Public Sphere (public + sphere)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


HABERMAS, REASON, AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION: THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

THE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 6 2007
PHIL ENNS
First page of article [source]


Laïcité in Reverse: Mono-Religious Democracies and the Issue of Religion in the Public Sphere

CONSTELLATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY, Issue 1 2010
Nadia Urbinati
First page of article [source]


Fujimori's Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere by Catherine M. Conaghan

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2008
Liisa L. North
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2002
U Kalpagam
Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality's governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte-face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason. [source]


New Directions in British Art History of the Eighteenth Century

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2008
Douglas Fordham
This essay examines new developments in the history of eighteenth-century British art since the publication of David Solkin's Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England in 1993. While Solkin's account of an urban professional class recasting a civic humanist ideology in its own polite and commercial image continues to hold tremendous sway in the field, this state of the field article identifies three major trends that have tempered and challenged that account. Recent scholarship dealing with gender, space, and empire has subtly reoriented the field towards a more inclusive notion of artistic agency and reception, a more synchronic and spatial approach, and an increasingly global perspective. [source]


Milton's Sexualized Woman and the Creation of a Gendered Public Sphere

MILTON QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2001
Maria Magro
[source]


PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY: This Is Our Culture: Anthropology and the Public Sphere in Malaysia

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2010
Eric C. Thompson
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Anthropology in the Public Sphere, 2008: Emerging Trends and Significant Impacts

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009
Melissa Checker
ABSTRACT The themes, trends, and significant events of 2008 demonstrate that anthropology has established a new foothold in the public sphere,one that makes the most of novel forms of communication to reach far beyond the ivory tower to disseminate knowledge widely and freely. This review focuses on six topical areas of robust anthropological research in 2008 that also addressed some of the year's most pressing problems and issues, including the following: (1) war and peace; (2) climate change; (3) natural, industrial, and development-induced disaster recovery; (4) human rights; (5) health disparities; and (6) racial understanding, politics, and equity in the United States. It concludes by addressing some emerging issues in 2009 that especially require anthropological attention and insight, if we are to move beyond "business as usual."[Keywords: practicing anthropology, public anthropology, 2009 trends, anthropological impacts] [source]


Museums, Information and the Public Sphere

MUSEUM INTERNATIONAL, Issue 4 2002
Barbara Lang Rottenberg
[source]


Parliament in the Public Sphere: A View of Serial Coverage at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century

PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 1 2007
MICHAEL HARRIS
First page of article [source]


Thinking for Thousands: Emerson's Theory of Political Representation in the Public Sphere

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2005
Hans Von Rautenfeld
This article develops Emerson's theory of representative democracy as it applies to a deliberative public sphere. By highlighting the democratic content of Emerson's thought, this article challenges tradition readings of Emerson that claim his thought to be elitist or antipolitical. According to Emerson, the public sphere is structured by representative individuals who are analogous to those representatives found in electoral institutions. These representatives make public the beliefs and values present in their "constituencies." They deliberate in the name of their constituencies, saying what their constituencies could and would say, were they to also directly engage in such deliberations. Representative individuals are tied to their constituencies through bonds of "sympathy and likeness." The moral consequences of a representative public sphere include the development of a sense of deliberative justice on the part of the citizenry and the reduction of the possibility of domination and oppression by ideologically oriented elites. [source]


Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 4 2002
Catherine R. Squires
Many theorists propose that there are multiple, coexisting "subaltern" counterpublic spheres. However, most discussions of these subaltern counterpublics rely on group identity markers to differentiate between these spheres and do not provide alternative means for distinguishing between subaltern public spheres. This essay presents an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres through an exploration of the history of the African American public sphere. Three types of marginal publics, enclave, counterpublic, and satellite, are defined as examples of how we might incorporate considerations of the kinds of resources different publics have available to them. This vocabulary facilitates more flexible descriptions of publics that are normally defined by identity and allows for more comprehensive comparisons across public spheres. [source]


Spatial Governance and Working Class Public Spheres: The Case of a Chartist Demonstration at Hyde Park

