Account of the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 26. 510 Mytheli Sreenivas being prepared for their arrest and prosecution. On the 7th of April, 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested and taken into custody.2 In their subsequent trial, the two activists linked birth control advocacy to a Malthusian worldview. They argued that the urban working classes and the rural poor in Britain labored under the burden of overpopulation. Humanitarian concern for impoverished people, and not intent to promote obscenity, drove them to disseminate information about birth control. Besant and Bradlaugh were eventually acquitted on a legal technicality, and Bradlaugh moved on to other issues. Besant, however, was dissatisfied with The Fruits of Philosophy because its methods were outdated by the science of the day. She was determined to write a more up-to-date guide explaining contraceptive methods and went on to found a Malthusian League to disseminate birth control information. These events—the trial and Besant’s further campaigns promoting contraception —mark a watershed moment in the history of birth control activism.3 They would shape how reproduction came to be understood not as a private matter, but as a particular sort of social problem, whose implications reverberated from London to the empire in India and back again. To outside observers, Bradlaugh and Besant may have seemed an unlikely pair to set these events into motion. Bradlaugh, at age forty-four, had a long history of association with radical causes. A celebrated atheist and antimonarchical republican, he helped to shape a tradition of mid-nineteenth-century English radicalism that developed in the wake of Chartist decline. As a member of the National Reform League in the 1860s, he had participated in public demonstrations to extend the franchise. His leadership of the National Secular Society made him a popular lecturer among Freethinkers on issues of political democracy, anticlericalism, and occasionally on neo-Malthusianism.4 2. Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110–12. 3. The term “birth control” was coined in a meeting of Margaret Sanger and her associates in 1914, and thus would not have been in use in the late nineteenth century. The term contraception was not unknown, but had only limited circulation in scientific discourses. Nevertheless, I use both “birth control” and “contraception” interchangeably to mean methods to prevent conception. See Peter C. Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), xviii. 4. Taylor, Annie Besant, 80–81. Mytheli Sreenivas 511 In comparison to Bradlaugh’s prominence, Besant was relatively unknown. Her public career began after a separation from her husband, the Anglican vicar Frank Besant. Perhaps the couple were ill-suited to each other from... (shrink)

Felony disenfranchisement is best understood as a means of vote suppression. Quite apart from its significance as a form of criminal stigma, disenfranchisement is most properly characterized as one of the ways in which the American voting system reserves political participation for a privileged social and intellectual class. Thus understood, felony disenfranchisement reveals the theoretical underpinnings of an exclusionary version of American democracy in which more or less widespread disenfranchisement is an acceptable or necessary political tactic. Felony disenfranchisement should (...) not be characterized as a sanction for criminal conduct: It fits none of the usual justifications for punishment. Most commentators agree that felony disenfranchisement as a collateral sanction for criminal conduct stigmatizes alike a disparate collection of individuals convicted of crimes carrying a penalty of one year or more - everything from drug possession to murder - and extends, in many instances, long after former felons have completed their sentences. Justifications for refusing the vote to felons, and to former felons who are no longer incarcerated, are surprisingly weak and clearly related to larger issues of democratic participation. Accordingly, it is under the framework of democratic participation that the most persuasive justifications of disenfranchisement might be found. Under the framework of democratic participation, the disenfranchisement debate implicates competing theories of democracy, each of which has profound consequences for the constitution of the American polity. I contend that there are currently three models for the right to vote in American society: (1) a membership model premised upon popular participation in the democratic process as an expression of citizenship; (2) a deliberative model in which popular participation is conditioned upon the duty to be an informed and reflective citizen; and (3) an elite model entrenching political office in a political class that competes for votes among the electoral masses. The continuing vitality of these three models at the level of political debate and constitutional doctrine unsettles the dominant history of the franchise as one of progress from an exclusionary to an inclusionary extension of the mandate, and requires us to acknowledge felony disenfranchisement as part of a larger process of voter exclusion and suppression. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

Democratic inclusion used to be regarded as mainly a matter of expanding the franchise: if democracy was viewed as a merely mechanical process of taking a vote, aggregating votes, and declaring a winner, all that had to be done was to bring everyone in, give them a vote and let them look after themselves in the ensuing electoral fray. However, as concerns with social exclusion have broadened, faith in that simplistic model of democratic inclusion has waned. Mere inclusion, as (...) per the mechanistic model of aggregative democracy, is not enough to meet all the new concerns—some affected interests will always be left out through those sorts of processes. The author argues that ‘democratic deliberation within’ offers the best way—and with the necessarily mute interests discussed in the next chapter, the only way—to address those new democratic concerns. The different sections of the chapter are: The Importance of Inclusion; Underlying Intuitions; The Hidden Costs of Inclusion Talk; The Political Functions of Inclusion Talk; Toward a Non‐Exclusive Concept of Political Authority; and ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ as a Concomitant, and a Substitute. (shrink)

