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Political Identity (political + identity)
Selected AbstractsEuropean Union Constitution-Making, Political Identity and Central European ReflectionsEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005It analyses both the temporal and spatial dimensions of constitution-making and addresses the problems of political identity related to ethnic divisions and civic demos. It starts by summarising the major arguments supporting the Union's constitution-making project and emphasises the Union's symbolic power as a polity built on the principles of civil society and parliamentary democracy. The EU's official rejection of ethnically based political identity played an important symbolic role in post-Communist constitutional and legal transformations in Central Europe in the 1990s. In the following part, the text analyses the temporal dimension of the EU's identity-building and constitution-making and emphasises its profoundly future-oriented structure. The concept of identity as the ,future in process' is the only option of how to deal with the absence of the European demos. Furthermore, it initiates the politically much-needed constitution-making process. The following spatial analysis of this process emphasises positive aspects of the horizontal model of constitution-making, its elements in the Convention's deliberation and their positive effect on the Central European accession states. The article concludes by understanding the emerging European identity as a multi-level identity of civil political virtues surrounded by old loyalties and traditions, which supports the conversational model of liberal democratic politics, reflects the continent's heterogeneity and leads to the beneficial combination of universal principles and political realism. [source] European Political Identity and the Problem of Cultural DiversityJOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 3 2000Noël O'Sullivan First page of article [source] Parliamentary Guides, Political Identity and the Presentation of Modern Politics, 1832,1846*PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 3 2003Joseph Coohill First page of article [source] The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identitiesGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2007DAVID FEATHERSTONE Abstract In this article I consider the relations between historical and contemporary forms of transnational political networks. I contest accounts that counterpose a networked present against a more settled and bounded past, arguing that this contrast rests on a problematic temporalization of difference in the construction of political identities. I consider how this temporalization produces particular accounts of relations between space, politics and identity. Drawing on the insurgent imaginative geography of resistance in C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, I argue for a focus on the dynamic geographies of connection formed through transnational networks. I develop this position through a discussion of the relations of the London Corresponding Society, formed in London in 1792, to transnational routes of political activists, organizational forms and ideas. This account highlights the multiple political identities crafted through transnational political networks. I conclude by outlining elements of a ,usable past' for contemporary counter-global struggles. [source] Developing network indicators for ideological landscapes from the political blogosphere in South KoreaJOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 4 2008Han Woo PARK This paper investigates hyperlink patterns in the South Korean political blogosphere. Using sampling from the blog sidebar hyperlinks of elected politicians (National Assemblymen), the top 79 elite citizen blogs were selected. Two data sets were manually compiled during January, 2007: (a) links between politicians and citizens, and (b) links amongst citizens. A variety of social network analytical methods were then applied. The results show that more top blogs have reciprocal links with politicians than have unidirectional links. The structure of hyperlink interconnectivity suggests that the ruling Uri party affiliated blogs are key in the blog network. For example, the blogs tied with the Uri party have a higher centrality and are more densely connected. Network diagrams also suggest that the top blogs are polarized by party. However, some blogs are located at the center of the Uri and GNP clusters and are connected to both camps. In other words, there are a number of citizen blogs that link to both the Uri and GNP members, because their political identities are not completely shaped but also remain between 2 different ideologies. This suggests that binary opposition in online political discourse is slowly changing. [source] The Dual State: The Unruly "Subordinate", Caste, Community And Civil Service Recruitment In North India, 1930,1955JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1-2 2007WILLIAM GOULD It argues that social relationships between different cadres of the revenue and police services effectively created a bureaucratic space in which citizens' approaches to the state recreated forms of ambiguity in the reach and authority of state power. In this sense, it provides a deeper historical basis for anthropological and sociological work on the nature of the "fuzzy" everyday state in postcolonial India. But it develops this literature further, arguing that important structural changes over independence in 1947, also transformed the ways in which caste and community lobby groups represented their corporate interests through bureaucratic recruitment. These lobby groups, as a result of disjunctions in state power and discourses, between centre, province and locality, were often able to subvert systems of caste and community reservation. In the process, their actions emphasized the inability of the state at central and provincial levels to adjust to local political identities that depended on hybridity. [source] Urban Space and the Mediation of Political Action in Nepal: Local Television, Ritual Processions and Political Violence as Technologies of EnchantmentTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2008Michael Wilmore This paper