Private Spheres (private + sphere)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


The multiplicity of citizenship: transnational and local practices and identifications of middle-class migrants

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2010
MARIANNE VAN BOCHOVE
Abstract In this article we focus on local and transnational forms of active citizenship, understood as the sum of all political practices and processes of identification. Our study, conducted among middle-class immigrants in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, indicates that the importance of active transnational citizenship should not be overstated. Among these immigrants, political practices are primarily focused on the local level; political practices directed to the home country appear to be quite rare. However, although transnational activities in the public sphere are rather exceptional, many immigrants do participate in homeland-directed activities in the private sphere. If we look at processes of identification, we see that a majority of the middle-class immigrants have a strong local identity. Many of them combine this local identification with feelings of belonging to people in their home country. [source]


The Child Soldier in North-South Relations,

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009
Lorraine Macmillan
This paper critiques the hegemonic constructions of child soldiers to be found in civil society and Anglophone media accounts. Close examination of these texts reveals that the discourse mirrors Anglophone imaginaries and preoccupations over childhood rather than the distinctive concerns of child soldiers themselves. It claims that the discourse accomplishes considerable political work in buttressing the international order between the global North and South. Furthermore, it asserts that the discourse operates as a site where wider Anglophone fears over the functioning of its personal, "private" sphere can be rehearsed and disciplined. [source]


Religion, Historical Contingencies, and Institutional Conditions of Criminal Punishment: The German Case and Beyond

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 2 2004
Joachim J. Savelsberg
Religion and historical contingencies help explain cross-national and historic variation of criminal law and punishment. Case studies from German history suggest: First, the Calvinist affiliation of early Prussian monarchs advanced the centralization of power, rationalization of government bureaucracy, and elements of the welfare state, factors that are likely to affect punishment. Second, the dominant position of Lutheranism in the German population advanced the institutionalization of a separation of forgiveness in the private sphere versus punishment of "outer behavior" by the state. Third, these principles became secularized in philosophy, jurisprudence, and nineteenth-century criminal codes. Fourth, partly due to historical contingencies, these codes remained in effect into post,World War II Germany. Fifth, the experience of the Nazi regime motivated major changes in criminal law, legal thought, public opinion, and religious ideas about punishment in the Federal Republic of Germany. Religion thus directly and indirectly affects criminal law and punishment, in interaction with historical contingencies, institutional conditions of the state, and other structural factors. [source]


Securing the German Domestic Front in the Second World War: Prosecution of Subversion before the People's Court

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 1 2007
Steven R. Welch
Using a sample of sixty-six cases dealing with defeatist statements tried before the People's Court, this article argues that these subversion cases clearly demonstrate the politicisation of the judicial process under the Nazi regime. The application of an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the term "public", virtually obliterating any notion of a private sphere , as well as a draconian use of the death penalty (two-thirds of defendants were sentenced to death and executed) both provide evidence that the prosecution of subversion can be understood as one component of a broader effort by the Hitler regime to achieve total control over society in pursuit of total war. [source]


Global Transformations and New Conflicts

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2001
Mary Kaldor
Summaries The central argument of this article is that a central feature of post-Cold War conflicts has been the delegitimisation of public authority, interacting with globalisation, through a process which is almost the reverse of state and nation-building. The political economy of the ,new wars' involves a mix of state and non-state, national and international violence. It creates vicious cycles, reinforcing the decline in the formal sector, breaking down the distinction between public and private spheres, and mobilising identity cleavages through strategies of fear and hate directed against civilians. These vicious cycles can only be broken by peace strategies, whose centrepiece, over the longer run, is the restoration of legitimate authority and the democratisation of politics. These strategies cannot, in a world in which the state has been eroded, be confined just to the state, but must also involve many other layers of political authority, from the local to the global. [source]


Taking the Future Seriously: On the Inadequacies of the Framework of Liberalism for Environmental Education

JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2002
Dirk Willem Postma
International reports on environmental policy promote ,education for sustainable development' as an instrument for realising environmental awareness, values and attitudes consistent with the liberal concept of ,sustainable development'. In this paper the ethical and political-philosophical assumptions of (education for) sustainable development will be criticised. First, it will be argued that (Rawlsian) liberal ethics cannot include obligations towards future generations. Second, the commentary focuses on the economic perspective underlying this liberal framework, its anthropocentric bias and the hierarchical distinction between public and private spheres. Third, to offer a more adequate framework for environmental education, some fruitful ideas within neo-republicanism will be examined. [source]


Public Opinion Surveys and the Formation of Privacy Policy

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 2 2003
Oscar H. Gandy Jr.
The laws that condition the boundaries that separate the public from the private spheres shape our expectations of privacy. Public opinion helps to shape the development and implementation of those laws. Commercial firms in the information-intensive industries have been the primary sponsors of public opinion surveys introduced into testimony as assessments of the public's will. Representatives of business and consumer organizations have relied upon the same industry-sponsored surveys to frame their arguments in support of or in opposition to specific privacy policies. In the past 25 years, references to public opinion have been used to frame the public as concerned, differentiated and, most recently, as willing to negotiate their privacy demands. [source]


Diu rîche vrouwe Dîdô (v. 7558): Dido as Exemplar in the Erec-Romance of Hartmann von Aue

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 6 2007
William C. McDonald
Hartmann's narrator reports that Enite rides on an ornamental saddle engraved with scenes from the life of Aeneas, including his tragic liaison with Dido, the Carthaginian queen. A similar, but much truncated scene appears in Erec et Enide of Chrétien de Troyes. Hartmann relies on a sophisticated audience, able to recognize analogies and to draw conclusions. He is indebted both to Ovid and to John of Salisbury, the former identifying Dido as an abandoned woman at the mercy of the wily Aeneas. According to the Ovidian interpretation, Dido's only crime is that she loves to excess. The latter views Dido as the very model of bad governance; she is a failed queen whose slide into amatory idleness has a profound negative effect on her subjects. Critics dispute the significance of the German Dido allusions, uncertain whether the ekphrastic fragments convey an overt message that is relevant to interpreting the text. Most believe that Hartmann aims here to create a resemblance between Enite and Dido; thus Aeneas and Erec would be analogically paired. I argue in this paper that the reverse is true. The images of Dido on Enite's saddle have direct application to Erec, heir to a kingdom, who is meant to learn from Dido's obsessive love what to imitate in her political career, and what to avoid. Erec, like Dido, confounds the public and private spheres, withdrawing after his marriage to Enite from the world of knighthood to a hermetic realm of regal inaction. Dido's image on Enite's saddle is meant to remind Erec of the time when he followed her into erotic idleness, and to point to the future when he, unlike Dido, will follow his sense of honor to thrive as an active monarch. [source]


Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 5 2001
Patricia Springborg
Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms. [source]


What to do with the "Tubby Hubby"?"Obesity," the Crisis of Masculinity, and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada

ANTIPODE, Issue 5 2009
Deborah McPhail
Abstract:, Despite current insistence that obesity is a new problem, obesity and fat were discussed frequently in the medical and popular presses and by state officials during the early Cold War in Canada. Using Kristeva's (1982,,Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) concept of abjection, I argue that Cold War anxieties about fat, and specifically the obesity of white, middle-class men, had less to do with the growing girth of bodies than it did with a post-war crisis in masculinity related to the collapse of the public and private spheres. Through an analysis of fitness regimes and female-administered diets for men, I argue that anti-obesity rhetoric served to assuage dominant worries about degenerating masculinity by reasserting both the gendered division of labour and the white, middle-class, nuclear family as Canadian norms. [source]


Public Concerns , Private Longings: Adolph Menzel's Studio Wall (1872)

ART HISTORY, Issue 2 2002
Françoise Forster-Hahn
While this paper focuses on The Studio Wall (1872), one of the most intriguing paintings by Adolph Menzel, the critical analysis of this one image serves as a window onto central issues of modernity: the disjunction , even rupture , between the public and private spheres in an artist's life and work, the fragmentation of, and ambiguity concerning, traditional aesthetic paradigms, and the reciprocal relation of nationalism to the ever-shifting critical reception of art. Rather than insist on one fixed reading, I shall concentrate on the dynamic processes at work which have alternatively concealed or exposed specific layers of meaning. [source]