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally (...) rooted in science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009). (shrink)

This article advances three claims. The first is that the standard instrumentalist case for minimal age and sanity requirements for voting is weak and inconclusive in such a way that the evaluation of such requirements should be made exclusively on the basis of procedural fairness considerations. The second claim is that fairness requires the inclusion of all and only those persons who have the franchise capacity: the minimum necessary cognitive and moral powers to experience the benefits of enfranchisement. The third (...) and final claim is that current age and sanity prerequisites for voting in most places fail to comply with the demands of fairness and ought to be revised. (shrink)

The ultimate aim of this dissertation is to determine whether libertarian theories of property can be adequately grounded in Locke's theory of natural rights. I defend the thesis that Locke's theory has no room for a fundamental commitment to natural rights, including property rights. ;In the first three chapters, I challenge each component of the dominant interpretation of Locke's theory of property in this century, viz., that of C. B. Macpherson. In Chapter One, I criticize Macpherson's claim that Locke's view (...) allows unlimited appropriation. In Chapter Two, I agree with Macpherson that Locke defended a state in which the franchise was restricted to those who held significant property, viz., land. However, this can be reconciled with an initial contract into civil society that meets certain standards of rationality and fairness. Thus, while political power is not equally distributed in the state Locke describes, that is not necessarily inconsistent with a rational, free, and voluntary social contract. This shows that we need not see Locke as committed to the interests of the wealthiest members of society. In Chapter Three, I agree with Macpherson that Locke's view is that the purpose of contracting out of the state of nature is the protection of one's property. But I briefly argue that Macpherson does not take seriously Locke's concept of property right and the wide range of objects that count as property. If we pay careful attention to Locke's terminology, we can see that although the purpose of the state is the protection of property, that does not guarantee greater protection for the wealthy than it ensures the poor. ;In Chapter Four, I challenge a quite different thesis. James Tully has argued that Locke did not defend private property at all, but attacked it. I criticize this interpretation on the grounds that Locke explicitly allows certain practices that Tully takes to be violations of the law of nature as Locke construes it. I also criticize the claim that certain developments in a commercial economy, such as the consumption of valuable land, necessarily violate the law of nature. In addition, I argue that the idea of conventionally established property rights is inconsistent with Locke's account of how and why government comes to be established. ;In Chapter Five, I provide an account of the principles underlying Locke's account of rights, both within and without civil society. I argue that Locke's view is improperly construed as a view which gives pride of place to rights. Rather, rights are almost always derivative from duties, and in those cases where they are not derivative, they are subordinate to certain primary duties that oblige us in virtue of our status as God's creations. (shrink)

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, judges and lawmakers sought to erase the visibility of unmarried women. In the public law arena, for example, legislators conflated women and wives for the purpose of the franchise, arguing that women did not need the vote because their husbands voted for them. In the private law arena, doctrines intended to guarantee support to unmarried women functioned by constructing single women's legal identities in relation to marriage, thereby suggesting that marriage could provide for (...) all women's material needs. This essay argues that understanding the history of single women's legal rights is critical to understanding the legal construction of marriage as the dominant institution for regulating all women's private relationships to men and public relationships to the state. Denying single women's existence allowed the law to ignore the potential threat they posed to a marriage-centric socio-legal order. Legal and political changes in the early decades of the twentieth century, however, made it increasingly difficult for the law to deny the existence of unmarried women. As single women gained social prominence, nonlegal writers in the 1930s and 1940s produced a new genre of prescriptive and descriptive literature for and about women living outside of marriage. Unlike earlier legal texts, these works embraced single women as a permanent and visible part of society. Like their legal predecessors, however, these modern authors sought to minimize the threat posed by single women to the institution of marriage, pointing to single women as proof of marriage's modern, consensual, democratic nature. (shrink)

