This project explores democracy as a way of life (radical democracy) by drawing from both North and Latin American philosophers. I work with ideas from Paulo Freire (Brazil) and Luis Villoro (Mexico) to develop (a) a criticism of mainstream liberal assumptions regarding freedom, tolerance and the nature of the relationship between the individual and the community as well as (b) a criticism of liberal democracy as a political system, and (c) a formulation of democracy as a way of life. This is relevant because the experiences in Freire's and Villoro?s historical background (colonialism, feudalism, dictatorships) have been neglected from the Western liberal approach which emphasizes property rights, individual rights and community obligations towards the individual. Working with philosophers whose theories have been informed by the liberal tradition but whose work was developed in response to living in environments of dehumanizing oppression and corruption provides us with relevant criticisms of the Western liberal tradition as well as its assumptions regarding central concepts such as freedom, tolerance and community.

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities.

Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / Thesis advisor: Cynthia A. Young / From the BLKARTSOUTH literary collective in the 1970s, to public-storytelling-based education and performance forms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and fiction and nonfiction collections in the years since the storm, this study traces how New Orleans authors, playwrights, educators, and digital media makers concerned with social justice have mirrored the aesthetics and epistemologies of the collaborative African diasporic expressive traditions that began in the antebellum space of Congo Square and continue in the traditions of second-line parading and Mardi Gras Indian performances today. Combining literary analysis, democratic and performance theory, and critical geography with interviews and participant observation, I show how New Orleans authors, theatre makers, and teachers have drawn on "second-line" knowledges and geographies to encourage urban residents to recognize each other as "divided subjects" whose very divisions are the key to keeping our social and political systems from stabilizing and fixing borders and ethics in a way that shuts down possibilities for dissent, flux, and movement. Building on diverse scholarly arguments that make a case both for New Orleans's exceptionalism and its position, especially in recent years, as a model for neoliberal urban reform, this study also shows how the call and response aesthetics of community-based artists in New Orleans have influenced and benefited from the rise of global democratic performance and media forms. This dual focus on local cultures of resistance and New Orleans's role in the production of national and transnational social justice movements enables me to evaluate New Orleans's enduring central role in the production of U.S. and transnational constructs of African diasporic identity and radical democratic politics and aesthetics. Chapter One, "Second Line Knowledges and the Re-Spatialization of Resistance in New Orleans," synthesizes academic and grassroots analyses and descriptions of second lines, Mardi Gras Indian performances, and related practices in New Orleans through the lenses of critical geography and democratic theory to analyze the democratic dreams and blues approaches to history and geography that have been expressed in dynamic ways in the public spaces of New Orleans since the era of Congo Square. My second chapter, "'We Are Black Mind Jockeys': Tom Dent, The Free Southern Theater, and the Search for a Second Line Literary Aesthetic," explores the unique encounter in New Orleans between the city's working-class African American cultural traditions and the national Black Arts movement. I argue that poet and activist Tom Dent's interest in black working-class cultural traditions in New Orleans allowed him to use his three-year directorship of the Free Southern Theater to produce new and lasting interconnections between African American street performances and African American theatre and literature in the city. Chapter Three, "Story Circles, Educational Resistance, and the Students at the Center Program Before and After Hurricane Katrina," outlines how Students at the Center (SAC), a writing and digital media program in the New Orleans public schools, worked in the years just before Hurricane Katrina to re-make public schools as places that facilitated the collaborative sounding and expression of second-line knowledges and geographies and engaged youth and families in dis-privileged local neighborhoods in generating new democratic visions for the city. This chapter contrasts SAC's pre-Katrina work with their post-Katrina struggles to reformulate their philosophies in the face of the privatization of New Orleans's public schools in order to highlight the role that educational organizing in New Orleans has played in rising conversations throughout the US about the impact of neo-liberal school reform on urban social formations, public memory, and possibilities for organized resistance. Chapter Four, "'Running and Jumping to Join the Parade': Race and Gender in Post-Katrina Second Line Literature" shows how authors during the post-Katrina crisis era sought to manipulate mass market publication methods in order to critically reflect on, advocate for, and spread second-line knowledges. My analysis of the fiction of Tom Piazza and Mike Molina, the non-fiction work of Dan Baum, and the grassroots publications of the Neighborhood Story Project asks how these authors' divergent interrogations of the novel and non-fiction book forms with the form of the second line parade enable them to question, with varying degrees of success, the role of white patriarchy on shaping prevailing media and literary forms for imagining and narrating the city. Finally, Chapter Five, "Cross-Racial Storytelling and Second-Line Theatre Making After the Deluge," analyzes how New Orleans's community-based theatre makers have drawn on second-line knowledges and geographies to build a theatre-based racial healing movement in the post-Katrina city. Because they were unable and unwilling, after the Flood, to continue to "do" theatre in privatized sites removed from the lives and daily spatial practices of local residents, the network of theater companies and community centers whose work I describe (such as John O'Neal's Junebug Productions, Mondo Bizarro Productions, ArtSpot Productions, and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center) have made New Orleans's theatrical landscape into a central site for trans-national scholarly and practitioner dialogues about the relationship of community-engaged theatre making to the construction of just and sustainable urban democracies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The radical democratic conception of civil society strives for theoretically constructing and politically defending civil society as a social sphere autonomous from both the economy and state. As a position taken against Marxist and liberal theories, radical civil societarianism views the cultural and normative structures of modern societies as independent from and prior to systemically conceived economic and political relations. These structures is purported to give way to spontaneous social solidarity characterising civil society. With the mechanisms of domination and exploitation defined outside civil society, this approach ends up with excessive voluntarism characterising social relations thereof. Similarly, in the Turkish context, the dominant centre-periphery approach is predicated upon the external contradiction between the vertical state-society relations and horizontal relations between social actors. It is argued that the dominance of the former has caused the underdevelopment of civil society which is a particular expression of the latter. In any case, social conflicts are detached from structural political and economic mechanisms and conceived in voluntaristic terms. Consequently, the normative position radical civil societarianism takes vis-&agrave / -vis social movements fails to go beyond an imposition of the arbitrary notion of &ldquo / civility&rdquo / through the discourse of self-limitation.