examines how political identities in the town of Tansen in the central western district of Palpa, Nepal, are mediated by contrasting forms of cultural and material practice: religious and secular processions and programs made by a local, cable-television production organisation. These practices and their materiality are conceptualised as ,technologies of enchantment' (Gell 1992) through which political culture is made manifest in urban space. Paradigmatically ,modern' and ,traditional' technologies are juxtaposed in order to analyse the different ways that political action is embodied within the community. The loss of life in Tansen and the destruction of buildings associated with these practices in the course of the 10-year Maoist insurgency provide a tragic confirmation of the conclusions reached in this paper. [source] ,No one gives you a chance to say what you are thinking': finding space for children's agency in the UK asylum systemAREA, Issue 2 2010Heaven Crawley Drawing on research undertaken with separated children seeking asylum in the UK, this paper explores the ways in which children's political identities and experiences have been conceptualised in procedures for determining who is , and is not , in need of protection under international refugee law. The paper focuses in particular on the experiences of separated children during the asylum interview. It is suggested that the conduct of the interview not only indicates a basic lack of humanity and care in engaging with the experiences of separated asylum-seeking children, but also a particular conceptualisation of ,childhood' that undermines the ability of children to fully articulate their experiences and to secure access to the protection to which they are entitled. The consequence of this approach is not only that separated asylum-seeking children are significantly less likely than adults to be granted refugee status, but that children who express political views and agency may not be considered to be children at all. [source] Explaining the Rise of Class Politics in VenezuelaBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2009OLIVER HEATH The sudden rise to power of leftist former coup leader Hugo Chávez and the subsequent politicisation of social class raises a number of interesting questions about the sources of class politics and political change in Venezuela. Using nationally representative survey data over time, this article considers different explanations for the rise of class politics. It argues that explanations for the politicisation of class can best be understood in terms of ,top-down' approaches that emphasise the role of political agency in reshaping and re-crafting political identities, rather than more ,bottom-up' factors that emphasise the demands that originate within the electorate. The economic crises during the 1990s undermined support for the existing parties, but it did not create a politically salient class-based response. Rather, it created the electoral space that facilitated new actors to enter the political stage and articulate new issue dimensions. [source] Shopping in Jenin: women, homes and political persons in the GalileeCITY & SOCIETY, Issue 2 2001Tania Forte For the past fifteen years, Palestinian women from the Galilee, who are citizens of Israel, have been going to Jenin, a large town in the West Bank, in order to shop. These excursions have profoundly modified home life, gender relations, and domestic and political identities. This paper examines the very processes by which women's shopping activities significantly contribute to the making and transformation of the household and social roles. Moreover, this new mobility among women has spurred both men and women in the Galilee to reflect upon citizenship, nationalism, and modernity. Thus an in,depth analysis of shopping provides insights on the relationship between consumption and social production, on the one hand, and political identities on the other. [Consumption, shopping, women, Israel, Palestinians] [source] Defining Political Community and Rights to Natural Resources in BotswanaDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2009Amy R. Poteete ABSTRACT Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), once presented as the best way to protect common pool natural resources, now attracts a growing chorus of critiques that either question its underlying assumptions or emphasize problems related to institutional design. These critiques overlook connections between the definition of rights to natural resources and membership in political communities. The potential for competing definitions of political identity and rights across natural resources arises when property rights regimes differ across natural resources and these different systems of rights appeal to alternative definitions of community. In Botswana, the entangling of natural resource policy with identity politics contributed to a partial recentralization of CBNRM in 2007. [source] European Union Constitution-Making, Political Identity and Central European ReflectionsEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005It analyses both the temporal and spatial dimensions of constitution-making and addresses the problems of political identity related to ethnic divisions and civic demos. It starts by summarising the major arguments supporting the Union's constitution-making project and emphasises the Union's symbolic power as a polity built on the principles of civil society and parliamentary democracy. The EU's official rejection of ethnically based political identity played an important symbolic role in post-Communist constitutional and legal transformations in Central Europe in the 1990s. In the following part, the text analyses the temporal dimension of the EU's identity-building and constitution-making and emphasises its profoundly future-oriented structure. The concept of identity as the ,future in process' is the only option of how to deal with the absence of the European demos. Furthermore, it initiates the politically much-needed constitution-making process. The following spatial analysis of this process emphasises positive aspects of the horizontal model of constitution-making, its elements in the Convention's deliberation and their positive effect on the Central