Originally published in 1983. The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social and political change. As Europe modernized, previously ignorant and apathetic elements in the population began to demand political freedoms. There was pressure also for a freer press, for the rights of assembly and association. The apprehension of the existing elites manifested itself in an intensification of often brutal form of political repression. The first part of this book summarizes on a pan-European basis, the major techniques (...) of repression such as the denial of popular franchise and press censorship. This is followed by a chronological survey of these techniques from 1815 – 1914 in each European country. The book analyzes the long and short-term importance of these events for European historical development in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green worked on the commission which led to the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, and supported the temperance movement, (...) the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students of philosophy and political thought. This collection of Green's writings, published in three volumes from 1885 to 1888, was edited by R. L. Nettleship, one of his Balliol students. (shrink)

Primarily a thought experiment, this essay explores how cinematic cyborgs and anthropological approaches to personhood and subjectivity might be theorized together. The 1980s and 1990s showed considerable investment by media producers, and strong reception by audiences and culture critics, to science fiction (SF) film and television franchises that brought new attention to the imagined cyborg subject in the popular imagination of the time. Outside of Hollywood, this same period was marked by biomedical and technological advancements that raised profound implications for (...) Western conceptions of personhood. While SF has enjoyed a long-standing position in the social sciences, primarily with sociologists and feminist theorists, SF’s preoccupation with what it means to be human calls for anthropological engagement as well. Yet if Donna Haraway envisioned cyborgs as celebrated sites of gender de/reconstruction and open possibility, why is it that cinematic cyborgs desire so strongly to become subjects of mothers, lovers, government, and God? While primary attention is given here to film texts and academic articles that drove discussions of science and technology in popular culture during the decades preceding the millennium, with remakes, reboots, and sequels to popular franchises underway, a renewed interest in the anthropological questions these films and series provoke is evident. (shrink)

Is it self-evident that every Kenyan adult citizen should have the right to vote at national and civic elections or referenda? This is not always the case: certain segments of the population are expressly or implicitly excluded by law or practice from the franchise. This paper suggests that the concept of unsoundness of mind should no longer be the basis for excluding persons with disabilities generally, and those with intellectual disabilities in particular, from voting. It traces provisions in law that (...) disenfranchise persons adjudged to be of unsound mind; and provides interpretation using national law as well as international human rights norms to infer that general or automatic disenfranchisement is a human rights violation. It concludes that Kenya’s electoral authorities must ensure that neither their policies nor the practices of their officials disenfranchise some Kenyan adults from voting by equating such persons’ mental illness or intellectual disabilities with “unsoundness of mind”. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's philosophy contains an important ‘radical’ dimension, deriving from his early exposure to the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham and of his father, James Mill. In this chapter, I argue that the doctrine Mill termed ‘philosophic radicalism’ is best understood as an attempt to initiate political reform by introducing radically democratic institutions, avoiding narrowly ‘sectarian’ assumptions about utility and social theory. Contrasting Mill's understanding of philosophic radicalism with Bentham's early and late democratic theory, I show that philosophic radicalism (...) characterized by its critique of ‘aristocratic’ privilege and the corresponding aim to uproot it, but also by commitments of varying intensity to the extension of the franchise, to public and parliamentary deliberation, and to the ‘omnicompetence’ of democratic legislation. (shrink)

This article uses a case-study of the relationship between the British suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, and its equivalent on the Irish side, the Irish Women's Franchise League, in order to illuminate some consequences of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. As political power was located within the British state, and the British feminist movement enjoyed superior resources, the Irish movement was at a disadvantage. This was compounded by serious internal divisions within the Irish movement (...) — a product of the dispute over Ireland's constitutional future — which prevented the Franchise League, sympathetic to the nationalist demand for independence — from establishing a strong presence in the North. The consequences of the British movement organizing in Ireland, in particular their initiation of a militant campaign in the North, are explored in some detail, using evidence provided by letters from the participants. British intervention was clearly motivated from British-inspired concerns rather than from any solidarity with the situation of women in Ireland, proving to be disastrous for the Irish, accentuating their deep-rooted divisions. The overall argument is that feminism cannot be viewed in isolation from other political considerations. This case-study isolates the repercussions of Britain's imperial role for both British and Irish movements: ostensibly with a common objective but in reality divided by their differing response to the constitutional arrangement between the two countries. For this reason, historians of Irish feminist movements must give consideration to the importance of the ‘national question’ and display a more critical attitude towards the role played by Britain in Irish affairs. (shrink)