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2001
John Michael Roberts
The concepts of the public sphere and public space have gained increasing purchase within social history. This paper contributes to this literature by theoretically developing a critical approach to both concepts. By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin circle, as well as Marxism and Poststructuralism, the paper suggests that public spheres under capitalism are structured through the basic contradiction between capital and labour. Each public sphere may then be seen as a refracted dialogic and spatial form of this basic contradiction, and is then best viewed as a contradictory spatial entity that obtains its unique identity through different "accents" and "word signs". The capitalist state must aim to regulate, through governance and law, dialogue within a public sphere. By focusing on the Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park, London in 1855, I show how these theories can be employed to explore how a radical social movement appropriated space by developing a working class public sphere. [source]


Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 4 2002
Catherine R. Squires
Many theorists propose that there are multiple, coexisting "subaltern" counterpublic spheres. However, most discussions of these subaltern counterpublics rely on group identity markers to differentiate between these spheres and do not provide alternative means for distinguishing between subaltern public spheres. This essay presents an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres through an exploration of the history of the African American public sphere. Three types of marginal publics, enclave, counterpublic, and satellite, are defined as examples of how we might incorporate considerations of the kinds of resources different publics have available to them. This vocabulary facilitates more flexible descriptions of publics that are normally defined by identity and allows for more comprehensive comparisons across public spheres. [source]


Mediation and feminism: Common values and challenges

CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2000
Marsha Lichtenstein
Mediation, and transformative mediation in particular, share several values, despite feminist criticisms of mediation. This article discusses three of the elements that mediation and feminism share. Both promote self-determination, both encourage strengthening values such as empathy and caring in the public sphere, and both deal with the issue of power and have attempted to redefine power to include behaviors other than dominance. Because feminism has gone through the growing pains of shifting from a homogeneous and middle-class movement to a colorful pluralistic social movement, it may serve as a model for the mediation movement as it expands and faces the demands of a demo-graphically diverse constituency. [source]


SPECTACLES OF SEXUALITY: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
CYMENE HOWE
ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of "televisionary" activism,a mediated form of social justice messaging that attempts to transform culture. Focusing on a locally produced and very popular television show in Nicaragua, I consider how social justice knowledge is produced through television characters' scripting and performance. The ideological underpinnings aspire to a dialogic engagement with the audience, as producers aim to both generate public discourse and benefit from audiences' suggestions and active engagement. Several levels of media advocacy interventions are considered including the production, scripting, and translation of transnational material into local registers. Televisionary activism offers challenges to several conservative social values in Nicaragua by placing topics such as abortion, domestic violence, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and lesbianism very explicitly into the public sphere. At the same time, sexual subjects on the small screen must be framed in particular ways, as, for instance, with the homosexual subjects who are carefully coiffed in normalized human dramas. Finally, many of these televisionary tactics draw from and engage with transnational tropes of identity politics, and "gay" and "lesbian" subjectivity in particular, confounding the relationship between real and idealized sexual subjects in Nicaragua. That is, these televisionary tactics "market" transnational identity politics but derive legitimacy through their very "localness." [source]


Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Christina Schwenkel
Recent years have seen the diversification of knowledge, memory, and meaning at former battlefields and other social spaces that invoke the history of the "American War" in Vietnam. Popular icons of the war have been recycled, reproduced, and consumed in a rapidly growing international tourism industry. The commodification of sites, objects, and imaginaries associated with the war has engendered certain rearticulations of the past in the public sphere as the terrain of memory making becomes increasingly transnational. Diverse actors,including tourism authorities, returning U.S. veterans, international tourists, domestic visitors, and guides,engage in divergent practices of memory that complicate, expand, and often transcend dominant modes of historical representation in new and distinct ways. [source]


Changing the Subject: Conversation in Supermax

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2005
Lorna A. Rhodes
Although supermaximum prisons in the United States impose an extreme social exclusion designed to prevent interaction among inmates, some do find ways to talk with one another. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Washington State, I describe conversation in supermax and focus on a theme of persecution of child sex criminals that emerges from prisoners' accounts. I suggest that these facilities constitute a hidden and problematic public sphere in which a discourse of excluded citizenship develops around the figure of the victimized child. In conclusion, I offer a brief "to-do" list for considering the politics of bare life in the supermax prison. [source]


Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2005
Christopher Kelty
This article investigates the social, technical, and legal affiliations among "geeks" (hackers, lawyers, activists, and IT entrepreneurs) on the Internet. The mode of association specific to this group is that of a "recursive public sphere" constituted by a shared imaginary of the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the United States, Europe, and India, I argue that geeks imagine their social existence and relations as much through technical practices (hacking, networking, and code writing) as through discursive argument (rights, identities, and relations). In addition, they consider a "right to tinker" a form of free speech that takes the form of creating, implementing, modifying, or using specific kinds of software (especially Free Software) rather than verbal discourse. [source]


The Artist in Society: Understandings, Expectations, and Curriculum Implications

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2008
RUBÉN A. GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ
ABSTRACT Disparate and contradicting assumptions about culture play a significant role in how the artist is constructed in the public imagination. These assumptions have important implications for how young artists should be educated and for the curriculum of artistic education. In this article, I theorize three conceptions of the role of the artist in society and the challenge they present for artistic education. I discuss three theoretical conceptions: the artist as Cultural "Civilizer," the artist as "Border Crosser," and the artist as "Representator." Although markedly different, these three conceptions all view the artist as an agent playing an active role in society, or a type of "cultural worker." I argue that these different views of the artist are grounded on different cultural discourses, that each of these discourses constructs the artist as an individual in a particular way, and that each view of the artist corresponds to specific institutions that mediate the role of the artist in society. Furthermore, I suggest the implications that each of these views has for the curriculum of artistic education and the preparation of cultural workers. I suggest that a contemporary artistic education grounded on these views should affirm the role of the artist in the public sphere of a democratic society. [source]


Patriotism for Citizens of the Penultimate Superpower

DIALOG, Issue 4 2003
Walter Brueggemann
Abstract: The United States of America confesses its penultimate status as "One nation under God." Yet this relationship,of the ultimacy of God and the penultimacy of nations,is frequently forgotten when foreign policy is crafted. The arrogant autonomy of such superpowers operates on the mistaken conviction that they will not be called into account. But the preacher says otherwise. The Old Testament witness teaches us that there is a grave danger to nations making such unrestricted claims of temporal ultimacy. Any state that imagines that it can use its power in unrestrained ways against any other state or vulnerable population,no matter how weak,misunderstands its place in a world under divine rule. It is thus essential that the preacher, along with the congregation, must dare to recover the rhetoric of prophetic imagination concerning God's governance in the public sphere. Empowered and humbled by the mandate of scripture, the preacher must counter the rhetoric of popular patriotism and witness to God's sovereignty over nations. We may then move beyond analysis to alternative, and finally set our hearts and minds on the evangelical task of empowering the faithful to alternative forms of citizenship. [source]


Who inhabits the European public sphere?

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2007
Winners, losers, opponents in Europeanised political debates, supporters
This article investigates which actors profit from and which actors stand to lose from the Europeanisation of political communication in mass-mediated public spheres. Furthermore, it asks to what extent these effects of Europeanisation can help one to understand collective actors' evaluation of European institutions and the integration process. Data is analysed on some 20,000 political claims by a variety of collective actors, drawn from 28 newspapers in seven European countries in the period 1990,2002, across seven different issue fields with varying degrees of EU policy-making power. The results show that government and executive actors are by far the most important beneficiaries of the Europeanisation of public debates compared to legislative and party actors, and even more so compared to civil society actors, who are extremely weakly represented in Europeanised public debates. The stronger is the type of Europeanisation that is considered, the stronger are these biases. For most actors, a close correspondence is found between how Europeanisation affects their influence in the public debate, on the one hand, and their public support for, or opposition to, European institutions and the integration process, on the other. [source]


Civil Society and the Re-imagination of European Constitutionalism

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2003
Michael A. Wilkinson
Recognising this necessarily dynamic relationship, an essentialist reading of a constitutionalisation of the demos is abandoned, and an examination of the extent to which the dialectic can credibly or legitimately be played out in a supranational ,community' and in the context of an emerging transnational civil society can be undertaken. Rather than seeking credibility or legitimacy through the rationalisation of a community by an ethical consensus as in some forms of republicanism and communitarianism, the dialectic opens up the norms and boundaries of the polity and leads to an understanding of the ,community' in less rigid and more diffuse, even plural, terms. Once understood in this way the possibility emerges for legitimacy to be pursued through a public sphere enlarged by a context-transcending constitutional discourse mediated by transnational civil society. Alternatively the normative ,openness' of the polity might be prioritised and with it the uncertainty/fluidity of the constitutional arrangement itself; in this way the legitimate pursuit of constitutionalism is understood in terms of a never-ending agonistic struggle or experimental practice. [source]


