			Home About us Contact

Various Schools (various + school)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Cooperative forms of governance: Problems of democratic accountability in complex environments

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2003
YANNIS PAPADOPOULOS
Various schools of research in public policy (the literature on ,governance' and its continental counterparts) are converging to focus on the growth of policy styles based on cooperation and partnership in networks, instead of on vertical control by the state. This article focuses on issues of democratic accountability and responsiveness with these governance arrangements. It argues that until recently the legitimacy of governance networks was not at the forefront of theoretical developments, even though the ,democratic deficit' of governance is problematic both for normative and for pragmatic reasons. There is now increased sensitivity to this problem, but the remedies presented in the literature are unsatisfactory, and critiques of governance presuppose a somewhat idealised image of representative democracy in terms of accountability or responsiveness of decision-makers. They also fail to offer adequate solutions to some of the central legitimacy problems of policy-making in complex societies. [source]

Student Conflict Resolution, Power "Sharing" in Schools, and Citizenship Education

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 2 2001
Kathy Bickmore
One goal of elementary education is to help children develop the skills, knowledge, and values associated with citizenship. However, there is little consensus about what these goals really mean: various schools, and various programs within any school, may promote different notions of "good citizenship." Peer conflict mediation, like service learning, creates active roles for young people to help them develop capacities for democratic citizenship (such as critical reasoning and shared decision making). This study examines the notions of citizenship embodied in the contrasting ways one peer mediation model was implemented in six different elementary schools in the same urban school district. This program was designed to foster leadership among diverse young people, to develop students' capacities to be responsible citizens by giving them tangible responsibility, specifically the power to initiate and carry out peer conflict management activities. In practice, as the programs developed, some schools did not share power with any of their student mediators, and other schools shared power only with the kinds of children already seen as "good" students. All of the programs emphasized the development of nonviolent community norms,a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. A few programs began to engage students in critical reasoning and/or in taking the initiative in influencing the management of problems at their schools, thus broadening the space for democratic learning. These case studies help to clarify what our visions of citizenship (education) may look and sound like in actual practice so that we can deliberate about the choices thus highlighted. [source]

Transnational political action and ,global civil society' in practice: the case of Oxfam

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2009
CRAIG BERRY
Abstract The term ,global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice , due largely, in the case of liberal-cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti-political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors. [source]

AGAINST THE CELEBRATION OF DIVERSITY

BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY, Issue 1 2008
Farhad Dalal
abstract The paper enquires into the pertinence of the ,diversity' agenda for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. It critically tracks how multiculturalism, anti-racism and ,diversity' emerge from the philosophy of liberalism. Some of the contradictions and difficulties in each of these discourses are highlighted. The paper then argues that the various schools of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis tend to be intolerant of each other's world-views and forms of practice. And finally, the paper takes up how three different strands within the profession might view, and so respond to the theme of diversity in the clinic. [source]