Citizens in the contemporary world have become alienated from politics because they conceive of it as an instrumental activity. David Antonini argues that Hannah Arendt's thought can help us recover meaningful political experience: a distinct experience of politics in which citizens can speak and act together.

RESUMEN Esta investigación aborda la validez del espacio público como auspiciador de la participación política, centrándose en las diversas formas de apropiación del espacio que pueden fomentar dicha participación. El objetivo principal consiste en demostrar las posibilidades de acción política de las y los ciudadanos al expresar su desacuerdo a través de distintos procesos de apropiación del espacio público: la apropiación por dominación, por rebelión, la apropiación vandálica y artística. Se sostiene que la legitimidad de un sistema de gobierno puede (...) cuestionarse o debilitarse según la actuación pública del cuerpo ciudadano contra el Estado o la entidad que ejerce la soberanía sobre el espacio. El análisis se llevará a cabo desde la filosofía política de la vertiente disociativa y el realismo político a través de los conceptos de conflicto, soberanía y desacuerdo. ABSTRACT This research addresses the validity of public space as a promoter of political participation, focusing on the various forms of appropriation of space that can foster said participation. The main objective is to demonstrate the possibilities of political action of citizens by expressing their disagreement through different processes of appropriation of public space: appropriation by domination, appropriation by rebellion, vandalic, and artistic appropriation. It will be argued that the legitimacy of a government system can be questioned or weakened depending on the public actions of the citizen body against the State or the entity that exercises sovereignty over space. The analysis will be carried out from the political philosophy of the dissociative aspect and political realism, through the concepts of conflict, sovereignty, and disagreement. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with monumental art in Slovakia before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Generally, art in public spaces is important, because it influences the knowledge and feelings the people who use this space have about the past and the present, and thus influences the shared social construction of who we are as a social group. In this article we concentrate on the period of Communism and the formal and iconographic aspects that were (...) essential to art at that time. We also look at the political use of art—the ways in which explicit and implicit meanings and ideas were communicated through art to the general public. We touch also on the present situation regarding the perception of “Communist art”. In the final section we discuss the state of affairs of the last twenty years of chaotic freedom in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, since there is no real cultural politics or conception for artworks in public spaces at the level of the state many artworks simply disappear, often without public discussion, and on the other hand, some actors use their political power to build monuments that promote their private political views. (shrink)

Common space and public open spaces are studied and investigated from various aspects in western contexts. What is the most considered in this study is the relationship between public open space and democratic functions in eastern context and especially in Middle Eastern countries. The notion of public is connected to the notion of people in the framework of the nation-state political organization. What was happened in Cairo in 2011, just as in Kiev in 2014, (...) and Turkey 2013 was the prolonged and mass occupation of public space by citizens. Indeed, physical space for the expression of democratic rights and claims is important in modern democracy. Tehran is studied as the example of a contemporary metropolis that embodies spatial-political tensions within its urban form. Tehran’s urban form remains deeply rooted in the historical ideologies of space in shaping a contemporary space of sovereignty. By reading the city through transformation of public spaces, the relationship between its architecture and political power will be exposed as an example in which the architecture of the city is charged with enabling an ideological interaction through action and reaction, revolution and resistance. This study focuses on Tehran during two major intervals 1921-1950(politics towards modernity)/1951-1979(Architecture for revolution) and the roots and results of these critical periods and their integration to political theology in contemporary middle-east metropolis. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , (...) commonly referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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The fragility of democracy and the political aesthetics of public art -- Voices and places: the space of public art and Wodiczko's the homeless projection -- Democracy's "empty place": Rawls's political liberalism and Derrida's democracy to come -- Public art's "plain tablet": the political aesthetics of contemporary art -- Democracy and public art: Badiou and Ranciere -- The political aesthetics of Chicago's Millennium Park -- The political aesthetics of New York's National (...) 9/11 Memorial -- Public art as an act of citizenship -- Badiou on "being and the void.". (shrink)

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a (...) dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions. In chapter two, I begin by considering the harms suffered by transgender persons through “misgendering”, the deployment of gender terms which inflict psychological harms upon transgender persons, place them in situations of injustice, or diminish their self-respect. Such deployments are morally contestable: they can be challenged on ethical grounds. Several characterisations of the term ‘woman’ proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. In chapter three, I elaborate a broadly liberal approach to gender pluralism. The approach involves: i) the public toleration of gender practices and beliefs which contest prevalent gender norms; and ii) state-gender neutrality. Public toleration allows gender non-conforming practices and beliefs within public space. State gender-neutrality consists mainly in the removal from law and government policy of provisions which assume compliance with prevalent conceptions of gender. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical analysis of the notion of selfhood that underlies identity politics. It offers a unique theory of the self that combines previous scholarly work on recognition and the phenomenology of space. The politics of identity occupy the centre of a contested terrain. Marginalised and oppressed peoples continue to seek the transformation of our shared social world and our political institutions required for their lives to be liveable. Public criticism and academic treatments of identity politics (...) often take a disparaging view that treats it as subordinate to more general political questions about justice and the organisation of society and its institutions. This book argues that these polemics ignore the numerous ways in which all politics is concerned with matters of selfhood and identity. Through a rereading of Hegel's account of recognition as an ongoing and dynamic process that constitutes the self, it presents selves-and the categories of identity that qualify these selves-as fundamentally conditioned by the environments in which they appear before themselves and others. It also argues that we do the work of identity in public spaces-particularly digital spaces-and that these spaces shape what identities we can assume and what those identities mean. Contemporary social media technologies facilitate the production of particular forms of selfhood through the combined logics of the interface, the profile, and the post. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Digital Spaces will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in a wide range of disciplines including political philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, sociology, political theory, and critical theory. It will also appeal to anyone with an interest in contemporary identity politics, whether as a matter of study or lived experience. (shrink)