European accession states. The article concludes by understanding the emerging European identity as a multi-level identity of civil political virtues surrounded by old loyalties and traditions, which supports the conversational model of liberal democratic politics, reflects the continent's heterogeneity and leads to the beneficial combination of universal principles and political realism. [source] HIV, AIDS and human services: exploring public attitudes in West Hollywood, CaliforniaHEALTH & SOCIAL CARE IN THE COMMUNITY, Issue 2 2000Robin M. Law Abstract The provision of human services associated with HIV and AIDS has been a controversial issue in Western countries, given the degree of stigma attached to AIDS, and the high level of public concern about the possibility of contracting HIV. Previous research on attitudes to controversial human services has identified some key characteristics associated with negative attitudes and resistant ,not-in-my-backyard' behaviour. Attitudes towards HIV- and AIDS-related services may be affected by other factors as well; in particular, they may be related to self-identified sexual orientation, given the role of HIV and AIDS in the emergence of a strong gay political identity. However, little research has yet been conducted to explore how knowledge and attitudes towards these services in particular localities are associated with a range of characteristics of local residents, including sensitive information such as sexual orientation and household HIV status, and how these might contribute to the creation of more accepting environments. This paper provides an analysis of a 1994 city-wide survey conducted in West Hollywood, California. This small city has a large and politically-organized gay and lesbian population, as well as significant numbers of residents in other, diverse social groupings, and has experienced high levels of HIV infection and AIDS relative to the surrounding Los Angeles County. Although issues of HIV and AIDS service provision have been well publicized in the city, residents may be expected to hold rather different sets of knowledge about and attitudes to these services, depending on their personal characteristics. Analysis of the survey data reveals that a large proportion of residents of West Hollywood rated HIV and AIDS services as very important, but there were interesting differences among groups. Most notably, variation in knowledge of services and attitudes to services (rating of importance) was particularly associated with age and language, but was less affected by sexual orientation and household HIV status. [source] John Marshall Harlan's Political MemoirJOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY, Issue 3 2008PETER SCOTT CAMPBELL Near the end of his life, John Marshall Harlan wrote a number of biographical essays, presumably at the request of his children. Most of the essays relate to his experiences in the Civil War. The essay reprinted here instead recounts Harlan's political career before he joined the Supreme Court. Although he rarely won any elections and only held a couple of offices, Harlan's political odyssey is significant in that it shows how his social views were formed. Harlan's transformation from a staunch anti-abolitionist to a civil-rights advocate can be viewed as a series of reactions against various opponents as he struggled to find his political identity after the collapse of the Whig party in the 1850s. [source] D(en)ying narratives: death, identity and the body politicLEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2000Patrick Hanafin One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic. [source] The lenses of nationhood: an optical model of identityNATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 3 2008ERIC KAUFMANN ABSTRACT. This paper tries to make the case for a model of political identity based on an optical metaphor, which is especially applicable to nations. Human vision can be separated into sentient object, lenses and inbuilt mental ideas. This corresponds well to identity processes in which ,light' from a bounded territorial referent is refracted through various lenses (ideological, material, psychological) to focus in certain ways on particular symbolic resources like genealogy, history, culture or political institutions. Distinguishing between referent, lenses and resources helps us more precisely situate many hitherto disparate problems of national identity. These include the ,ethnic-civic' dilemma, the mystery of national identity before nationalism, and the relationship between local and national, and individual and collective, identities. The model also clarifies the place of universalist ideology, which currently fits poorly within the leading culturalist and materialist theories of nationalism. [source] Producing North and South: a political geography of hydro development in QuébecTHE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 2 2004Caroline Desbiens Since the 1970s, the tapping of James Bay's hydroelectric potential has been synonymous with the tapping of divergent national imaginaries for native and non-native people in Québec. Exploitation of natural resources in the region has activated different narratives of political identity for each community. I explore this evolving political context by examining how, for each group, water has emerged simultaneously as a physical entity possessing economic value and a social artefact supporting the consolidation of national boundaries. I do so by analysing three phases of changing relationships around resource management, namely: hydroelectric development on the La Grande river in the 1970s; the Cree opposition to Great Whale in the 1990s; and the recent agreement concerning a new relationship between the two parties. In each of these phases, nature has been both the symbolic and material tie that binds different national identities and materialises their boundaries. While these are not boundaries in the traditional geopolitical understanding of the term, the forging of an equitable framework of development in the region depends on the recognition of nature as a historical and political formation that answers to different sets of national preoccupations. Depuis les années 70, le développement hydroélectrique de la Baie James