Children are among the few social groups that are systematically and universally disenfranchised. Although children are citizens worthy of equal moral treatment and rights, their right to vote is restricted in almost all states, and this is seen as legitimate by most democratic theories. What is particular about childhood that justifies the restriction of their right to vote? How can democratic systems legitimise the exclusion of a section of their citizenry? This article provides a critical analysis of the principles (...) that ground child disenfranchisement, and of the allocative mechanisms proposed for restricting the right to vote. It shows that most arguments in favour of child disenfranchisement are unsatisfactory, as they are inconsistently used to target the child population (but not other groups) or are incompatible with a commitment to equality. Among the principles for child disenfranchisement, only those that appeal to political incompetence may be valid for excluding children. Regarding the allocative method of exclusion, this article shows that age thresholds cannot be justified to restrict franchise, and that, while competence tests fare better in theory, there may be issues of implementation. The article contributes by providing a clear and systematic analysis of the core arguments in favour of child disenfranchisement, and the conditions that must be met to justify such a practice. (shrink)

In 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals set an ethical imperative: end extreme poverty and hunger by 2030. Microfranchising can contribute to this critical effort by offering nonprofit organizations and businesses an opportunity to rapidly scale entrepreneurship within Base of the Pyramid markets. However, while abundant literature exists on traditional franchising, we know little about how to leverage microfranchising in resource-scarce contexts to alleviate poverty. To address this gap, we report a longitudinal case study of a microfranchise network (...) aimed at providing timely access to quality, affordable agricultural input, and services for millions of small-scale farmers in Bangladesh. Anchored in the BOP and microfranchise literature and drawing on innovation theory as an analytical lens, we provide a detailed account of how CARE—a global humanitarian and development non-governmental organization—developed and managed the network. We found that context played a strong role and that adaptability therefore was key to successfully recruiting and engaging BOP entrepreneurs and other business partners in the network. Moreover, as members joined the network with past ties and established practices, managing these path dependencies had important implications for network performance. Network sustainability in terms of financial and social impact was also a key theme that required careful consideration throughout network development. We combine these empirical findings with extant literature to discuss contributions to the theory and practice of microfranchising and innovation networking in the BOP context. (shrink)

Today political theorists and the public generally often associate descriptive representation with democracy. However, in Victorian Britain supporters of descriptive representation tended to be arrayed against democracy. The impression that democracy was incompatible with descriptive representation and a set of related values, primary among which was deliberation, formed one of the great obstacles which democratic theory faced in this period. These values belonged to a traditional theory of representation which held that Parliament ought to be a mirror of the nation (...) in its diversity and which judged democracy, in contrast, to be an illiberal mode of regulating the franchise because it risked handing the representation wholly to one part or class within society. In response to this school of thought, democratic theory developed two conflicting responses: first, that democracy could accommodate social and ideological diversity; second, that democracy was irreconcilable with the goal of mirroring diversity, but that nevertheless democracy had to be preferred on grounds of fairness and non-arbitrariness. (shrink)

Students of Mill's political theory know that he was both a political reformer and a social philosopher. An important part of Mill's life involved political struggles over the electoral franchise and schemes of parliamentary representation, the legal and social emancipation of women, land law and economic policy, and freedom of speech and the press. When turning to his best known writings such asOn Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, Principles of Political EconomyandThe Subjection of Women, issues of reform intrude (...) at almost every point. Even his more philosophical writings—Utilitarianism, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's PhilosophyandSystem of Logic— can be seen as attacks on or supports for those theories of man and society which Mill sees as hindering or furthering ‘the improvement of mankind’. Moreover, Mill's subsidiary careers as a journalist, editor of theLondon and Westminster Reviewand member of parliament further demonstrate his commitment to political reform. (shrink)

Moral education is concerned with depolarising the tension between loyalty and sedition, but little work has been done in the field to describe and map the territory between these poles. This paper proposes that the concept of dissent accomplishes this task and satisfies the need for a construct which describes the condition of sitting apart from those one is a part of. Through a seven‐part descriptive and prescriptive conceptual analysis it is revealed that this kind of ‘loyal disagreement’ depends upon (...) disagreeing within rigorous and desirable conceptions of franchise, shared history, contra‐hegemony, ethical principles, reasonable heresy and a publicly pronounced attitude of persuasion. Through revealing dissent’s conceptual complexity, this argument also demonstrates that such complexity is also, generally speaking, central to the aims of moral education insofar as these can be described as making correct judgements in the interests of maintaining social relationships. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He (...) became Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Volume 2, published in 1886, consists of Green's unpublished lecture notes. The Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation drew criticism upon Nettleship, Green's pupil and editor, for his editorial interventions: the idea of 'common good' was thought to vary significantly here from Green's other writings. (shrink)

