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Allen Buchanan argues that a particular set of false factual beliefs, especially when part of a comprehensive ideology, can lead persons to develop ‘morally conservative’ convictions that stand in the way of realising justice even though these persons have a ‘firm grasp of correct principles of justice and a robust commitment to their realisation’. In my remarks, I raise some questions concerning the core argument: How ‘firm’ can a grasp of principles of justice be if a person is blind to the realities of injustice? And how ‘sincerely committed’ to justice can such an injustice-insensitive person be? Alternatively: How firm is that grasp or commitment if one has a radically pessimistic view about human nature so that one does not believe that (egalitarian) justice can or could ever be realised? Secondly, I ask: If such ideologies or false beliefs are in play in reproducing injustice, do they not also ‘mask’ existing injustices?
Scholars and international organizations engaged in institutional reconstruction converge in recognizing political corruption as a cause or a consequence of conflicts. Anticorruption is thus generally considered a centrepiece of institutional reconstruction programmes. A common approach to anticorruption within this context aims primarily to counter the negative political, social, and economic effects of political corruption, or implement legal anticorruption standards and punitive measures. We offer a normative critical discussion of this approach, particularly when it is initiated and sustained by external entities. We recast the focus from an outward to an inward perspective on institutional action and failure centred on the institutional interactions between officeholders. In so doing, we offer the normative tools to reconceptualize anticorruption in terms of an institutional ethics of ‘office accountability’ that draws on an institution’s internal resources of self-correction as per the officeholders’ interrelated work.
Unemployment and political trust across 24 Western democracies: evidence on a welfare state paradox
(2021)
Set against the backdrop of the Great Recession, the paper explores the interplay of unemployment experiences and political trust in the USA and 23 European countries between 2002 and 2017. Drawing on harmonized data from the European Social Survey and the General Social Survey, we confirm that citizens’ personal experiences of unemployment depress trust in democratic institutions in all countries. Using multilevel linear probability models, we show that the relationship between unemployment and political trust varies between countries, and that, paradoxically, the negative effect of unemployment on political trust is consistently stronger in the more generous welfare states. This result holds while controlling for a range of other household and country-level predictors, and even in mediation models that incorporate measures of households’ economic situation to explain the negative effect of unemployment on trust. As expected, country differences in the generosity of welfare states are reflected in the degree to which financial difficulties are mediating the relationship between unemployment and political trust. Overlaying economic deprivation, however, cultural mechanisms of stigmatization or status deprivation seem to create negative responses to unemployment experiences, and these render the effect of unemployment on political trust increasingly negative in objectively more generous welfare states.
Some realists in political theory deny that the notion of feasibility has any place in realist theory, while others claim that feasibility constraints are essential elements of realist normative theorising. But none have so far clarified what exactly they are referring to when thinking of feasibility and political realism together. In this article, we develop a conception of the realist feasibility frontier based on an appraisal of how political realism should be distinguished from non-ideal theories. In this realist framework, political standards are feasible if they meet three requirements: they are (i) politically intelligible, (ii) contextually recognisable as authoritative, and (iii) contestable. We conclude by suggesting that our conception of realist feasibility might be compatible with utopian demands, thereby possibly finding favour with realists who otherwise refuse to resort to the notion of feasibility.