Until recently, struggles for justice proceeded against the background of a taken-for-granted frame: the bounded territorial state. With that "Westphalian" picture of political space assumed by default, the scope of justice was rarely subject to open dispute. Today, however, human-rights activists and international feminists join critics of structural adjustment and the World Trade Organization in challenging the view that justice can only be a domestic relation among fellow citizens. Targeting injustices that cut across borders, they are making the scale (...) of justice an object of explicit struggle. Inspired by these efforts, Nancy Fraser asks: What is the proper frame for theorizing justice? Faced with a plurality of competing scales, how do we know which one is truly just? In exploring these questions, Fraser revises her widely discussed theory of redistribution and recognition. She introduces a third, "political" dimension of justice—representation—and elaborates a new, reflexive type of critical theory that foregrounds injustices of "misframing." Engaging with thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt, she envisions a "postwestphalian" mapping of political space that accommodates transnational solidarity, transborder publicity, and democratic frame-setting, as well as emancipatory projects that cross borders. The result is a sustained reflection on who should count with respect to what in a globalizing world. (shrink)

Starting from the hypothesis that the predominant church, religion and belief in Romania (i.e. the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox religion and the Orthodox belief) are paradigms that help understand politics, we will highlight in the present article three major aspects of the political phenomenon in post-communist Romania: de-symbolizing the democratic function, institutionalizing “democratism” and manifesting integralism in the public space. Our analysis is based on a communicational approach which postulates the conceptual oppositions as a fundament of (...) understanding. The interpretation of these oppositions has lead us to discovering a series of coherent actions, behaviors, facts, etc., but also a series of incoherent, at some point irrational situations in the relation between the religious and the political spheres. The importance of this article lies in the fact that, once highlighted, these structures allow us to take into consideration the possibility of analyzing the meaning of the relation between the religious and the political spheres. (shrink)

The intertwining: the recursion of the seer and the seen -- Artificial intelligence and the phenomenology of flesh -- Aesthetic education and the project of being human -- The intertwining of incommensurables: Yann Martel's life of Pi -- Flesh and the limits of self-making -- Violence and embodiment -- Excessive presence and the image -- Politics and freedom -- Sovereignty and alterity -- Political violence -- Public space -- Sustaining the other: tolerance as a positive ideal -- Forgiveness (...) and incarnation. (shrink)