British Masculinities on Trial in the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2008
Louise Carter
This article uses the deluge of pamphlets, public addresses, newspaper articles and sermons addressing the Queen Caroline Affair to construct a case study of the opposing constructions of British masculinity vying for dominance in 1820. The literature surrounding the attempted royal divorce reveals a contest between the libertine example of manhood characterised by George IV and the more sober, chivalrous and respectable image of masculinity increasingly espoused as the British ideal. This episode, therefore, offers an unusually rich insight into contemporary constructions of masculinity and the way in which they were utilised within the public sphere. Moreover, this article argues that such gendered concerns were not only as crucial to motivating opposition to the king's actions as political issues, but that gender concerns and political issues were indivisible, as appropriate manly behaviour in both public and private increasingly came to be seen as a core component of a man's overall reputation and fitness to exercise authority. [source]


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]


Deliberative Democracy and International Labor Standards

GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2003
Archon Fung
Political theorists have argued that the methods of deliberative democracy can help to meet challenges such as legitimacy, effective governance, and citizen education in local and national contexts. These basic insights can also be applied to problems of international governance such as the formulation, implementation, and monitoring of labor standards. A participatory and deliberative democratic approach to labor standards would push the labor,standards debate into the global public sphere. It would seek to create broad discussion about labor standards that would include not only firms and regulators, but also consumers, nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and others. This discussion could potentially improve (1) the quality of labor standards by incorporating considerations of economic context and firm capability, (2) their implementation by bringing to bear not only state sanctions but also political and market pressures, and (3) the education and understanding of citizens. Whereas the role of public agencies in state,centered approaches is to formulate and enforce labor standards, central authorities in the decentralized,deliberative approach would foster the transparency of workplace practices to spur an inclusive, broad, public conversation about labor standards. To the extent that a substantive consensus around acceptable behavior emerges from that conversation, public power should also enforce those minimum standards. [source]


Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and Interregnum

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 197 2004
Lloyd Bowen
This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century. [source]


Origins of the French Revolution

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2007
Gail Bossenga
There is at present no comprehensive interpretation of the origins of the French Revolution. Because of the fragmented state of the argument, this article explores several perspectives that have influenced research on the Revolution's origins including Alexis de Tocqueville's view of the state; research on the politics of the court at Versailles and the parlements; fiscal origins by institutional economic historians; and cultural approaches, including the analysis of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas. It concludes that the collapse of the Old Regime was the result of a variety of converging causes, many of which had deep roots in the institutional structure of the old regime. The state itself generated institutional contradictions by both reinforcing privilege and implementing policies that undercut privilege in the quest for greater administrative efficiency. Ministerial incompetence combined with new forces, including enhanced international pressure from efficient British war finance and the growing appeal to public opinion, made reform increasingly difficult and created conditions favorable to revolution when the state went bankrupt in 1789. [source]


Bridging the Social and the Symbolic: Toward a Feminist Politics of Sexual Difference

HYPATIA, Issue 3 2000
EMILY ZAKIN
By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics. [source]


Negotiating Islam: Conservatism, Splintered Authority and Empowerment in Urban Bangladesh

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2010
Samia Huq
Bangladesh has recently been seeing a rise in religiosity which has been treated as problematic, anti-secular and anti-progressive within the public sphere. Various writers describe this trend as having a disempowering effect on women and negating their self-expression. However, underlying these views is the assumption that the assertion of women's agency is not enough if it does not confront existing structures of relations. This article asks whether it is possible that in seeking changes in certain aspects of one's life, existing gender relations are not necessarily transformed, but indirectly challenged and reconfigured? The conclusion suggests that rather than a polarisation of the secular and religious ways of living most people are in fact in between, negotiating between the two camps, and borrowing ideas and ways from both. [source]