Most political systems consist of multiple layers. While this fact is widely acknowledged, we know surprisingly little about its implications for policy-making. Most comparative studies still focus exclusively on the national level. We posit that both “methodological nationalism” and “methodological subnationalism” should be avoided. We argue instead that in multilevel systems national and subnational governments jointly affect policy-making. Their respective influence is, however, conditional on the distribution of policy authority. Moreover, we identify power asymmetries, as subnational governments hardly affect policy-making in centralized systems whereas national governments shape subnational policy-making even in decentralized polities. Empirically, we study the case of education policy. Novel data on regional education spending, regional and national governments’ ideology, and regional authority over education in 282 regions in 15 countries over 21 years reveals strong support for the interplay between ideology and the distribution of authority across levels. We conclude by sketching a resulting research agenda.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the office and warehouse of an organic wholesaler in Germany, this article presents a trans-sequential analysis of an innovation that aimed to reduce the use of plastic wrap. During the analytical reconstruction of the innovation process, the substitution of plastic wrap turned out to be a precarious process of negotiating attachments to plastic. Against this background, innovation is not simply about the implementation and substitution of technology by human actors, but about negotiating attachments that humans have towards objects within socio-technical assemblages. Drawing on actor-network theory and the sociology of attachment, the article highlights the dynamic interplay between persistence and problematization of plastic wrap, which characterizes the innovation process. This interplay is seen along several steps during the innovation process: from (1) the problematization of plastic dependency to (2) the mobilization of alternatives, to (3) resistance against measures to be implemented and (4) the enforcement of reusable strings as technological substitution and (5) to conclusive retrospection on the innovation process. The trans-sequential analysis shows that ‘getting rid of something’ might be an imperfect approach to dealing with unsustainable object relations. Instead, withdrawing is a double-sided process of detaching and attaching, removing constraints and building new ones.
Four years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent moral-political problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to sophisticated tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs on democracies and exacerbate preexisting distributive and political inequalities. Yet much contemporary tax sheltering occurs within the letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative minipublics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand accountability, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over essential economic processes.
Ökonomische Schocks haben beträchtliche Folgen für die Gesellschaft. Armutsrisiko, Arbeitslosigkeit, Bildungsmangel, Scheidungsrisiken, Vertrauenskrisen – politisches Krisenmanagement kann diese Folgen positiv beeinflussen und zu gesellschaftlicher Resilienz beitragen. Lassen sich daraus Schlüsse für die Folgen der Pandemie ziehen?
Four years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent moral-political problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to sophisticated tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs on democracies and exacerbate preexisting distributive and political inequalities. Yet much contemporary tax sheltering occurs within the letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative minipublics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand accountability, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over essential economic processes.
Correspondence study field experiments with political elites are a recent addition to legislative studies research, in which unsolicited emails are sent to elites to gauge their responsiveness. In this article, we discuss their ethical implications. We advance from the viewpoint that correspondence study field experiments involve trade-offs between costs and benefits that need to be carefully weighted. We elaborate this argument with two contributions in mind. First, we synthesize ethical considerations in published work to explore what the specific trade-offs are and how they can be mitigated by experimental design. We conclude that correspondence study field experiments with political elites are worth pursuing given their potential to further good governance. But they also involve distinct trade-offs that are particularly challenging. Second, we draw from our own considerations while designing a comparative correspondence study field experiment and stress challenges resulting from cross-national designs. In sum, we aim to facilitate further reasoned discussion on an important methodological issue.
The article “Ganging up on Trump? Sino-German Relations and the Problem with Soft Balancing against the USA”, written by Sebastian Biba, was originally published Online First without Open Access. After publication in volume 25, issue 4, pages 531–550 the authors decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to © The Author(s) 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. The original article has been corrected.
In this article, I question the use of the notion of ‘constituent power’ as a tool for the democratization of the European Union (EU). Rather than seeing the absence of a transnational constituent power as a cause of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, I identify it as an opportunity for unfettered democratic participation. Against the reification of power-in-action into a power-constituted-in-law, I argue that the democratization of the EU can only be achieved through the multiplication of ‘constituent moments’. I begin by deconstructing the normative justifications surrounding the concept of constituent power. Here I analyze the structural aporia of constituent power and question the autonomous and emancipatory dimension of this notion. I then test the theoretical hypothesis of this structural aporia of the popular constituent power by comparing it with the historical experiments of a European popular constituent power. Finally, based on these theoretical and empirical observations, I propose to replace the ambivalence of the concept of popular constituent power with a more cautious approach to the bottom-up democratization of European integration: that of a multiplication of transnational constituent moments.