This work seeks to highlight that an understanding of aesthetic practices is essential to the analysis of politics and political processes. If today, aesthetics has become a rather overused term, referring to a variety of historical periods and groups, even states of being (love, melancholy...), nonetheless its relevance as a connecting agent between individual, state and society remains strong. Placing it as a central theme for understanding processes of domination, contestation and transversal links highlights the mobilization of spaces, (...) bodies and objects in a struggle for the exercise of power and the challenges to it. It is impossible to study historical shifts or systems of power without examining the mobilisation of aesthetic languages: of splendour and display, austerity, asceticism, minimalism or restraint. In this book the concern is with the dynamics between the custodians of aesthetics and the dissenters, with the moment, and with change over time. This book approaches contemporary politics through the aesthetics of power and its practices: from the more formal and regulated presence of state power in the public space in the form of official buildings, commemorative monuments, to the aestheticisation of sacrifice in politics and judicial spectacles. The studies presented here promise to lead us further to deepening our understanding of the dynamics of political spaces and the politics of the aesthetic in contemporary politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 309-313 [Access article in PDF] Niall W. Slater. Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. x + 363 pp. Cloth, $59.95. In this close reading of all but three of Aristophanes' surviving plays, Niall Slater demonstrates considerable theatrical sensitivity. He all but stages the comedies for us, and in doing so he shows how Aristophanes stakes a (...) claim for the power of comedy to educate its audience.In two introductory chapters, Slater establishes the terms and contexts of his arguments. "The Naming of Parts" begins with the history of the concept "metatheatre," which includes a fine account of the problem of "illusion." Slater understands illusion as a contract negotiated—and in Aristophanes constantly renegotiated—between the actors and the audience. Metatheatre acknowledges the negotiation, the process of the play. "Aristophanic comedy knows and names [End Page 309] itself" (1). Slater sets out to show that Aristophanes uses metatheatre not just as one of many comic devices, but also as a technique to provoke Athenians into thinking about performance. Metatheatre, he says, "invites our contemplation not only of the qualitybut the goalsof theatrical performance" (7). The remainder of the chapter looks at the metatheatre possible or even inherent in the many aspects of the plays (e.g., musical form or costumes and props). The account is a welcome survey, and it reminds us to be open to finding metatheatre in moments less obvious than a parabasis. In his second chapter, "The Emergence of the Actor," Slater argues that only after the actor becomes conceptually separate from the play, which happened by the 440s and the institution of the acting prize, can an audience understand an actor's performance asa performance and react to it on a metatheatrical level. Slater recounts much of what we know about the shift from poet-actors to professional actors and focuses on comedy and how it makes fun not just of tragedy, but also of tragic actors. By doing so, comedy "created an observational point outside the tragic system of representation from which to recognize and observe analogues to tragic acting in the construction of other kinds of cultural performances" (32). He looks forward here to the arguments he will make about Aristophanes teaching his audiences to critique political performances, but I wonder if locating the "observational point" might not be as simple as showing that acting is recognizable as its own performance and that performance is something to be judged (both of which the existence of the acting prize proves) without making tragicacting the only way to observe other kinds of performance? Although Slater does not need to set up the rest of the book so elaborately, the chapter includes intriguing ideas about the effect of the emergence of the actor on the theater.He concludes the introductory chapters by explaining that he has chosen to examine in detail the eight of the surviving comedies in which metatheatre makes a difference and contributes to debates about democratic Athens. He begins with the admirable reminder that modern theater analogies are likely to mislead about Athenian comedy in the context of radical Athenian democracy. In his accounts of the plays, Slater first considers the theatrical space within a play and then gives a second look at the relationship of that theatrical space to other public spaces. What he finds in Acharniansis a theatrical space nearly congruent with the political space of the assembly—the only other occasion for the whole citizenry to sit together and judge—but Dicaeopolis cannot control that space, and so he creates his own space with his peace treaties. Slater clearly delineates the separate spaces Dicaeopolis brings together and the metatheatrical effect of his doing so, i.e., to show that all are performance spaces. The main claim of the parabasis is that Aristophanes has taught the city to see through deceptive speeches, and the parody of Euripides can teach spectators to see the process of role-playing and thus see through the deceptions of demagogues and... (shrink)

This book addresses the social, functional and symbolic dimensions of urban space in today’s world. The twelve essays range from a conceptual framing of the issues to case descriptions, rich with illustrations. Together they provide a thorough exploration of the nature and significance of social space and particular aspects of its distribution in today’s urban spaces and the various factors that are competing for it. -/- The book addresses a topic that is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Questions of space are (...) examined from a rich variety of perspectives from urban planning to political philosophy, shedding some light on this shadowy process. Some of the issues addressed include the dichotomies of public and private space, rights and duties regarding the use of space, and conflicts over its allocation. Well-reasoned and lively discussions are offered from the perspective of basic values and rights. The recognition of the specifics of (minority community) identity as an institutional policy is raised in opposition to “abstract distributive accounts of justice” – economic pressures by developers and would-be gentrifiers. (shrink)

Iran, as a country that has never been colonized, underwent a rapid modernization process, which arose from its internal pressures. Starting from 1945, with the rise of globalism at the end of World War II, a new stage of modernization began in Iran which continued to grow and foster the culture of mass consumption. Globalization also led to the rise of different maternities in the housing sector. Focusing on Tehran, the dominant tendency to create a modern society based on nationalism (...) and modernism values, led to the creation of a very new image of the city, at odds with its introverted urban form till early of the twentieth century. The majority of urban policies were based on the need to create a major change in public life and to revolutionize the socio-political aspects of Iranian society. This chapter has been divided into three chronological periods. The first section Planning the Metropolis aims to focus on the idea of Tehran as a modern capital back in the 1950s and late 1960s with a special focus on class segregation and housing politics. The second part of this chapter Housing as a Revolution has a special focus on the transformation of housing strategies in Iran after the 1978-79 Islamic revolution. The third part Post-Revolution focuses on the current policies for the housing sector and construction economy. As a result of the imposition of US sanctions on the Iranian economy after unilaterally abandoning the Iran nuclear deal, the country’s economy has been hit hard by Tehran’s inability to export oil. Inflation has also hit the housing sector. In general, this chapter aims to bring forward the idea of housing as politics in modern Tehran through a critical and historical perspective. (shrink)

