Can unfree people make themselves free? Some people are unfree because of the social and political conditions in which they find themselves. To become freer would require changing those conditions; yet changing them requires the exercise of freedom. So it seems like they must already be free in order to become free. Drawing on John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and B.R. Ambedkar, I argue that the unfree can make themselves free. Unfreedom involves external constraints and how those constraints shape people’s agency. Becoming freer involves coming to know, from the inside, how our agency has been shaped. We can change that shaping and in turn the social conditions. The problem of unfreedom is a vicious cycle. Social conditions constrain agency, which in turn further entrenches the social conditions. A virtuous cycle is possible. Agents can change their conditions, reducing the constraint on their agency, in turn enabling greater change. Conditions are unstable, and agents can take advantage of that instability.

A partir de los textos de Jorge Dubatti, podemos entender al “convivio”, parte fundamental de la definición de “acontecimiento teatral”, como la reunión territorial de cuerpos vivos que no permite la sustracción de estos a partir de tecnologías. Sin embargo, frente a las distintas expresiones artísticas que han surgido durante el contexto de aislamiento social por el COVID-19, la definición resulta excluyente e incompleta porque las propuestas mencionadas parten de usar la tecnología como medio para unir presencias humanas frente a la imposibilidad de compartir espacios territoriales comunes. De esta manera, el contexto de emergencia sanitaria permitió que se discutiera si tales manifestaciones artísticas podían ser clasificadas como teatro o no. Así, esta investigación buscó analizar de qué manera la definición del concepto “convivio” se ve problematizada en el tecnovivio para brindar una definición del concepto “convivio” que no sea excluyente y que amplíe la noción de teatro. Además, esta investigación busca que los lectores consideren que existe la posibilidad de hacer teatro por medio de tecnologías y que exploren las posibilidades creativas que estas ofrecen. Para lograr este objetivo, se realizó un montaje artístico titulado Manifiesto.ig bajo la plataforma de Instagram. En él, se exploró la noción de “convivio”, pero en el acontecimiento tecnovivial. El montaje partió del uso del dispositivo relacional en la creación para propiciar un ambiente participativo que genere comunicación y retroalimentación para suscitar así el añorado convivio. A partir de esto, se llegó a la conclusión de que el convivio sí puede llegar existir bajo la mediación tecnológica. Mediante el convivio, cada participante siente que tiene la posibilidad de afectar el acontecimiento, aspecto que se comprobó en el montaje realizado. A este sentimiento individual, siguiendo los planteamientos de Bryant Caballero, se le denomina “vivialidad”.

“Sites of Inscription” argues that creative works allow us to trace black epistemologies of space and time in the United States. Reading works of literature and art from the 19th century to the present, I trace how black people have creatively mis-used, reimagined, and transformed the spatial technologies of the plantation and its geographic afterlife. My project specifically asks how the “literary” in black literary geographies reveals and preserves black spatial praxes in ways that exceed the capacities of dominant modes of Western spatial representation such as conventional maps, blueprints or land surveys. Each chapter considers literary form in particular to be intimately related to the production and representation of space by black people—both as ways of expressing the experience of living under spatial technologies of racialized management, enclosure and exploitation, and as ways of expressing resistance to these technologies and the underwriting epistemologies they reproduce. Employing a palimpsestic practice of reading, I gather texts written across periods but which cohere around a single spatial formation that stages the tensions of (post)plantation geographies—fences, city blocks, apartments, and rooftops. Reading works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston, I consider the relationship between writing and enclosure in the South during and immediately after slavery. Moving North and into the 20th century, I consider representations of the city block in work by Romare Bearden, Tonya Foster, and Langston Hughes. The art of apartment living in Chicago is explored through readings of Kerry James Marshall and Gwendolyn Brooks. I conclude on the rooftop, where Claude Brown, Piri Thomas, and Faith Ringgold document its creative re-production. All four chapters explore the impact of these radical acts of counter-planning, and efforts to represent them, on literary form and genre—concluding that formal experimentations are precisely what allow literature and visual art to archive these fugitive and fleeting engagements with space.