Public opinion towards welfare state reform: The role of political trust and government satisfaction
(2021)
The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post-industrial knowledge economies. Experts and policymakers have therefore called for welfare state readjustment towards a ‘social investment’ model (focusing on human skills and capabilities). Under what conditions are citizens willing to accept such future-oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hitherto neglected role of citizens’ trust in and satisfaction with government. Trust and satisfaction matter because future-oriented reforms generate uncertainties, risks and costs, which trust and government satisfaction can attenuate. We offer micro-level causal evidence using experiments in a representative survey covering eight European countries and confirm these findings with European Social Survey data for 22 countries. We find that trust and government satisfaction increase reform support and moderate the effects of self-interest and ideological standpoints. These findings have crucial implications not least because they help explain why some countries manage – but others fail – to enact important reforms.
China’s law to control international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) has sent shockwaves through international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society and expert communities as the epitome of a worldwide trend of closing civic spaces. Since the Overseas NGO Management Law was enacted in January 2017, its implementation has seen mixed effects and diverging patterns of adaptation among Chinese party-state actors at the central and local levels and among domestic NGOs and INGOs. To capture the formal and informal dynamics underlying their mutual interactions in the longer term, this article employs a theory of institutional change inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s distinction between rules-in-form versus rules-in-use and identifies four scenarios for international civil society in China – “no change,” “restraining,” “recalibrating” and “reorienting.” Based on interviews, participant observation and Chinese policy documents and secondary literature, the respective driving forces, plausibility, likelihood and longer-term implications of each scenario are assessed. It is found that INGOs’ activities are increasingly affected by the international ambitions of the Chinese party-state, which enmeshes both domestic NGOs and INGOs as agents in its diplomatic efforts to redefine civil society participation on a global scale.
Background: This study investigates the willingness of men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) to use HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Research in the HIV/AIDS field typically relies on clinical and epidemiological studies, thereby often excluding social dimensions of the illness as well as factors explaining its prevention. The current study analyzes HIV-prevention through an interdisciplinary theoretical approach. It aims to comprehensively understand the mechanisms associated with the willingness to take PrEP among MSM in terms of psychological, social, behavioral, cultural, and demographic factors. Methods: We analyze data from the survey “Gay Men and AIDS” conducted in Germany in 2013 prior to market approval for PrEP. Analyses were performed using the statistical software SPSS 25.0, while results were visualized using the R programming language. Results: We find that perceived risk of infection, social norms (anticipated HIV-stigma), practices (e.g. regular condomless sex), and socio-demographic factors (young age, being single) all have a positive effect on the willingness to take PrEP, while education reveals a negative, and income no effect. Conclusions: Results indicate that beyond well-established socio-psychological mechanisms of health behavior, social factors play a crucial role in understanding the willingness of PrEP uptake. This study enriches existing health behavior theories with sociological concepts such as social norms and social practices.
Children from upper-class families have better cognitive outcomes and fewer behavioural problems than those from working-class families. Previous studies highlighted that the class gap in child development is partially driven by differences in parenting styles, but they rarely looked at multiple, more specific dimensions of parenting, i.e., inductive reasoning, parenting consistency, warmth and anger. This study provides a systematic account of how parental social class shapes these four dimensions of parenting, and how these dimensions affect children’s cognitive outcomes and behavioural problems. Using high-quality, longitudinal data, and both hybrid models and the generalized methods of moments, this study reports two main findings. First, upper-class parents significantly differ from lower-class parents in two parenting dimensions, displaying more inductive reasoning and parenting consistency, but no relevant class differences are found in the two emotion-type dimensions of parenting (i.e., warmth and anger). Second, all four parenting dimensions have a strong impact on children’s behavioural problems, while they do not affect cognitive outcomes. An exception is consistency, the only dimension that affects both types of child outcomes. The study underscores the relevance of analysing parenting and child development from a multidimensional approach to better understand how upper-class parents transmit advantage to children.