After an introduction and views on inculturation, the focus shifts to ‘incarnation’ and ‘contextualisation’ in a broader sense, to also include the transformation and adaptation of the ‘sacred’ for the secular or political sphere. Practices of performing faith through texts and music within diverse liturgical, spiritual, cultural and political contexts in South Africa are discussed. Aspects taken into account are the possible influence of landscape or seasons on the expression of faith and the possible sacro-soundscapes that could (...) come from different contexts, such as the impact of the Karoo landscape on Khoisan descendants singing the sacred; performances in a contextualised music idiom, such as the Genevan Psalms in a Khoi music idiom; and celebrating the Church Year in different hemispheres. The discussion focuses also on contextualising within political contexts – that is, where political space is ‘sacralised’ through sacred songs and where sacred songs are given political meaning or changed for the political sphere. The article closes with the possibility of songs from Africa being sung in other countries and the meaning it could have, or could be given. It is argued that contextualisation from one context to another context of the sacred, or from a ‘secular’ to a sacred context, as well contextualising the sacred into the public or political sphere, could lead to contexts and spaces being changed, enrich the performance of the sacred, stimulate creativity, allow for new processes of attributing meaning, change values and motivate people, form new identities and thus also could lead to changed communities. (shrink)

Traditionally, liberals have confined religion to the sphere of the ‘private’ or ‘non-political’. However, recent debates over the place of religious symbols in public spaces, state financing of faith schools, and tax relief for religious organisations suggest that this distinction is not particularly useful in easing the tension between liberal commitments to equality on the one hand, and freedom of religion on the other. This article deals with one aspect of this debate, which concerns whether members of (...) religious communities should receive exemptions from regulations that place a distinctively heavy burden on them. Drawing on Habermas’ understanding of churches as ‘communities of interpretation’, we explore possible alternatives to both the ‘rule-and-exemption’ approach and the ‘neutralist’ approach. Our proposal rests on the idea of mutual learning between secular and religious perspectives. On this interpretation, what is required is (i) the generation and maintenance of public spaces in which there could be discussion and dialogue about particular cases, and (ii) evaluation of whether the basic conditions of moral discourse are present in these spaces. Thus deliberation becomes a touchstone for the building of a shared democratic ethos. (shrink)

This article presents an examination of the political implications of Levinas' concept of hospitality (hospitalité). As described by Levinas, hospitality operates in two distinct realms, the ethical and the political. In the ethical realm, the self is morally compelled to welcome the individual stranger into the private space of the home. In the public realm, the self is politically obligated to welcome the whole of humanity into the public space of the homeland. However, since politics is (...) violent and totalizing, the practice of political hospitality requires an ethical transformation of the public realm. For Levinas, such a transformation entails the creation of political and juridical institutions that are fraternalistic, monotheistic and messianic in nature. It is found that Levinas's hospitality ethic is compromised by the fraternalistic, monotheistic and messianic aspects of his political vision. (shrink)

C. Sturtewagen. ' Welcome Address' -- M. Lehnert. ' Practical Wisdom as a Measure of Recognition' -- A.P. Rots. ' Reclaiming Public Space: Shinto and Politics in Japan Today' -- P. Schwieger. ' Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern Tibet' -- E. Francis. ' Une autre conception de la royauté: de deux dynasties hindoues du sud de l'Inde' -- C.K. Neumann. ' Ḳadīmden: A Notion of Truth Turning into Legal Claims in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire' -- B. Martel-Thoumian. ' (...) Itinéraires chiites: pouvoir politique et religion dans le Dār al-islām médiéval' -- B. Dessein. 'Conclusions'. (shrink)

Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by (...) defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain how abstract space of the State – universally and specifically within the context of Middle Eastern cities – aims to homogenise the city and eliminate any anomaly that threatens its power structure. Design/methodology/approach – Through a historical and discourse analysis of these policies and processes in the two case studies, this paper presents a contextualised reading of Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space and process of abstraction in relation to the alienation (...) of political public spaces. Findings – The paper proposes that regardless of these homogenising strategies being applied universally, they fail to respond to contextual particularities and therefore they – in a contradictory manner – may themselves produce a space of resistance and difference. Originality/value – This paper focusses on Iran, the case of Tehran and Turkey, the case of Taksim Square and Gezi Park in Istanbul. Recent policies and strategies have been proposed and implemented to reduce, alienate and possibly neutralise the impacts of urban and political protests in these cities and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

Much of contemporary political philosophy revolves around debates over perfectionism, which is the view that the state may, or should, promote valuable conceptions of the good life and discourage conceptions that are worthless or bad. Collis Tahzib has recently proposed a unique theory of perfectionism. I examine two central aspects of his theory: the amalgamation of public reason and perfectionism, and the employment of the Rawlsian lexical priority. I argue that Tahzib’s idea of perfectionist public reason (...) has certain serious problems. Additionally, Tahzib, like many other perfectionists, has neglected that many excellences are at once personal and civic. I sketch a perfectionist account of civic virtue, with the hope of opening up space for defending and justifying perfectionism. (shrink)

Why do most of us consider ourselves free but also believe there is little we can change in the way the world is run - individually, severally, or even collectively? Why has the growth of individual freedom coincided with the growth of collective impotence? Bauman argues that this condition hangs on the agora - the space where private and public meet to seek the creation of 'public good', a 'just society', or 'shared values'. The problem is that little (...) remains of such old style spaces. We cannot, he argues, overcome our collective impotence without resorting to politics and using the vehicle of political agency. Three orientation points for a reconstruction of politics are suggested: the republican model of the state and of citizenship, basic income as a universal entitlement, and re-enabling the institutions of autonomous society by catching up with the controlling extraterritorial powers in an age of globalization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. (...) Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

