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Political Experiences (political + experience)
Selected AbstractsTrauma as a metaphor: the politics of psychotherapy after September 11PSYCHOTHERAPY AND POLITICS INTERNATIONAL, Issue 1 2005Karen SeeleyArticle first published online: 9 JAN 200 Abstract This paper explores the links between mental health practice and politics by examining the implications of turning persons harmed by an act of mass violence into patients with psychiatric disorders, and of prescribing psychotherapy to treat reactions to terrorism. It first considers the interpretative aspects of diagnosis, the social and political implications of particular diagnostic categories, the history of PTSD, and the phenomenon of medicalization. It then looks at the ways psychotherapists privatize social and political experience by emphasizing the personal consequences of community catastrophes, and by helping individuals transform collective history into personal narratives. In closing, it asks whether mental health discourses depoliticize experience, thereby discouraging political engagement and the development of political consciousness. Copyright © 2005 Whurr Publishers Ltd. [source] Taming the Tiger: Voting Rights and Political Instability in Latin AmericaLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2004Josep M. Colomer ABSTRACT This article discusses the relationship between certain institutional regulations of voting rights and elections, different levels of electoral participation, and the degree of political instability in several Latin American political experiences. A formal model specifies the hypotheses that sudden enlargements of the electorate may provoke high levels of political instability, especially under plurality and other restrictive electoral rules, while gradual enlargements of the electorate may prevent much electoral and political innovation and help stability. Empirical data illustrate these hypotheses. A historical survey identifies different patterns of political instability and stability in different countries and periods, which can be compared with the adoption of different voting rights regulations and electoral rules either encouraging or depressing turnout. [source] 9.,Human Rights: Historical Learning in the Shadow of ViolenceAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Article first published online: 18 FEB 200, Richard T. Peterson This paper emphasizes the historical dimension of human rights understood as a social ethic. Rather than timeless principles, human rights and the universality proper to them emerge in a process of suffering, conflict, political assertion, and institutional change. We can understand them as historical yet also universal by seeing that human rights arise in processes of social learning that take place in an increasingly globalized world. Such learning often has advanced in the face of dramatic violence, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima. But the demands on a global social ethic today are not only a matter of responding to threats and acts of dramatic violence in isolation. Attention to the example of Hiroshima suggests that the problem of violence is bound up with other questions about the regulation of emerging technical powers in a context of inequality and social conflict. To what extent can an ethic centered on human rights provide an ethics that can inform effective responses to these problems? To consider the promise of human rights, we look more closely at the kind of social learning they involve and explore in particular the role of social movements in forging new identities and reciprocities along with normative claims proper to a global public sphere (the anti-apartheid movement provides an example). We go on to see that these political experiences can inform interpretations of historical experience that can inform a widened sense of historical possibilities, both those missed in the past and those that confront us today. While this argument may thicken our sense of the promise of a human rights ethic, it remains speculative, not least because of the limited effectiveness of these norms in practice today. We close with the suggestion that nonetheless a coherent ethical response is possible, one that in the wealthy parts of the globe might take the form of an ethic of democratic responsibility. This would both represent a distinctive kind of learning and perhaps contribute to a wider advance of human rights. [source] The Contributions of Political Life Events to Psychological Distress Among South AfricanPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2000Michelle Slone The psychological consequences of adverse political experiences among South African youth were studied in a sample of 540 black and white adolescents from two age groups, evenly divided by gender. Three questionnaires were administered, measuring exposure to political life events, the presence of symptoms of psychopathology, and stressful personal life events during the previous 5 years. The first hypothesis, predicting a substantial contribution of stressful political experiences to psychopathology, was strongly supported; when stressful personal life events were partialed out, a significant effect for political life events remained both on general distress and symptomatology indices. The second hypothesis of a linear relation between exposure to political life events and severity of distress was also confirmed. The findings underscore the enduring impact on children's mental health of past apartheid policies in South Africa specifically, and adverse political environments in general. [source] | ||||||||||