Das illusionäre Moment des »ewigen Aufbruchs« ist durch Corona phasenweise unübersehbar geworden. Doch es mangelt, auch mit Blick auf die ökologische Krise, nach wie vor an nachhaltigem Umsteuern. Ohne ein massives Umdenken ist zu befürchten, dass deren Bedrohungen durch ähnliche Mechanismen verdrängt werden, wie es schon in früheren Krisen der Fall war. Folgenreiche Muster der Bagatellisierung und Verleugnung sind auch literarisch verarbeitet worden am Beispiel des »Schwarzen Todes«.
Problematisiert wird, dass der Aufsatz von Revers und Traunmüller Erkenntnisinteresse und Positionalität der durchgeführten Forschung verschleiert. Eine Offenlegung wäre notwendig, um die Grundlagen der schwerwiegenden methodischen Probleme, der Fallauswahl und der unbelegten Behauptungen des Aufsatzes verstehen zu können. Im Widerspruch zu der falschen Annahme, dass Meinungsfreiheit grenzenlos sei und auch mit einer Freiheit einhergehe, andere zu diskriminieren, legt meine Replik die Notwendigkeit (siehe Grundgesetz und Gleichbehandlungsgesetz) dar, dass auch an den Universitäten Diskriminierungen aktiv vermieden werden müssen.
Gender and attitudes toward welfare state reform: Are women really social investment promoters?
(2021)
This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusion.
Recombinant DNA technology is an essential area of life engineering. The main aim of research in this field is to experimentally explore the possibilities of repairing damaged human DNA, healing or enhancing future human bodies. Based on ethnographic research in a Czech biochemical laboratory, the article explores biotechnological corporealities and their specific ontology through dealings with bio-objects, the bodywork of scientists. Using the complementary concepts of utopia and heterotopia, the text addresses the situation of bodies and bio-objects in a laboratory. Embodied utopias are analyzed as material semiotic phenomena that are embodied by scientists in their visions and emotions and that are related to potential bodies and to future, not-yet-actualized embodiments. As a counterpart to this, the text explores embodied heterotopias, which are always the other spaces, like biotechnological bio-objects that are simulated in computers or stored in special solutions.
With the significant disconnect between the collective aim of limiting warming to well below 2°C and the current means proposed to achieve such an aim, the goal of this paper is to offer a moral assessment of prominent alternatives to current international climate policy. To do so, we’ll outline five different policy routes that could potentially bring the means and goal in line. Those five policy routes are: (1) exceed 2°C; (2) limit warming to less than 2°C by economic de-growth; (3) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation only; (4) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation and widespread deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs); and (5) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation, NETs, and Solar Radiation Management as a fallback. In assessing these five policy routes, we rely primarily upon two moral considerations: the avoidance of catastrophic climate change and the right to sustainable development. We’ll conclude that we should continue to aim at the two-degree target, and that to get there we should use aggressive mitigation, pursue the deployment of NETs, and continue to research SRM.
Cet article cherche à rapprocher les pensées de Louis Althusser et de Theodor W. Adorno autour de trois grandes questions : le primat de la théorie, la théorie de la société et de l’histoire, et la critique du sujet. Dans chaque cas, il s’agit de mettre en évidence les points communs entre les deux penseurs tout en soulignant leur désaccord fondamental en ce qui concerne la manière dont chacun se rapporte à la philosophie de Hegel. Là où Althusser vise à repenser le marxisme sur des bases non hégéliennes, Adorno veut au contraire revenir à Hegel pour ressourcer le marxisme en temps de crise.