Jus post Bellum is, like Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello, a part of just war theory. Jus post Bellum is distinguished from the other parts of just war theory by being primarily concerned with the principles necessary for securing a just and lasting peace after the end of a war. Traditionally, jus post bellum has focused primarily on three goals: [1] compensating those who have been the victims of unjust aggression, while respecting the rights of the aggressors, [2] (...) punishing and rehabilitating those guilty of war crimes and other violations of the principles of Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello and [3] developing measures that will prevent future war and violence (Orend 2000 and May 2012). In this chapter, I outline an account of political forgiveness and explain the role that political forgiveness can have in promoting the goals of jus post bellum. My conception of political forgiveness requires some unpacking. Let me begin with individual forgiveness, which I understand along familiar Butlerian lines as the renunciation of resentment (Butler, Sermon IX in McNaughton 2017: 75-83), though with a bit of a twist. More exactly, ● An individual, I, forgives J for doing F if and only if I renounces all her own warrant for resenting J for doing F. Resentment is a judgment-sensitive attitude, and, therefore, it tends to track judgments concerning its warrant (Scanlon 1998: 20 and Smith 2015). In cases of perfect forgiveness, I’s renunciation causes her to cease feeling resentment toward J for doing F, though, of course, less perfect cases are possible. I reject the idea that there is a sharp discontinuity between individual and political forgiveness, a position argued for by, e.g., Peter Digeser (1998 and 2001). By contrast, I understand political forgiveness as the renunciation of resentment by the relevant political body in question. With greater precision, ● A sovereign political body, P, forgives J for doing F if and only if P renounces all warrant that its citizens have for resenting, as part of their public lives, J for doing F. A little more explanation is in order. Sovereign political bodies, such as national governments, claim degrees of control over the lives of their citizens, in both their public and their private aspects, though the claims with respect to the former tend to be considerably more expansive than the claims with respect to the latter. I assume here that, at least in the case of legitimate governments, these claims of control are often valid. Such governments may reasonably renounce certain grounds for motivating action in the public sphere. For example, governments may renounce all warrant that its citizens have, as part of their public lives, for hating members of marginalized groups. In practice, this means that, while citizens might continue to act in their private lives out of hatred for members of these groups, their appeal to this hatred is seen by the state as irrelevant to matters of law and public policy as well as being wholly out-of-place in public discourse. Political forgiveness toward J for doing F, as I understand it, involves an analogous rejection of resentment, on the part of citizens in their public lives, toward J for doing F. I turn now to the matter of how political forgiveness supports securing a just and lasting peace between former belligerents. With respect to the first goal of jus post bellum, political forgiveness helps to balance compensation for victims and respect for the rights of defeated aggressors by countering the all-too-human tendency to overvalue harms done to oneself and to members of one’s group. As regards the second goal, political forgiveness plays a similar role but also provides a model for rehabilitation by exemplifying among the victorious the behavior to be emulated by the vanquished. Finally, political forgiveness promotes the third goal of jus post bellum by providing a space for nations to meet as moral equals rather than allowing one nation to have the moral high ground over the other. None of this, of course, means that political forgiveness should be unearned or that it should be confused with condonation (Kolnai 1973 and Pettigrove 2004). However, the question of what is required to put oneself in a position to be forgiven as part of jus post bellum is a matter that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. (shrink)

“Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. Hannah Arendt links this space with “public freedom.” The being of such freedom, she asserts, depends on its appearing. It consists of “deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance.” Such appearance, however, requires the public space. Reflecting on Arendt’s remarks, a number of questions arise: What does the dependence of freedom (...) on public space tell us about the nature of freedom? How does public freedom relate to the freedom of a private individual? Does the latter also depend on its appearing? Which is generatively prior: freedom or public space, i.e., the actions that publicly manifest freedom or the space required for their appearance? How does public power shape this space? In this article, I approach these questions through a phenomenological study of public space. (shrink)

The essays in this volume honor the work of political scientist and Eric Voegelin scholar, Barry Cooper, by considering how political philosophy (a form of hunting) and empiricism get "woven" together (to borrow a metaphor from Plato). In other words, they consider how science needs to be conducted if it is to remain true to our commonsense experience of the world and to facilitate political judgment. Several of the essays cover Eric Voegelin, including his understanding of consciousness, (...) a comparison of him and Leo Strauss, and his self-understanding as a scholar. Other essays consider terrorism, technology, religion and the modern world, the divided line in Plato's Republic, and the political significance of hope. The volume also includes a number of essays that consider different aspects of Canadian politics, including its strong regionalism, political culture, public law, and the infamous "Calgary School" of political science. These essays are united by the concern that political science must "weave" together political philosophy and empiricism. This task was what Aristotle meant when he characterized political science as a matter of practical wisdom. It is an insight that was also central for Voegelin's restoration of political science in the twentieth century, and that these essays continue into the twenty-first century. Political analysis begins in whatever contemporary crisis the analyst has found himself. The analyst sifts through competing claims of political meaning asserted by the partisans in the crisis. From there he ascends to greater luminosity concerning the human condition by viewing those claims in light of the "major questions in the history of political thought." They inform one another, as the search for order is necessarily the search for order that is conducted by a particular individual's consciousness in the context of a particular community in space and time. This volume will be of special interest to scholars of political philosophy as well as citizens and statesmen interested in how an engagement in the history of political philosophy can facilitate political judgment in particular political circumstances. Publisher's note. (shrink)