German question and Ostpolitik within the years 1963-1966 Petra Matějů MATĚJŮ, Petra. Německá a východní politika v letech 1963-1966. Praha, 2011. 103 s. Diplomová práce (Mgr.) Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd, Institut mezinárodních studií. Katedra německých a rakouských studií. Vedoucí diplomové práce PhDr. Tomáš Nigrin, Ph.D. The master thesis German question and Ostpolitik within the years 1963-1966 is focused on the attitudes of the parliamentary parties in the Federal Republic of Germany - CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party of Germany), FDP (Free Democratic Party) and SPD (Social Democratics Party of Germany) - to the policy towards the countries of the Eastern Bloc and with the changes in these attitudes in the period from 1963 to 1966, when the Federal Cabinet of Ludwig Erhard held rule. The main thesis of this study is the premise that in all the parliamentary parties in the Federal Republic of Germany a significant shift in the approach to the German question and Ostpolitik within the years 1963-1966 occurred. This thesis should be verified or refuted by means of a detailed chronological description and analysis of the progress of the issue, followed by the comparative analysis of the attitudes of the parties in view to the policy towards the Soviet...

What would it mean to take philosophy of education seriously, and why should we care about doing so now? This dissertation explores how John Dewey conceived of re-orienting philosophy to address contemporary challenges (such as the failings of democracies, estrangement between individuals and groups, experiences of routine and drudgery) by making education a central philosophical issue. My new reading of Dewey suggests that for him, philosophy of education wasn’t just a minor subfield of philosophy. To take philosophy of education seriously would mean to re-orient philosophy, placing questions about human development (and about the shape of human experience that emerges under the different arrangements, formal and informal, that educate us) at the center of philosophy. I argue that in his concern about this, Dewey belongs to the tradition of thought in which we might also include Du Bois, Plato and Rousseau, among others. Although recent scholarship contains significant and valuable contributions to our thinking about education, philosophy of education still remains outside what is seen as the “core” of the discipline. I hope to show that engaging carefully with Dewey’s thought can help us appreciate the promise of a subject that is often treated as if it were of secondary importance.

On November 26, 1945, the Ambassador to China, Patrick J. Hurley, announced his resignation to the American press. In doing so, he leveled charges against the State Department and a number of its Foreign Service officers—charges which questioned the integrity of many, in their relation with what Hurley termed the “Imperialist” and communist nations in China. Those charges were the beginning of two and one-half decades of ideological crusading in America by many who developed the theory that those men charged by Hurley had been responsible for America’s “loss of China” Hurley was sent to China in 1944 as President Roosevelt’s personal representatives to Chiang Kai-shek. His directive was to promote efficient and harmonious relations between Chiang Kai-shek and General Stilwell, Commander of American Forces, China Theatre. Hurley was, further, to facilitate Stilwell’s exercise of command over the Chinese armies, which, it was hoped, would soon be placed under him. Failing in this mission, Hurley was ultimately appointed to the rank of Ambassador after the resignation of Clarence T. Gauss. Hurley had by this time, taken on the responsibility of promoting negotiations between the Kuomintang Government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party, headquartered in Yenan. Rather than simply offering his “good offices” in the negotiations, Hurley became personally involved, interjecting his personal, ideological beliefs into the proposals of each side. Through his involvement, Hurley became personally committed to unification on his terms and eventually gave the Kuomintang Party and Chiang Kai-shek the impression that the United States was permanently committed to support of the Central Government. Hurley soon came into conflict with a number of Foreign Service officers and the Department of State, below the level of the Secretary of State, over opposing interpretations of American policy in China. Hurley became intransigent in his overwhelming support of the National Government, while members of the State department believed that the United States should remain flexible in its approach to the problems in China to avoid supporting the losing side in what was seen as an inevitable civil war. Hurley came to see criticism of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and suggestions for alterations in policy, as personal criticism directed to him. In the face of this perceived threat to himself, he had a number of Foreign Service officers re-called or transferred, only to discover that they had been reassigned to positions which he thought were superior to his. In the face of these events and rising criticism, in addition to eventual failure to bring the two Chinese factions together and impending civil war. Hurley submitted his resignation to the Secretary of State, after first announcing his reasons to the press. Experiencing one of the few failures of his life , the man who had risen from the coal mines of Oklahoma to become a millionaire twice over, Secretary of Defense und0er President Hoover, and Ambassador to China under Roosevelt, turned the blame for his failure to those with whom he had come into conflict, the Department of State being the principal culprit. This study of Hurley’s experience in China is based upon several secondary accounts of the period, recently published Department of State papers (Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers), Hurley’s several testimonials before Congressional Committees, and interviews with Mr. John Stewart Service, upon whom attention was focused in numerous loyalty investigations subsequent to Hurley’s resignation.