The concept of solidarity has been receiving growing attention from scholars in a wide range of disciplines. While this trend coincides with widespread unsuccessful attempts to achieve solidarity in the real world, the failure of solidarity as such remains a relatively unexplored topic. In the case of the so-called European Union (EU) refugee crisis, the fact that EU member states failed to fulfil their commitment to solidarity is now regarded as established wisdom. But as we try to come to terms with failing solidarity in the EU we are faced with a number of important questions: are all instances of failing solidarity equally morally reprehensible? Are some motivations for resorting to unsolidaristic measures more valid than others? What claims have an effective countervailing force against the commitment to act in solidarity?
Right-wing populist parties often resort to a xenophobic rhetoric which both exploits and fuels existing illiberal anti-immigrant sentiments. Since populist anti-immigrant sentiments are at odds with fundamental liberal values and challenge the implementation of any liberal ethics of migration, this essay argues that states should adopt civic education policies to counter such sentiments and persuade citizens to develop liberal attitudes towards immigrants. Empirical evidence suggests that sentiments may be malleable, and there are already examples of local governments devising or supporting initiatives aimed at dispelling prejudices and promoting positive interactions. It might be objected that a government’s involvement in shaping sentiments and opinions conflicts with liberal democratic states’ commitment to individual autonomy and electoral fairness. However, I argue that civic education policies are not necessarily incompatible with such values and I provide five criteria to identify policies that liberal democratic governments may legitimately adopt to counteract anti-immigrant sentiments.
Recent developments in Hungary and Poland have made democratic backsliding a major issue of concern within the European Union (EU). This article focuses on the secondary agents that facilitate democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland: the European People’s Party (EPP), which has continually protected the Hungarian Fidesz government from EU sanctions, and the Hungarian ruling party Fidesz, which repeatedly promised to block any EU-level sanctions against Poland in the Council. The article analyses these agents’ behaviour as an instance of transnational complicity and passes a tentative judgment as to which of the two cases is normatively more problematic. The analysis has implications for possible countervailing responses to democratic backsliding within EU member states.
Current work on populism stresses its relationship to nationalism. However, populists increasingly make claims to represent ‘the people’ across beyond national borders. This advent of ‘transnational populism’ has implications for work on cosmopolitan democracy and global justice. In this paper, we advance and substantiate three claims. First, we stress populism’s performative and claimmaking nature. Second, we argue that transnational populism is both theoretically possible and empirically evident in the contemporary global political landscape. Finally, we link these points to debates on democracy beyond the state. We argue that, due to the a) performative nature of populism, b) complex interdependencies of peoples, and c) need for populists to gain and maintain support, individuals in one state will potentially have their preferences, interests, and wants altered by transnational populists’ representative claims. We unpack what is normatively problematic in terms of democratic legitimacy about this and discuss institutional and non-institutional remedies.
This article argues that populism, cosmopolitanism, and calls for global justice should be understood not as theoretical positions but as appeals to different segments of democratic electorates with the aim of assembling winning political coalitions. This view is called democratic realism: it considers political competition in democracies from a perspective that is realist in the sense that it focuses not first on the content of competing political claims but on the relationships among different components of the coalitions they work to mobilise in the pursuit of power. It is argued that Laclau’s populist theory offers a sort of realist critique of other populists, but that his view neglects the crucial dynamics of political coalition-building. When the relation of populism to global justice is rethought from this democratic realist angle, one can better understand the sorts of challenges each faces, and also where and how they come into conflict.
A link between populism and social media is often suspected. This paper spells out a set of possible mechanisms underpinning this link: that social media changes the communication structure of the public sphere, making it harder for citizens to obtain evidence that refutes populist assumptions. By developing a model of the public sphere, four core functions of the public sphere are identified: exposing citizens to diverse information, promoting equality of deliberative opportunity, creating deliberative transparency, and producing common knowledge. A wellworking public sphere allows citizens to learn that there are genuine disagreements among citizens that are held in good faith. Social media makes it harder to gain this insight, opening the door for populist ideology.