It would be unproblematically correct to say "the laws of Pennsylvania have it that a person is eligible to vote at age eighteen." But whether someone is actually mature enough to exercise his electoral franchise appropriately will very much depend on the individual. In setting the voting age by fiat, Society leaps in where Nature fears to tread. Many quantities that figure importantly in shaping our conduct of affairs are not specified by nature but are artifacts of human contrivance. At (...) what age, for example, is a person old enough to marry, drink alcoholic beverages responsibly, handle fireworks safely, manage his own property, enter into contracts, see a violent movie, serve on a jury, or hold a public office? These are not quantities writ large in nature's impersonal scheme of things but matters of social decision made for reasons of public polity and administrative convenience. They are legislated quantities. (shrink)

In this paper I will focus on the role of the community of inquiry and its commitment to democracy. I suggest that if we are serious about this commitment we need to do more than merely utter the word democracy as if we have communicated a concept that is both precise and worthy of commendation. The word democracy is, in fact, laden with ambiguity. Claims for democracy have been used to support civil rights, freedom of speech and universal franchise. On (...) the other hand, it has aided and abetted the free market society and defended the dominance of the two-party political system. It seems that some democrats can support the very same programs that other democrats oppose, all in the name of democracy. I will look at some of the ambiguities surrounding the term democracy and offer a model which captures the spirit of the community of inquiry. I conclude that while it is true that the community of inquiry method goes beyond the hidden curriculum and actively encourages pupils to be critical and reflective thinkers, children from an early age also need to learn how to govern themselves. How can this be achieved? By actively involving pupils in the process of decision-making in the classroom on issues that affect their daily lives, and by finding practical ways to increase the participation of everyone involved through the creation of learning opportunities within schools and between the schools and the wider community. It is important, therefore, that pupils acquire the skills needed to become active decision-makers in a participatory democracy. This requires that teachers and educators question the existing democratic structures and processes while taking into account the social realities that have shaped children's consciousness of themselves. (shrink)

Traditional institutions are often considered inadequate to govern for the long term as their politicians promote short-term thinking which can harm the future. This book proposes a novel theory of social time perception to address the short-term thinking of traditional institutions which threaten to stifle liberal democracies. The semi-future reconfigures liberal democracies’ franchises, representative instruments, deliberative practices, accountability mechanisms, and policymaking to include in the demos all citizens, regardless of age, and holders of representable objective interests in the future. (...) The result is not only a way to legitimise long-term governance but also to improve the quality of current democracies. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became (...) Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Much of Volume 1, edited by Green's pupil R. L. Nettleship and published in 1885, consists of Green's work on David Hume . In his essay, 'Introductions to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature' , Green gives a detailed critique of Hume's metaphysical thought. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He (...) became Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Volume 3, published in 1888, contains a memoir by Nettleship, Green's pupil and editor, drawing on Green's recollections, as well as the memories of friends and family. The rest of the volume consists of essays on topics ranging from Aristotle to Christian dogma. (shrink)

There is widespread concern that the nature of mass politics changed during the late twentieth century, and indeed changed largely for the worse, in most post-industrial societies. The standard arguments are familiar and widely rehearsed. You can hear them echoed everyday, whether in simple or sophisticated versions, in the press, scattered in political speeches, and published in academe. Some arguments are cast in strictly empirical terms, but many popular accounts have strongly normative overtones.The intellectual roots lie in the classics of (...) political sociology from the late 1950s and mid-1960s, captured perhaps just as the era of traditional party campaigns was passing, notably the work of Maurice Duverger on mass-branch political parties and Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset on social cleavages and electoral behaviour.The standard view emphasizes the consequences of the significant shift from direct party-oriented linkages between citizens and the state towards indirect media-oriented linkages in representative democracies. In the traditional model of election campaigns that characterized the ‘golden age’ of West European party politics, running from the expansion of the mass franchise in the late nineteenth century until at least the mid-twentieth century, party loyalists characteristically selected parliamentary representatives based on long-standing social cleavages and stable ideological cues.The core cleavages of class, religion, region, and language gave a collective meaning to party support and united people with shared identities and social roots who strived for broadly similar political ideals. As illustrated in Figure 1, in traditional campaigns political leaders communicated with grass-roots party loyalists via elected representatives and core party activists, using direct face-to-face channels of persuasion, organization and mobilization, such as local meetings, party newsletters, candidate pamphlets, doorstep canvassing, and town-hall speeches, supplemented by partisan newspapers.Collective organizations and traditional interest groups such as unions and churches, local cooperatives, community groups, and workers’ clubs, mobilized many citizens at the margins of political power and linked their interests to political parties. Support by party loyalists was regarded as a sign of trust in the ability of elected leaders to translate their programmatic principles into concrete policy actions. (shrink)