a favorisé l'expression de deux imaginaires nationaux dans la province, celui des autochtones en parallèle avec celui des non-autochtones. L'exploitation des ressources naturelles de la région a donné lieu à des récits identitaires propres à chaque communauté. J'explore les changements dynamiques de ce contexte politique en examinant comment, pour chacun de ces groupes, l'eau est à la fois une entité physique possédant une certaine valeur économique, ainsi qu'un objet social capable de consolider les frontières nationales de chaque peuple. L'analyse se fait à travers trois phases de gérance des ressources: la construction du Complexe La Grande dans les années 70; l'opposition des Cris au projet Grande Baleine dans les années 90; et la signature récente d'une nouvelle entente entre les deux parties. Dans chacune de ces phases, la nature a constitué un terrain à la fois symbolique et matériel consolidant des frontières nationales divergentes. Même s'il ne s'agit pas de frontières ,géopolitiques' au sens propre du terme, la création d'une structure de développement équitable dans la région exige que la nature soit perçue dans toute sa dimension historique et politique afin de dégager les différentes priorités nationales qui s'expriment en son nom. [source] Work, Identity, and Stigma Management in an Italian Mental Health CommunityANTHROPOLOGY OF WORK REVIEW, Issue 1 2006Sara M. Bergstresser Abstract When mental illness prevents an individual from working, the economic burden is obvious, but little attention has been paid to the accompanying loss of social identity. This paper addresses the meanings of work and unemployment for participants in an Italian community mental health center, and it evaluates the role of work therapy in an agricultural setting as a way to regain some social aspects of work or professional identity. The study is based on over a year of anthropological fieldwork in the Province of Bergamo, Northern Italy, conducted to investigate the relationship between community-based mental health care, social stigma of mental illness, and the social sphere in everyday life. The social position of the individual at the time of job loss is significant in his or her professional expectations while in the community center. Those who had previously worked in manual or farming capacities found this type of work therapy to be a helpful means of social participation. On the other hand, expectations based on educational, social, and economic hierarchies persist for individuals within mental health communities. For those individuals with high education, manual labor violated professional expectations, and the reality of their employability provided a conflict between social participation and perceived status group. The stigma of unemployment is also addressed in relation to political identity and desire for worker status. [source] Fear and loathing in Kansas City: Political harassment and the making of moderates in America's abortion wars (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 4 2010Alexander Thomas T. Smith The pro-life movement regularly employs tactics of political harassment in its campaign against abortion. As the murder of the controversial abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, demonstrated last year, such tactics often betray a potential for violence. This paper explores how the militant tactics of the pro-life movement in the 1990s have contributed to the formation of a ,new' political identity in Kansas politics: that of the moderate Republican. But for those that seek to counter-mobilize against the Christian right, the political stakes remain high. [source] The Disappearance of the State from "Livable" Urban SpacesANTIPODE, Issue 5 2009Katherine B. Hankins Abstract:, This paper examines the absence of the state from the discourses and practices of "livable" urban spaces. Drawing from an ethnography of Atlantic Station, the USA's largest new urbanist infill development, we argue that "livable" urban spaces are increasingly arenas for luxury, theater, and consumption, and that the state, while an important actor in the creation of urban spaces such as Atlantic Station, has largely been made invisible. We see this in the absence of public institutions, such as schools, parks, and libraries, and in the absence of a collective political identity among Atlantic Station patrons. The disappearance of the state in the material spaces of the city suggests that the neoliberal project of individualism and consumerism is transforming the very notion of livability and the democratic possibilities of what makes urban space "livable". [source] The settlement patterns of north-eastern and south-eastern Arabia in late antiquityARABIAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND EPIGRAPHY, Issue 2 2009Michel Mouton The east Arabian settlements in antiquity were never large urban sites. However, they were the main centres of the communities that inhabited that area, interfacing between the nomadic and sedentary societies. A study of the distribution and characteristics of these sites reveals different, complementary functions. They were organized in local networks forming the essential structure of the settlement pattern and delineating the territories of communities having their own political identity. [source] Imagining Europe: political identity and British television coverage of the European economyBRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2000Neil T. Gavin The article considers European economic news coverage on British television and its relationship with the UK public's perceptions of and identity with Europe. Stress is placed on the symbolic content of news about Europe; stories about the economic entitlements offered to citizens within the European Union; and portrayal of material benefits or losses for Britain. The results suggest that coverage offers mixed signals about Europe. As yet, they offer an unlikely platform for the development in the United Kingdom of European solidarity or identity. The results are assessed in the light of the way journalists approach political issues. The implications for statistical modelling of the media's relationship with attitudes towards Europe are also considered. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||