This study explores the hegemonic articulation of ‘feminist politics’ by the Swedish political party Feminist Initiative (Feministiskt initiativ) during 2014 national parliamentary election campaign. The analysis is carried out on two levels: the construction of the hegemonic project of feminist politics and the construction of an antagonist.      Deploying the discourse-theoretical approach by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as well as the theories of radical democracy and intersectionality, it is shown how a new, broad collective feminist identity is produced by deconstructing womanhood as an identifiable and unproblematic category as well as expanding the signifying chain of feminism by including new social struggles into it. As a result, the feminist subject is conceptualized in radical-democratic terms as a citizen with equal rights, rather than an essentialized female subject. Two nodal points that fix the meaning of the hegemonic project of feminist politics are identified: one is human rights, which enables the expansion of the chain of equivalence, and the other is experience of oppression, which acknowledges differences existing within the movement and prevents it from muting marginalized voices. Discrimination, being the constitutive outside, both threatens and produces the subject: on the one hand, it violates human rights that underlie feminist politics; on the other hand, it produces the experience of oppression that gives a unique feminist perspective to each member of the collective identity. The hegemonic project thus emerges as dependent on the oppressive power of discrimination. The study suggests a critical discussion on how the constitutive outside – discrimination – empties the concept of feminism by a radical expansion of its meaning.    The research furthermore explores the construction of the antagonist of the hegemonic project. Utilizing analytical concepts from the writings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, it is demonstrated how social structures and norms acquire agency and become the significant Other for the feminist identity. The thesis is concluded by a critical discussion on the fundamental impossibility of identification based on opposing oneself to something that can only be expressed with a signifier that ultimately lacks any signified.