University research in the U.S.A. is based on a tight relationship between University and economic activity. In Europe and South America, although less commonly than in the U.S.A., there's already a large amount of experiences related to the creation of "on campus" or "spin off" companies based on the results and knowledge obtained from research in University departments and R&D centres financed with public funds. The virtual base of this results in communication technologies enables private use and the appropriation (...) of the benefits by their authors. European model, historically widely separated from private companies, has produced high quality basic research, but it has failed to obtain profit from technological development. Research funds happen to be basically public. Europe heads for economic, politic and military union. Common economic space and the growing up of the new markets, which we can foresee to be extended to other countries, will promote business opportunities and the relationship University-Industry. University institutions and faculties should think about their current ethic convictions to create a new Industry-University model in the context of a global economy. (shrink)

This paper looks at the Parsi community in 19th century India and its role as an agent in the formation of public cultural space in Bombay. The Parsis provide a unique example of an indigenous community under colonial rule, who through acceptance of the values of modernity and enterprise culture, manage to negotiate a position of prominence within one of the power centres of the then dominant British empire. The notion of the public sphere thus employed, provides an (...) interesting contrast with the Habermasian theory of the bourgeois public sphere. Furthermore, it provides a model that directly challenges the somewhat simplistic subject-object relations that are often implicit within post-colonial theory. Indeed, there is a particular kind of desire for modernity that is reflected in the active participation of Parsis in the construction of imperial public space in Bombay. This leads to a reconsideration of the fluidity of the notion of the 'political' within the discussion of post-colonialism. (shrink)

Socio-spatial conditions for women in Dhaka are very specific and highly contradictory. This article traces some of these contradictions by looking at the multilayered presence of women in public space—where public space is defined as both the space of politics and public discourse, and the physical space of streets, parks and squares. By analyzing the presence of women in public space, it is argued that one can observe a continuous tension within these spaces between ‘official’ (...) discourses and often repeated ideas that stress equal rights for women on the one hand and a whole series of everyday practices on the other that rather tend to make women’s presence in public space marginal. (shrink)

As militarization of bodies politic continues apace the world over, as military organizations again reveal themselves as primary political, economic and cultural forces in many societies, we argue that the emergent and potentially dominant form of political economic organization is a species of neo-feudal corporatism. Drawing upon Bourdieu, we theorize bodies politic as living habitus. Bodies politic are prepared for war and peace through new mediations, powerful means of public pedagogy. The process of militarization requires the generation (...) of new, antagonistic evaluations of other bodies politic. Such evaluations are inculcated via these mediations, the movement of meanings across time and space, between formerly disparate histories, places, and cultures. New mediations touch new and different aspects of the body politic: its eyes, its ears, its organs, but they are consistently targeted at the formation of dispositions, the prime movers of action. (shrink)

The UK Chief Medical Officer’s 2016 Annual Report, Generation Genome, focused on a vision to fully integrate genomics into all aspects of the UK’s National Health Service. This process of integration, which has now already begun, raises a wide range of social and ethical concerns, many of which were discussed in the final Chapter of the report. This paper explores how the UK’s 100,000 Genomes Project —the catalyst for Generation Genome, and for bringing genomics into the NHS—is negotiating these (...) ethical concerns. The UK’s 100 kGP, promoted and delivered by Genomics England Limited, is an innovative venture aiming to sequence 100,000 genomes from NHS patients who have a rare disease, cancer, or an infectious disease. GEL has emphasised the importance of ethical governance and decision-making. However, some sociological critique argues that biomedical/technological organisations presenting themselves as ‘ethical’ entities do not necessarily reflect a space within which moral thinking occurs. Rather, the ‘ethical work’ conducted by organisations is more strategic, relating to the politics of the organisation and the need to build public confidence. We set out to explore whether GEL’s ethical framework was reflective of this critique, and what this tells us more broadly about how genomics is being integrated into the NHS in response to the ethical and social concerns raised in Generation Genome. We do this by drawing on a series of 20 interviews with individuals associated with or working at GEL. (shrink)

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; (...) and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal (...) theory” as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

The political does not exist. What exists is individual and collective life; there is nature, with its inexhaustible cycles; there is the world, the (blind and astute) interlacement of the actions, conflicts and visions that will become history. The political exists only as an invention: the invention of a specific space of the relation that intercepts life, modifies nature, and is a curvature of the world. I would like to dwell on this invention, not without warning that the (...) political of which one speaks precedes and constitutes specific kinds of politics, since it is the condition of their possibility. (shrink)