This paper critically engages the legal and political framework for responding to democracy and rule of law backsliding in the EU. I develop a new and original critique of Article 7 TEU based on it being democratically illegitimate and normatively incoherent qua itself in conflict with EU fundamental values. Other more incremental and scaleable responses are desirable, and the paper moves on to assess the legitimacy of economic sanctions such as tying access to EU funds to performance on democratic and rule of law indicators or imposing fines on backsliding states. I hold such sanctions to be a priori legitimate, and argue that in some cases economic sanctions are even normatively required, given that EU material support of backsliding member states can amount to material complicity in their backsliding. However, an economic conditionality mechanism would need to be designed to minimize unjust and counterproductive effects. One way to pursue this could be to complement sanctions against the backsliding government with investment for prodemocratic actors in that state.
This article sheds light upon the role of the audience in the construction and amendment of populist representative claims that in themselves strengthen representative-represented relationships and simultaneously strengthen ties between the represented who belong to different constituencies. I argue that changes in populist representative claims can be explained by studying the discursive relationship between a populist representative and the audience as a conversation in which both poles give and receive something. From this perspective, populist representative claims, I also argue, can be understood as acts of bonding with the intended effect of constituting ‘the people,’ and inputs from the audience can be seen as conversational exercitives. Populist appeals therefore may change when the audience enacts new permissibility facts and signals to populist representatives that there is another way to strengthen relationships between several individuals belonging to otherwise-different constituencies.
This contribution develops a defence of a universalist conception of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) against three prominent critiques, which are, among others, put forward by postcolonial scholars. The first critique argues that GCE is essentially a project of globally minded elites and therefore expressive both of global educational injustices and of the values and lifestyles of a particular class or milieu. The second critique assumes that GCE is based on genuinely ‘Western values’ (e.g., in the form of a conception of human rights or conceptions of rationality or the self), which are neither universally accepted nor universally valid and therefore unjustly forced on members of non-Western cultures and societies. GCE, according to this critique, is assumed to be another version of the educational justification of a hegemonic and unjust global Western regime. The third critique focuses on the epistemological preconditions of GCE. It assumes that GCE relies on a particular, culturally embedded ‘Western epistemology,’ which perpetuates historically grown global educational and epistemic injustices by dominating and subjugating alternative epistemological approaches. With respect to the first critique I argue that it is to a certain extent sociologically plausible, but wrong when it is applied to the educational and political legitimacy of GCE. The second critique overestimates the consensus within the ‘Western tradition’ and underestimates the transnational dissemination of universalist ideals and values as well as its own reliance on universalist validity claims. I argue that in order to provide a plausible criticism of historically grown global educational and political injustices, it is imperative for GCE to integrate central insights provided by the postcolonial critique, without giving up on universalist ideals and values. The third critique is, according to my argumentation, based on flawed epistemological assumptions, which do not withstand critical scrutiny. Instead of identifying epistemic and scientific claims as the expressions of a particular ‘culture’ or geographical location (the ‘West’), I defend the position that philosophical and scientific research should ideally be conceived as a democratic and universalist project, whose emancipatory potential can only be realized on the basis of a universalist epistemology.
This paper explores how University as social entity has great potential to confront epistemic injustices by expanding epistemic capabilities. To do this, we primarily follow the contributions of scholars such as Miranda Fricker and José Medina. The epistemic capabilities and epistemic injustice nexus will be explored via two empirical cases: the first one is an experience developed in Lagos (Nigeria) using participatory video; the second is a service learning pedagogical strategy for final year undergraduate students conducted at Universidad de Ibagué (in Colombia). The Lagos experience shows how participatory action-research methodologies could promote epistemic capabilities and functioning, making it possible for the participants to generate interpretive materials to speak of their own realities. However, this experience is too limited to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The Colombian experience is a remarkable experience that is building epistemic capabilities among students and other local participants. However, there is a hermeneutical and structural injustice that tends to give more value to disciplinary and codified knowledge at the expense of experiential and tacit knowledge.
