This thesis investigates how rural communities negotiate the development of renewable energy projects. Public and local community acceptance of these new technologies in rural areas around the world is uncertain and spatially uneven and represents an area of emerging public policy interest and one where scholarly theory is rapidly developing. This thesis uses Habermasian concepts of public sphere, communicative action and deliberative democracy, as well as the concept of “wicked problems” from the planning studies literature combined with geographical concepts of place and scale to advance theoretical and empirical understanding of how public opinion on renewable energy technologies is formed in place. It documents energy use patterns, attitudes and sociopolitical relations at a time when considerable state and business efforts are directed at the construction of solar, wind, biomass and small-hydro technologies in rural regions. These concepts and theories are applied in a case study of rural communities in the Eastern Ontario Highlands, an impoverished area undergoing rapid restructuring driven by centralization of services and amenity migration but with abundant natural resources in form of forests, numerous waterways and open space which have attracted a broad range of new energy developments. Overall high levels of support for alternative energy development particularly for solar power were found, albeit for reasons of local energy security and not for reasons of preventing climate change. There was some evidence that seasonal residents are less supportive of hydro and biomass projects than permanent residents possibly reflecting broader trends in rural economies away from productive uses of land to consumptive appreciation of rural landscapes. The thesis suggests that collective action to advance energy projects in the case study area require agreement along three world-claims (truth, rightness and truthfulness) and that communication leading to discourse which uncovers hitherto hidden reasons for action is possible. These findings offer rare empirical evidence of the predictions of deliberative democratic theory in environmental planning settings. However, multiple barriers to communicative action were also identified and there is evidence that the state’s reliance on market incentives may have long term costs in terms of diminished public reasoning around renewable energy.

Orientador: Jose Camilo dos Santos Filho / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-19T21:24:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Pinto_JoseMarcelinodeRezende_D.pdf: 10685147 bytes, checksum: 49870d8ebe2b2a88a96dc205c7c7b3dd (MD5) Previous issue date: 1994 / Doutorado

By examining the donations by the local nobility to the local church, this thesis aims to study the church as a public room. By analyzing the donations of the nobility in relation to Habermas concept of the public sphere and the concept of conspicuous consumption the donations to the churches can be viewed as manifestations of power. This thesis studies all donations to the churches that leaves material and visual remnants in the church room. The results shows that there was a conscious strategy for the nobility to use the church for manifestation and representation of power. The nobility used their donations to manifest their power and to represent the power towards the people. This was done by filling the church with their names and coats of arms. By donating liturgical objects, church silver, chapels and coats of arms used for funerals the nobility was able to symbolically place themselves in the religious rituals. The church as a room was a symbolically and hierarchical place, and by connecting themselves with this room by donations the nobility could manifest their position in society, both locally and nationally.

In this text, the relation of critical theory and religion is analysed, comparing Jürgen Habermas's late philosophy with the philosophy of his predecessor Theodor W. Adorno. The question I ask is: What changes has the relation of critical theory and religion undergone in the transition from Adorno's thinking to that of his successor? As I try to answer this question, I develop a specific understanding of Adorno's philosophy as a "contemplative eschatology", and perform an in-depth study of how, why, and with what consequences it has changed to a frame oriented towards reaching understanding. In so doing, I point out the ambivalence which the turn towards understanding breeds, and suggest the religious motives discovered in Adorno's work deserve further attention.

Der Begriff der Ideologie, traditionell verstanden als falsches Bewusstsein, hat für die kritische Theorie zentralen Stellenwert. Nur unter Rückgriff auf diese Kategorie kann sie erklären, warum Herrschaft nicht nur fortbesteht, sondern oft sogar die Zustimmung der Beherrschten findet. Jedoch wird Ideologiekritik immer wieder vorgehalten, die Kriterien, nach denen sie bestimmte Bewusstseinsformen als falsch ausweist, nicht benennen zu können. Jürgen Habermas' kommunikationstheoretisch reformulierte kritische Theorie bietet eine Möglichkeit, dieses Problem zu bearbeiten. Ideologiekritik wird dann als Kritik systematisch verzerrter Kommunikationsbedingungen interpretiert. Der vorliegende Beitrag erläutert das Potenzial dieser kommunikationstheoretischen Ideologiekritik und illustriert es am Beispiel gegenwärtiger Islamdebatten.

This thesis intends to examine how taste, identity and community works in a Swedish Facebook group exclusive to women and people who define themselves as non-binary. The study is based on a material that stretches from 2019–01–01 to 2019–06–30. With a political framework, this group has based its values on intersectional feminism and postcolonial theory, which gives the posts made in the group a certain setting to relate to. By using Jürgen Habermas’ classic book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962) together with Pierre Bourdieu’s notions on habitus, field, dox and capital, this thesis examines the perception of how the group develops a shared taste, as well as how it forms a certain kind of community. The first part of the analysis introduces statistics to form an overview of where the group members find their interests in literature most fulfilled and how interactions and commentary is spread over different kinds of posts. Here, a categorization is presented to clarify what the most prominent posts in the group are. In the second part, a closer examination is made through an approach to the new public that this group constitutes, how taste is formed and what kind of books the members are interested in and how conflicts arise not through discussions on good or bad taste, but rather political matters. Finally, the analysis shows how the community fulfills certain functions for the members and how they seem to perceive the group as a whole. In conclusion, this new cultural environment has impact on how we can understand our ability to express ourselves and make ourselves heard. Together with this we can see that the group forms a certain taste that mainly consists of popular culture, even though more literary titles can be found. Still, the most important function seems to be the one of community and the sense of belonging to a group, to participate and receive approval as a human being.

