[PDF] Oppositional Discourses And Democracies eBook

Author : Michael Huspek
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 452 pages
File Size : 35,66 MB
Release : 2009-09-10
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1135226954

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When citizens take to the streets or pack assembly halls or share their ideas through the minority press, they often give voice to truths and logic that have otherwise been given little or no airing through the available institutional channels offered by democratic states. Such discourses offer new rhetorical strategies for the expression of citizen desires, needs and emotions that otherwise go unrecognized and unaddressed. They also offer impetus for new forms of deliberation and informed action that can result in real political change. This collection explores the tensions between democratic states and the dynamics of citizen voice. In so doing, the collection addresses such questions as: What role do oppositional discourses play in increased democratization? Can oppositional discourses be sustained over time? How do states resist pressures to democratize? This volume will be of interest to students and scholars in Politics, Sociology, and Communication.

Author : John Medearis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 25,9 MB
Release : 2015-06-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0674286642

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Is infrequent voting the most we can expect from a free citizenry? Would democracy be more robust if our political discourse were more deliberative? John Medearis’s trenchant and trend-bucking work of political philosophy argues that democracies face significant challenges that go beyond civic lethargy and unreasonable debate. Democracy is inherently a fragile state of affairs, he reminds us. Revisiting fundamental questions about the system in theory and practice, Why Democracy Is Oppositional helps us see why preserving democracy has always been—and will always be—a struggle. As citizens of democracies seek political control over their destinies, they confront forces that threaten to dominate their lives. These forces may take the form of runaway financial markets, powerful special interests, expanding militaries, or dysfunctional legislatures. But citizens of democracies help create the very institutions that overwhelm them. Hostile threats do not generally come from the outside but are the product of citizens’ own collective activities. Medearis contends that democratic action perpetually arises to reclaim egalitarian control over social forces and institutions that have become alienated from large numbers of citizens. Democracy is therefore necessarily oppositional. Concerted, contentious political activities of all kinds are fundamental to it, while consensus and easy compromise are rarities. Recovering insights from political theorists such as Karl Marx and John Dewey, Why Democracy Is Oppositional addresses contemporary issues ranging from the global financial crisis and economic inequality to drone warfare and mass incarceration.

Author : John S. Dryzek
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 11,69 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780199250431

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This critical tour through recent democratic theory examines the deliberative turn in democratic theory which argued that democratic legitimacy is to be found in authentic deliberations on the part of those affected by a collective decision.

Author : Frank Farmer
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,99 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Citizenship
ISBN :

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"In After the Public Turn, author Frank Farmer argues that counterpublics and the people who make counterpublics--"citizen bricoleurs"--deserve a more prominent role in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Encouraging students to understand and consider resistant or oppositional discourse is a viable route toward mature participation as citizens in a democracy. Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two significantly different kinds of publics, Farmer suggests that each discursive world can be seen, in its own distinct way, as a counterpublic, an oppositional social formation that has a stake in widening or altering public life as we know it. Drawing on major figures in rhetoric and cultural theory, Farmer builds his argument about composition teaching and its relation to the public sphere, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of public life and a deeper sense of what democratic citizenship means for our time"--

Author : Michael Bennett
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 38,82 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813535739

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'Democratic' Discourses shows the ways that abolitionist writing shaped a powerful counterculture within a slave-holding society. Drawing on discourses about the body, gender, economics, and aesthetics, this study encourages readers to reconsider the reality and roots of freedoms experienced in the US.

Author : Little Adrian Little
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 21,32 MB
Release : 2019-08-05
Category : Democracy
ISBN : 1474470300

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This book addresses the idea of radical democracy and, in particular, its poststructuralist articulation. It analyses the approach to radical democracy taken by a number of contemporary theorists and political commentators:, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, William Connolly, Jacques Ranciere, Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben. By examining critically the critiques accounts of democracy advanced by these theorists, this volume explores how a more radically conceived theory of democracy might be extended in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction.developed.The strand of radical democracy examined in this book is defined by a number of characteristics:*Democracy is conceptualised understood as a fugitive condition, being open to perpetual disruption and reinvention*The relationship between the state and civil society is regarded as the site where the open-ended 'promise' of democracy is fought out*There is an emphasis on questions of political renewal*There is a deep suspicion of identity-based political claims*Politics is conceived as either the site of or as one of the mechanisms for identity construction* Democratic politics is understood as a politics of contestation and disagreement* Democracy is regarded as always at least partially conflictual and not a means through which violence and conflict can be permanently eradicated*There is a deep suspicion of identity-based political claims*The political is assumed to be ontologically conflictual, with such conflict being understood as ultimately ineradicable from politics, though the form it takes necessarily varies from time to time and context to contextThe book clarifies the concept of radical democracy by mapping the field, and elaborates it further through a critical engagement with the works of its key proponents. In addition, it draws on the insights of radical democratic theory to explore a range of concre

Author : Adriana Hernandez
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 43,13 MB
Release : 1997-02-20
Category : Education
ISBN : 143840655X

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A variety of educational and broader cultural and political questions are addressed in this book such as: What are educational practices about? Where do "schooling" and "learning" take place? What is critical pedagogy? In posing these questions, the author argues that pedagogy is central to any struggle for democracy and that cultural workers must address with specificity the context in which people translate private concerns into public issues. Hernandez connects forms of learning, knowledge production, and subjectivity formation to processes of both personal and social transformation. She offers her own experience with the Argentine Mother's Movement as a case study in feminist intellectual alignment with cultural workers.

Author : Alexander Wöll
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 25,46 MB
Release : 2007-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1134089074

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In the absence of democratic state institutions, eastern European countries were considered to possess only myths of democracy. Working on the premise that democracy is not only an institutional arrangement but also a civilisational project, this book argues that mythical narratives help understanding the emergence of democracy without ‘democrats’. Examining different national traditions as well as pre-communist and communist narratives, myths are seen as politically fabricated ‘programmes of truth’ that form and sustain the political imagination. Appearing as cultural, literary, or historical resources, myths amount to ideology in narrative form, which actors use in political struggles for the sake of achieving social compliance and loyalty with the authority of new political forms. Drawing on a wide range of case studies including Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, this book argues that narratives about the past are not simply ‘legacies’ of former regimes but have actively shaped representations and meanings of democracy in the region. Taking different theoretical and methodological approaches, the power of myth is explored for issues such as leadership, collective identity-formation, literary representation of heroic figures, cultural symbolism in performative art as well as on the constitution of legitimacy and civic identity in post-communist democracies.

Author : Noel Sturgeon
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 37,24 MB
Release : 2016-01-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317959019

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Examining the development of ecofeminism from the 1980s antimilitarist movement to an internationalist ecofeminism in the 1990s, Sturgeon explores the ecofeminist notions of gender, race, and nature. She moves from detailed historical investigations of important manifestations of US ecofeminism to a broad analysis of international environmental politics.