The Adornian theories are still a relevant theoretical and educational model, even fifty years after his death. The article develops exactly this aspect in many directions and it lingers on one of the masterpieces of the master of Frankfurt, Minima moralia, making use of hermeneutic critical thinking.
O presente texto apresenta uma reflexão sobre a educação dos sentidos a partir do estudo das obras “A indústria cultural” de Theodor W. Adorno e “A obra de arte na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica” de Walter Benjamin. Primeiramente apresentamos uma breve contextualização histórica sobre o período no qual se desenvolveram os referentes textos. Em seguida buscamos demonstrar através do pensamento de Walter Benjamin como a arte passou a educar os sentidos das classes trabalhadoras a partir da sua reprodutibilidade técnica. Nas considerações finais, apontamos a importância da leitura de ambas as obras para possíveis reflexões acerca da formação do discurso nas tomadas de decisão social e cultural na atualidade. Como também buscamos compreender a função política da arte na formação crítica do sujeito.
As a result of globalization, the number of people living outside of their countries of origin is on the rise. Among them are children of primary and secondary school age of varying socio-economic backgrounds. This article addresses the education-related challenges that children in such circumstances face. I first identify two principles – an educational adequacy principle and a presumption of responsibility on the part of a host country for meeting children’s educational
needs – which are widely employed to guide national policy decisions on educational content and the distribution of educational resources. I then discuss a number of problems that students living abroad face which, I argue, policies devised on the basis of these principles either systematically overlook or, in some cases, exacerbate. Finally, I offer two alternative principles – a cosmopolitan revision of the first and a replacement for the second with a focus on collective responsibility – designed to promote education policies better suited to a globalized world which might help to alleviate the barriers to success commonly encountered by children learning abroad.
As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings and marital dissolution using data from the 1968–2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that wives' relative earnings were positively associated with the risk of divorce among couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s, and that this was especially true for wives who outearned their husbands, but this was no longer the case for couples married in the 1990s. Change was concentrated among middle-earning husbands and those without college degrees, a finding consistent with the economic squeeze of the middle class over this period.
The aim of this paper is to examine how Adorno's aesthetic and musicological thinking was received in Czech and Slovak musicology in the decades between the 60s and the 80s. The focus is on the Czech and Slovak translation of some of Adorno’s musicological treatises and lectures – especially those concerning his views on the Second Vienna School and the musical poetics of its immediate successors – which were published in former Czechoslovakia. The study offers an interesting perspective on Adorno’s relatively unknown lecture Form der neuen Musik (1965) and its related, although not identical, Czech version Formové princípy súčasnej hudby [Formal Principles of Contemporary Music] (1966) as well as on his discussion with some Slovak composers and musicologists published as Dnes je možné iba radikálne kritické myslenie [Today, Only Radical Critical Thinking is Possible] (1967). The study also considers other scientific texts by Adorno in relation to the above-mentioned translations of his works. The analysis, reflection, and interpretation of Adorno’s works in former Czechoslovakia, as well as their contemporary reception, turn out to be sporadic in the examined period. The purpose of this research is to revive awareness of their significance and to give a new impulse to their reassessment within the current musicological and philosophical reflection.
In the1960s, texts by the prominent German philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno were translated into the Czech and Slovak language. This was only possible due to the more relaxed social and political atmosphere of those years. The translated essays were published in professionally-oriented periodicals. This paper is aimed to map and evaluate the reception of Adorno’s translatedworks in Czechoslovakia. Although these texts embraced above all Adorno’s work in the sociology of philosophy, aesthetics of literature and musicology, this paper is mainly focused on Adorno’s musicological texts. Albeit mostly regarded as an original and extremely versatile author in Czechoslovakia, Adorno was also criticised on the background of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. In order to evaluate the reception of Adorno’s ideas in the Czech and Slovak environment, it is methodologically necessary to adopt a broader aesthetic-philosophical perspective that enables us to account for Adorno’s endorsement of the Marxist philosophy pursued at Frankfurt School of Philosophy.