Purpose – The purpose of this master thesis is to generate new knowledge and understanding how the concept of public sphere has been used and understood in library and information research of public libraries.  Design/methodology/approach –Through a systematic literatur review of  research literature of public libraries and public sphere, interpretations of the public sphere concept are mapped. Qualitative content analysis is applied for the analysis. The research questions are: 1. How is the concept of public sphere interpretated in library and information science (LIS) research about the democratic role of the public library and its role beeing a meeting place and an arena for public debate?  2. What significance can the interpretation of the concept public sphere be assumed to have for the understanding of how LIS researchers view and use the concept?  Findings – Six themes are identified: 1. Habermas original theory of public sphere from 1962. 2. A theoretical framework of public sphere, based on Habermas theory. 3. Other concepts and theories that can be applied on public libraries and public sphere. 4. A diversity of public spheres. 5. The democratic role of the public libraries and public sphere. 6. Conversation, communication, debate and public sphere.

Ce mémoire porte sur l’éthique des modifications génétiques à visées mélioratives. Les modifications génétiques à visées mélioratives sont l’une des technologies les plus étudiées dans le mouvement transhumaniste. Nous présenterons la défense transhumaniste de cette technologie à travers l’ouvrage « From Chance to Choice », qui propose une défense de nature politique, faisant remarquer que cette technologie peut venir offrir un outil précieux aux théories de la justice égalitariste. Cette défense est cependant dépourvue d’un volet éthique, puisque les éthiques classiques sont impuissantes à se saisir de ce phénomène nouveau de manière intelligible. Afin de fournir un cadre de régulation éthique de ces modifications génétiques, nous nous tournerons vers l’éthique de la discussion de Jürgen Habermas et l’éthique de la responsabilité de Hans Jonas. Nous montrerons dans un premier temps que l’éthique de la discussion, selon laquelle une norme morale est valide si elle peut espérer recevoir le consentement des sujets moraux impliqués à la suite d’un débat argumenté, permet de légitimer sur un plan éthique les modifications génétiques car il est possible d’espérer le consentement à venir du sujet de la modification génétique. Cependant, ce consentement ne peut être postulé que si la réflexion sur la modification à effectuer est effectuée sous le signe de l’éthique de la responsabilité, présentée par la suite, selon laquelle un tel choix doit être effectué dans un processus nommé « heuristique de la peur », soit avec en ayant en tête les effets lointains de notre action. / This memoir studies the ethical implications of human genetic modification. Human genetic enhancement is one of the most studied technologies by the transhumanist movement. We will present the transhumanist defence of genetic modification in the book “From Chance to Choice”, which defends this technology on political grounds, due to its efficiency in helping carry out egalitarian theories of justice. This defense is deprived of a substantial ethical aspect. More generally, classical ethical theories seem to be inadequate to grasp the issues of human genetic modification. In order to offer an ethical framework of regulation of this technology, we will study Jürgen Habermas’s discussion ethics and Hans Jonas’s responsibility ethics. We will first show that discussions’ ethics, according to which a moral norm is valid if and only if every moral subject affected by it can agree to it through an argumentative debate, ethically legitimates genetical improvements because we can hoe for the future consent of the modified person. This being said, this consent can only be postulated if the ethical reasoning is aided by responsibilities ethics, which is then presented, according to which a choice such as a genetic modification has to be made under the guidance of the heuristic of fear, in other words, while bearing in mind the long-term effects of our actions.

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Questions regarding the concept of legitimacy are central to social and political science. Exploring how people justify legitimacy and why people grant legitimacy to leadership and collective decisions in groups, organizations, and nations is generally agreed to be essential to scholarship on legitimacy. One line of research finds contributing factors in bureaucratic effectiveness and efficiency that can provide substantive benefits to people. Another line of research expands legitimacy to procedural elements such as fairness of treatment or quality of communication (deliberation) in the decision making process. This dissertation intends to contribute to the research of legitimacy and hopes to further the understanding of communication's role in decision outcome legitimacy by incorporating two sets of contributing factors: Performance factors and communication factors. This will enable a side-by-side comparison of instrumentalist and communicative factors in predicting legitimation. In addition, the study will observe the quality of the communication environment as a contextual variable upon which the relationship between performance elements and decision outcome legitimacy depends. Specifically, how the communication environment moderates the strength of the relationship between output of public service in a certain domain and the perceived legitimacy of the decision made in the same domain will be observed. Drawing on the framework from Habermas's theory of communicative action and the public sphere, the literature on deliberative democracy, and organizational studies, the project intends to observe how the communication environment or speech conditions (in Habermasian terms) may affect the legitimacy of a decision outcome, and at the same time may influence the relationship between the perceived performance in a certain public service sector and the perceived legitimacy of a decision outcome in the same sector. Using a sample of 255 adult residents in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province in southwest China, the study found that perceived government performance and perceived speech conditions were both positively related to perceived legitimacy of government decision; furthermore, perceived speech conditions moderated the relationship between the performance evaluation and legitimacy perception. These findings suggest some important insights into the role of communication in political legitimation and the evolving communication expectations in China. / Mass Media and Communication