This study of political decision-making stressing the process of decision-making in a group setting is, in part, a reaction against traditional approaches of political analysis. The study of international relations is overburdened with historical studies of the interaction between states. The classic approach to the study of a given decision by one government affecting another might be called the “rational actor model”. This model treats the state as the entity reaching the decision. The decision itself is seen as behavior that reflects a rational purpose or intent. The central concepts of the model center around the calculated weighing of goals, alternatives, consequences, and choices. The “rational actor model” is the dominant method of current political analysis. I will implicitly contend in this paper that the concept of foreign policy as a rational process of gathering information, setting alternatives, and making decisions is not an adequate tool of understanding. In fact, the “rational actor model” does not make sense out of much political phenomenon. I will directly contend in this paper that a process model of political decision-making provides an adequate and helpful tool for the understanding of political decisions.

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A Ramón Gómez de la Serna lo descubrí hace relativamente poco: hace menos de un año en un curso de la universidad. Mi primer contacto con él tuvo lugar a través de un video en el que aparecía recitando varias de sus greguerías en una plaza madrileña. Recuerdo que, a primera instancia, no sentí sino molestia por sus textos; lo consideré un simple charlatán, quizá bajo efectos de algún estupefaciente, que recitaba palabras o ideas sin conexión alguna, a manera de los cómicos ambulantes que pululan por las plazas de Lima. Algunos días después, resultó que el profesor del curso, en una medida bastante cuestionada, decidió improvisar un trabajo final a entregarse en apenas dos semanas desde el día en que conocí a Gómez de la Serna. Teniendo fresco el recuerdo y las emociones que había despertado en mí cuando me lo presentaron, la idea que vino rápidamente a mi mente fue la de hacer un trabajo alrededor de aquel particular hombrecillo de la plaza, un trabajo en el que despotricara al respecto de su forma de hacer literatura. El asunto fue que, profundizando en sus greguerías poco a poco, terminé por cambiar mi opinión al respecto sobremanera, al extremo de que, hoy por hoy, Ramón Gómez de la Serna es uno de mis autores de cabecera, y sus greguerías son textos que no me producen sino placer lectura tras lectura. En ellas he encontrado divagaciones de todo tipo: desde las políticas, sociales, económicas, culturales y raciales, hasta los tipos de humor más negros que puedan existir. Hay desde comedia hasta subrepticia tragedia, siempre escondida bajo algún ingenioso juego de palabras o alguna metáfora quizá no tan rebuscada, pero de esas que te hacen pensar “sí, tiene razón, ¿cómo no me di cuenta antes?”. En sus greguerías, Gómez de la Serna simboliza la diversión hecha literatura, probablemente uno de los entretenimientos más puros que he encontrado en ella. Es uno de esos autores sobre los que hacer un trabajo como el presente resulta difícil, pues al transportar su obra al solemne ámbito académico que se desprende de una tesis, no puedo dejar de sentir que le robo cierto halo místico. Sin embargo, mi decisión de abordar las greguerías nació bajo la condición personal de poder vincularlas con alguna teoría que otorgue licencias, que no fuese tan “cuadriculada” y que, de esta manera, me hiciera sentir que las enajeno lo menos posible de aquella magia mencionada. Puede sonar ridículo, soy consciente de eso.

“Donde manda capitán… Perú y Venezuela en la OEA, 2011 – 2016” es una investigación que busca entender la racionalidad que existe detrás de la postura peruana para con Venezuela en la OEA durante el gobierno de Ollanta Humala. Además, busca desmitificar la idea de que la relación óptima que mantenía el presidente Humala es una variable absoluta para determinar la posición del Perú en materia de política exterior. A través de entrevistas con actores clave, revisión de documentos oficiales de la OEA y un recuento histórico de hechos, centrado en el modelo político burocrático planteado por Graham T. Allison y otros autores, la investigación concluye que el proceso de toma de decisiones en política exterior con respecto al tema Venezuela en la OEA presentaba cierta contraposición de opiniones e intereses los cuales partían de los actores involucrados en el proceso; tales como el presidente, la Cancillería y los representantes “políticos” ante la OEA. Estos actores bajo una misma línea de mando, que parte desde el presidente, van a brindarle ciertos matices a las intenciones iniciales del jefe de estado haciendo del producto final un esbozo de varios intereses; el cual se explica desde las variables aquí presentadas. En conclusión, el nombre “Donde manda capitán…” hace atribución al clásico dicho “donde manda capitán, no manda marinero”. En la presente investigación, se presenta la primera parte de dicha frase en alusión a que en el caso peruano para con Venezuela en la OEA, las intenciones del jefe de estado no necesariamente se llevaban a cabo tal y cómo se indicaban.