This article contributes to studies in democratic theory and civic engagement by critically reflecting on the role of contemporary art for the transformation of the public sphere. It begins with a short assessment of the role of art during the Enlightenment, when the communicative function and the public role of art were most clearly articulated. It refers in particular to the analogies between aesthetic and political judgement in order to understand the emancipatory role of artistic production within (...) a philosophical project centred on reason’s capacity to liberate itself from the dogmatism of authority and from the errors of superstition, both elements considered crucial to the development of a functioning public sphere. The article then discusses the historical transformation of art following a number of philosophical and sociological critiques to a similar project of the Enlightenment and assesses the attempt of historical avant-gardes to appropriate this critique yet maintain art’s emancipatory function in society. Having examined some problems raised by these attempts, the article turns to the analogies with contemporary artistic production. It examines the role of contemporary visual art in the public sphere and shows how the anti-rationalist theories articulated to reflect on contemporary works of art, and the works themselves, both fail to develop art’s emancipatory role in society. Without rethinking artistic experience in a way that places emphasis on reason’s capacity for critical and constructive self-understanding and without reconsidering art theory in a way that brings back the emphasis on the emancipatory role of rational communication, contemporary art, far from contributing to the revitalization of the public sphere, will contribute to its decline. (shrink)

During the last twenty years in Latin America, there has been a rise in governments drawn from self-defining progressive political currents. Consequently a revitalization is underway of the debate on the viability, pertinence, and characteristics of the welfare state in the twenty-first century. In this context, the present article explores emerging social practices that redefine the various senses of the public space; practices that go beyond nation states, situated in a global territoriality, articulating languages and eliciting emotions capable (...) of producing new socialities. The multitude is discussed as a social subject capable of generating transformative practices. Specifically, the article analyzes the way in which the singularities of occupations raise further questions for nation states. The analysis focuses on global movements such as #Occupy camping out on squares. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Taking Up Space:Museum Exploration in the Twenty-First CenturyTiffany Sutton (bio)Museums have become a crucible for questions of the role that traditional art and art history should play in contemporary art. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in the nineteenth century that museums can be no more than mausoleums for effete (fine) art.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, however, curators dispelled such blanket pessimism by showing that what keeps historical art (...) museums, both comprehensive and modern, "alive" and relevant in the modern art world are the things that curators do with the artworks in their collections.2 In certain cases, I will argue in this article, the focus on artworks and the relationship between them can be rewardingly shifted onto the spatial aspect of the museum. I will try to show what such a shift of focus entails, show that it involves a gestalt shift (in Wittgenstein's terms, the "dawning of an aspect"), and illustrate the limits within which this can arise.3 The foremost of these limiting factors is museum architecture, and I will discuss this to the extent that it determines the limits of what curators can do. How architects do things with museums, however, lies outside the scope of this article.An Art Historical Heuristic Gets a Curatorial MakeoverNineteenth-century art museums typically were vast, labyrinthine, and built to assume the shape of a comprehensive art historical narrative, so they were easy targets for ideologues drawn to vibrant modern artworks and the controversy surrounding them. At the turn of the twentieth century new commercial galleries developed a distinctively modern mode of display in which individual artworks were showcased with plenty of space around them.4 Had existing museums changed their ways to accommodate these developments, the momentum of a new aesthetic of flatness, surface, [End Page 87] and yet purer forms of conceptualism would have been lost. It was not a time for absorption and deflation: new museums, no less monumental and historical but smaller and with fewer volumes, were commissioned to give modern art the appearance of a fresh start.5 The weightless upward mobility of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, modeled in 1945 and opened to the public in 1959, consummated this trend of the first half of the twentieth century and gave it its purest form. What the building spurt revealed was that as art changes, it demands to be reflected in its surroundings, not merely accommodated. That the response was to build new museums rather than new wings suggests the inner workings of the principle—call it "curatorial heuristic one"—that, whereas art history is fluid and simply flows forward with new developments, museums are not of this nature; they can become effete.The curatorial revision of this heuristic was a century in coming. As often happens when emerging movements are yet underdetermined, modernism suppressed in its beginnings the background factor that would seem to entail the end of modern art when finally brought into focus: the very context of display that had once set it apart. Duchamp's Readymades (1913) gave the initial nod (or wink) to the gallery context; it was, however, ignored, as a suppressed punch line, until art history was ready to concede the importance of the context of display—not in the gallery, but in the museum—to a site-specific artwork by Richard Serra: his Splashing and Prop (1968). With the museum's framing context and, concomitantly, the importance of the curator's work conceded, the barrier that had kept lesser masterpieces in the basement (or out of the museum) were removed. Unearthed, these began to circulate, and attention centered on the relation in which they stood to better-known artworks, either as suppressed alternates or as descendants of an artistic lineage. So postmodern sprawl began, with the display of multiple alternative art histories drawing, as modernism had, on available display conventions for periodizing according to internal principles (period, school, genre, style) such that detection of them devolved upon the viewer.When public uses for the new public museums began to diversify (from an historical/educational focus to aesthetic/educational and cultural/political ones), principles for ordering artworks were... (shrink)