This paper is addressed to recent theoretical discussions of the Anthropocene, in particular Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene (Open Universities Press, 2018), which argues: “As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk (...) fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap…”. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to discuss how the Anthropocene is appropriated to certain ideological discourses (paradoxically) to maintain the hegemony of precisely those systems of production that have most accelerated climate change etc.; (2) to consider how the factography of the Anthropocene is exploited in this process to mask the ideological character of industry-aligned “technocratic” environmental management. The paper is not concerned with specific case studies in terms of government and industry policy, or climate science, but rather with the ways in which the discourse of the Anthropocene has been inflected within the humanities and the broader cultural field—that is to say, ideologically, as a system or logic of meaning. How the Anthropocene “means” is, in this respect, a question of some importance. This paper does not attempt to address all the facets of this question, but focuses upon a central “apocalyptic” strain in the discourse of the Anthropocene drawn particularly from Francis Fukuyama’s millennial posthumanism and centred in the question of “sustainability” as catastrophe management—with the risk that real environmental degradation will become an alibi for a revived neoliberalism. In other words, that the critical Earth system transformations that characterise the Anthropocene are themselves commodities, and that the project of their amelioration is in process of defining a future (opportunistic) “crisis” rhetoric with a global political franchise. The ideological import of the Anthropocene stems precisely from the fact that it is planetary and, while catalysed by human agency, independent in its specific behaviour from it. The Anthropocene objectively presents as the contemporary counterpart of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and the most compelling argument for a new kind of technological “arms race.” But it also presents as the condition of an emerging ideological discourse which will determine how this race is run. From the discourse on “energy security” to the widespread “security crackdown” on environmental activists across the so-called developed & developing world, the Anthropocene has come to represent the co-option of a scientific factography for the thinly disguised resurgence of “ideological science” of the Fukuyamaesque variety (post-history, post-human). For Fukuyama, the true meaning of “posthuman” is thus the accomplishment of humanity’s historical mission. As the “End of History” designates an end of ideological struggle, so too the dénouement of the Anthropocene and the “ends of man” represent the accomplished purpose of species warfare: dominion, not simply over the world, but over all possible worlds. According to this narrative, science—like technology—must be uniquely at the service of the maintenance of the global order, organised around a universal appeal to “crisis management.” It is precisely for this reason that what calls itself post-human masks the return of an ever-more-apocalyptic Humanism. (shrink)

This third brand-new 'Star Wars & Philosophy' title once again takes a fresh look at the franchise with all-new chapters. The focus of this volume is the more recent entries into the franchise, including hit TV shows such as THe Mandalorian. Modern applied philosophy is also used to analyse the Star Wars universe: In addition to thorny metaphysical questions about the nature of time and free will, this volume highlights the staggering cultural impact of George Lucas's universe. The newest Star (...) Wars narratives tackle ethnicity on alien worlds and how love and sex with a droid like L3-37 would work ("It works"). The connections between the Separatist Freedom Movement and the struggle for social justice in the USA in the 21st century are brought to light. And philosophical second looks at Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi prove there is much more to this controversial entry in the Skywalker saga. (shrink)

This paper considers the justifiability of removing the right to vote from those convicted of crimes. Firstly, I consider the claim that the removal of the right to vote from prisoners is necessary as a practical matter to protect the democratic process from those who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Secondly, I look at the claim that offenders have broken the social contract and forfeited rights to participate in making law. And thirdly, I look at the claim that (...) the voting ban is essential part of the justified punishment of serious offenders. These arguments have in common the feature that they attempt to articulate the sense in which rights imply responsibilities, particularly that voting rights should be conditional on one’s having met one’s civic responsibilities. I argue that the only interpretation of this view that could justify prisoner disenfranchisement is that which thinks of disenfranchisement as fair and deserved retributive punishment for crime. Against widespread opposition to, and confusion about, the importance of retributive punishment, I offer a brief defence. However, I conclude that even if legitimate retributive purposes could in principle justify prisoner disenfranchisement, the significance of disenfranchisement is such that it should be reserved for the most serious crimes. (shrink)