The extensive scholarship devoted to the congruence of mass-elite policy preferences lacks consensus about the meaning, comparison, and measurement across political settings. This makes comparisons difficult and raises obstacles to advancing the debates. This symposium aims to identify the diversity of methodological choices and to reflect systematically on several key choices of particular importance in understanding the congruence. The contributions to the symposium compare and contrast how several types of measurement fare in diverse political contexts in Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and East Asia, and what we can learn from those methodological choices.
Let me start with a reminiscence: a few weeks ago, I was sitting in one of my preferred cafés in Paris, le Café Odéon- Théâtre de l’Europe, a vivid place near the Jardin de Luxembourg in the heart of the university quarter. I realised that the waiter was wearing a shirt with the letters "Defend Paris", which he explained to be a statement against the forces that make Paris an uneasy place to live, a defiance against the powerful and social injustice. With a mixture of rebellion and idealism, he added that he understands himself as part of a "Reclaim Your City" Movement, thus representing what is central for urban citizenship today: a republican defence against forces that make a metropolitan city a trademark to be sold to people who can afford it, but increasingly less a home for ordinary people who want to live in the city. Walking through the streets, passing a small jewelry shop, a place of distinguished understatement showing a picture of Meghan Markle wearing "rose"-earrings displayed in the window, the term "zombie urbanism" came to my mind – a term used by Jonny Aspen, professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape in Oslo (See Bjerkeset and Aspen (forthcoming 2020) and here), to describe a cliché-like way of dealing with urban environment by developers and designers – a "staged urbanism", in which urban features are used as a means for selling, marketing and branding. This kind of city-marketing can prove quite successful: whereas the burning of Notre Dame mobilised hundreds of millions of donations within a short period of time, the burning of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro soon after, extinguishing 200 years of documentation of cultural memory, mobilised only 225.000 Euros (state 1.4.2019). ...
This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. This challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation.
The digitalization of financial services opened a window for new players in the financial industry. These start-ups take on tasks and functions previously reserved for banks, such as financing, asset management, and payments. In this article, we trace the transformation of the industry after digitalization. By using data on FinTech formations in Germany, we provide first evidence that entrepreneurial dynamics in the FinTech sector are not so much driven by technology as by the educational and business background of the founders. Furthermore, we investigate the reactions of traditional banks to the emergence of these start-ups. In contrast with other emerging industries such as biotechnology, a network analysis shows that FinTechs have mostly engaged in strategic partnerships and only a few banks have acquired or obtained a financial interest in a FinTech. We explain the restraint of traditional banks to fully endorse the new possibilities of digitalized financial services with the characteristics of the technology itself and with the postponed fundamental decisions of banks to modernize their IT infrastructure.
Das Unbehagen mit den Gender Studies. Ein Gespräch zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik
(2020)
Der Beitrag ist ein Gespräch zweiter Sozialwissenschaftlerinnen im Feld der Gender Studies. Es kreist um den Vermittlungszusammenhang zwischen Wissenschaft und (politischer oder aktivistischer) Praxis am Beispiel der Geschlechterforschung. Wie politisch kann, darf Forschung (nicht) sein? Wie, wenn überhaupt, lassen sich Kritik, Normativität, Forschung, politische Praxis und Ethik einerseits trennen, andererseits produktiv aufeinander beziehen? Er plädiert für die Anerkennung der Eigenlogiken von Wissenschaft und Politik und für deren Vermittlung im Sinne reflexiver Übersetzungen sowie gegen einen positionalen Fundamentalismus, der soziale Position(-ierung) mit inhaltlichen Positionen gleichsetzt. Schließlich artikuliert der Beitrag eine reflexive Ethik des Zuhörens, die sich im Forschungsprozess als Anerkennung von systematisch bedingten blinden Flecken sowie in den Mühen um deren Überwindung realisieren sollte.