Brazilian society has frequently been described as polarized during the country’s recent political and economic crisis. In 2018, a wave of opposition to the centre-left Workers’ Party culminated in the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist who portrays the political left as a malevolent force in Brazilian society. In this paper I explore this polarization through drawing on ethnographic research with the Homeless Workers’ Movement (Movimento de Trablhadores Sem-Teto, MTST), a large urban social movement that develops settlements (...) on underutilized land in the city, and a prominent civil society opponent of Bolsonaro. More specifically, I examine a key site of socio-spatial tension in São Paulo, Paulista Avenue, as a new political right came to predominate on the city’s main thoroughfare during the campaign to impeach the Workers’ Party President, Dilma Rousseff. I show how the perceived intolerance of the mobilized right helped to establish new normative codes that regulated the political symbolism which could be displayed in public spaces. Lastly, I consider how the vilification of the MTST in particular and the political left in general by the new right is embedded in broader structures of stigmatization. (shrink)

versity is full of all manner of public activity: students talking, reading, dozing, playing cards; tables representing a wide variety of ethnic communities and clubs advertising their functions, soliciting membership, and serving as gathering places; and—~most directly related to the topic of this essay—students advocating mainly radical political causes, passing out material exposing and denouncing putative (and more often than not correctly imputed) wrongdoings by authorities ranging from the university administration to the federal government and beyond. It is (...) true that both university officials and students making use of this space count on its campus setting to informally discourage use of it by other than students, but the space admits of an indefinite variety of uses, and at least no members of the.. (shrink)

This article investigates the specific cultural and collaborative nature of China’s public spaces and how they are formed through performative appropriations. Collective cultural practices as political participation were encouraged during the Mao era when cultural activities played a key role in workers’ education and participation. Since the opening-up period, performance in public space has become widespread in China and creates alternative community spaces that constitute alternatives to capitalist spaces of consumption. Using Habermas’s theory of (...) communicative action, we argue that cultural practices performed in public space create a proletariat public sphere that plays a wider role in governance and China’s democratization. Further, the article examines performative practices in public space. It traces the popular activity of public square dancing through history and counters this research with a parallel study of a much younger skateboarding practice. The two practices are very differently rooted. Yet both practices appear to move through cycles of disruption and appropriation, followed by an affirmation of governmental rule. The studies reveal that western ideas of citizenship and individual leisure are less applicable. Public spaces are largely managed through collaborative practices, whereas contemporary scholarship reaffirms Fei Xiaotong’s description of Chinese society as individuals positioned within a complex network of concentric circles. (shrink)

This chapter attends to somaesthetic expressions occurring irrespective of knowledge of the movement, using Mandalay’s Water Festival and Cairo’s Arab Spring as case studies. These celebrations and protests feature bodies creatively gravitating around urban structures and according to emotional, cultural concerns, all of this together defining city spaces for a time. Bodies also become venues for artistic refashioning, for example, through creative conversion of injuries into celebratory badges of dissent. Geared almost therapeutically towards life-improvement—albeit sometimes implicitly—these celebrations and protests (...) also have meliorative aspects that mark the somaesthetic movement. Moreover, they have a shared, public character stressed by Shusterman, but arguably lost on many because of his interest in self-focused meditation and the popular appeal of such exercises among those interested in body practices. (shrink)

New words have found their way into the public sphere: we now commonly talk about “confinement”, “barrier-gesture” or “distancing”. The very idea of public space has been transformed: with restrictions on movement and interaction in public; with the reintegration of lives (certain lives) into the home (if there is one) and private space; with the publicization of private space through internet relationships; with the cities’ space occupied, during confinement, by so-called “essential” workers; with the restriction of gatherings (...) and political demonstrations in public space. With these and other recent changes, it is imperative to revisit the concept of public space, which continues to be used as if it were self-evident, despite its profound transformation over the past few decades, in a process of realization and “literalization”. No longer just a comfortable metaphor for reasonable debates, public space has become a concrete reality in the 21th century. This transformation in the various phenomena, such as the occupation of squares and public spaces; the demand for spaces of conversation and expression for those without a voice; the transition of private matters into the public realm through verbal expression; and the expression and circulation of public issues within popular cultures. As a result, the question of public space is increasingly intertwined with that of private spaces, such as the home or individual subjectivities, forming an internal, logical relationship. (shrink)

This article questions the nature of the philosophical commitment to the problem of 'the public' in modernity. To what extent does the natural form of the public determine the use and value of the instruments of pragmatism in the public-private divide. In this interpretation, John Dewey's ideas about 'the public' are presented in terms of how to solve a specific problem through what he sees as 'co-operative inquiry'. The article also examines the role of public (...) space in the process of democratization through the potential of co-operative inquiry. More often than not, it appears that the politics of public space may be both detrimental and/or beneficial to its end-users in China, Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the rest of Asia. (shrink)