In his defenses of empire, Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the need to achieve grandeur for France, and his writings on Algeria have shaped our understanding of his political career. In pursuing empire abroad as a remedy for weak politics at home, scholars maintain that Tocqueville abandoned the participatory politics of Democracy in America. This essay argues, however, that the focus on Tocqueville’s international turn has obscured his interest in the greatness of domestic party politics. It demonstrates that Tocqueville championed a (...) version of grandeur tied to the latent energies of the lower classes and distinct from the Bonapartism and aristocratic nostalgia that characterized his thoughts on empire. This version of grandeur was a political reclamation of disagreement and debate that supported great party opposition to counter the malaise of bourgeois rule. The essay concludes by comparing Tocqueville’s attitude toward foreign others, whose freedoms had to be sacrificed to the cause of French nationalism, with his description of the lower classes within his own nation, whose inclusion in the franchise could foster great politics. This comparison enables us to draw modest lessons for interpreting political grandeur in the present day. (shrink)

The case of highland Yemen up to around the middle of the twentieth century involves a history different from most Muslim societies in that, from 1919, the Yemeni state was independent. The problem I address concerns the utility of thinking about the highland property regime in this era in relation to the categories of "private" and "public." What sort of antecedents existed, at the level of property relations, for later commercial transformations that would culminate in such things as Pizza Hut (...) franchises? In Yemen, the polity of the period was a type of Islamic state, one based on the shari`a in ideology and in application and headed by a classical form of jurist-leader, a figure known as an imam. Prior to the twentieth century, this Yemeni form of a shari`a-based Islamic polity had a thousand year history in the highlands. Shari`a courts had exclusive competence as state tribunals, and judges, trained on old-style law books, heard the full gamut of litigation. By contrast, colonial changes in other Muslim societies typically entailed a sharp alteration and restriction of the sphere of the shari`a, often limiting application to the domain of "family law" alone. At the same time, the highlands had yet to commence the other great and, elsewhere, ongoing modern transformation of the shari`a, codification and legislation, which would not begin in Yemen until after the Revolution of 1962.Highland society at mid-century was agrarian, based primarily on settled plow cultivation, and the associated property regime was almost exclusively "private." In Yemen, the "private" property regime centered conceptually on milk, a category of individual ownership of immoveable property, and on the concept of mal, a commercial commodity. As a form of private, landed property, milk involved rights that could be acquired, alienated and inherited, and the associated agricultural production was based on lease contracts between landlords and sharecroppers. Pious endowments were the basis for one of the great Muslim "public" institutions, which supported mosques, schools, water systems, etc. Another fundamental "public" institution was an extension of the "private" commercial notion of mal into the state institution of the 'House of Mal,' or Treasury. Other key "public" institutions were the imamate itself, a form of Islamic state, and the shari`a court. This shari`a system can be thought of in terms of three levels of legal texts. At the highest level, shari`a doctrine, the jurisprudence of the period, constituted an ideology of the property regime. The doctrine provided models for both the range of substantive undertakings and for court processes, but the relationship of these models to the property relations and to litigation on the ground is a key question. At the lowest level, the routine documents of ongoing, uncontested practice proliferated. These included ordinary sale documents, leases, marriage contracts, endowment instruments, wills and estate inheritance instruments. Between high doctrine and low instruments were the records of shari`a court judgments, records in which the conflicts and contradictions of the property system were expressed, argued and ruled upon. In certain problem areas of the law, the ruling imams's personal doctrinal "choices" were designed to guide court judges in their rulings. (shrink)

Se presentan los resultados de un estudio que explora la gestión de la responsabilidad social en trece hospitales de la Red Sanitaria de RS. Las conclusiones revelan que estos hospitales gestionan la RS profesionalmente y con criterios de calidad, orientados al cumplimiento de los ODS, en el marco del plan estratégico de cada hospital. Aunque, todavía se detectan déficits en su implantación departamental, su planificación, y la evaluación de sus impactos. Y debilidades como la falta de recursos y de (...) liderazgo. Para superarlos, el apoyo directivo del hospital resulta determinante. La Red Sanitaria de RS constituye un modelo de colaboración. (shrink)