The civil society and civic engagement is a prerequisite for democracy (Putnam, 1994), and in the form of the popular movements it has in many ways defined the Swedish democracy. This thesis focuses on the locality Holmsund located in the municipality of Umeå, Holmsund has a history that are in ways defined by activeness from civil society in similarity with many other places in Sweden (Ambjörnsson, 2001). Through interviews with people active connected to voluntary associations in Holmsund, and the use of narrative analysis this thesis tries to understand how what roles civil society has in Holmsund today; with specific interest in the rural context. Central to this is the understanding of space as relational and in many ways defined by power relations, and in particular relationship between centre-periphery. The combination of the centre-periphery relationship and the neo-liberal restructuring of the Swedish economy from being characterized by wealth distribution to wealth contributing in order to prosper has among other things lead to a decrease in services and increase inequality, both in urban peripheral places or as in this case, rural places. A part of how voluntary associations perceive their role in a rural and local context, is a role of counteracting the effects of inequality but mainly voluntary association are occupied with creating a good living environment within their local community. A part of the increasing inequality is that it enhances the identification with the local context which creates a common social reality among the inhabitants which serves as ground for organization. Through place attachment there seem to be an identification in between a significant presence and importance of civil society and the place Holmsund, this contributes to Holmsund being constructed as a civic community.

No description available.

This paper deals with online political discussion on social networking sites. Drawing from Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and former adaptations of public sphere theory to Internet research, the study examines to what extent political discussion on social networking sites displays public issue focus as well as deliberative, liberal and communitarian characteristics. The empirical analysis is a case study that scrutinizes two opposing Facebook pages created in the context of the topic ‘Stuttgart 21’ – a construction project that evoked a local civic protest movement in the city of Stuttgart in the south of Germany. Using an ethnographic approach, the study takes into account the architecture, culture and discussion style on the two pages and aims at describing the pages in terms of their degree of reciprocity, contestation, ideological homogeneity, rationality and contextualisation with the offline protest movement. The results show two polarized pages that lack deliberation and dialogue, but feature ideological homophily and identification. The results back the fragmentation theory of Internet audiences, while not maintaining the fear of losing the common ground in society. On the contrary, the study suggests that civic political engagement on social networking sites should be discussed in the context of radical democratic processes. It concludes that the utilization of social networks in order to politically inform, stimulate and mobilise scalable publics is desirable.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-07T15:09:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 12565097 bytes, checksum: ef1d94b51a832f975313347e08b4dd18 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This thesis proposes an investigation of citizenship education in Brazil, taking as a reference the relationship between citizenship and the educational process that takes place at secondary school in the country, particularly in the scope of the school subject Sociology. The research focuses on the comparative analysis of the meanings of citizenship identified in students discourse by reference to their curricular experiences, especially in the field of Sociology, the conceptions of citizenship articulated in the discourse of curriculum guidelines for the teaching of Sociology at secondary school level and the considerations about citizenship education that emerge in the discourse of the Sociology teachers of the participating students. Students discourse was observed through the analysis of mind maps on the theme of citizenship constructed by 21 students from a local secondary school, and it was related to the analysis of specific curriculum guidelines for the teaching of Sociology at secondary school (the National Prescribed Outcomes, the National Guidelines and the local State Guidelines) and to the investigation of the teachers discourse, articulated through interviews. It is a case study, and the methodology used for analyzing data was anchored on the theoreticalepistemological framework and on categories of Discourse Theory proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, among which we highlight: discourse, hegemony, the axes of equivalence and difference, floating signifier, articulation, antagonism and dislocation. The study of the distinct discursive formations above-mentioned was aimed at analyzing which conceptions of citizenship appear as hegemonic in the educational arena, considering the dynamics of interdiscursivity and the intertwining of citizenship conceptions and the dimensions of agency, experience and identification. Citizenship education was discussed taking as a reference three analytical perspectives: a developmental perspective or of social responsibility, a critical or justice-oriented perspective and a perspective of everyday practice and process. In the end, we suggested some implications of the meanings of citizenship identified as hegemonic in the educational discourses observed. Those implications affect curriculum development and the pedagogical process in specific ways, enabling those aspects to contribute (or not) to the emergence of participatory citizens, not only from a social, but also from a political point of view, and facilitating (or not) the strengthening of radical and plural forms of democracy. / Essa pesquisa se dirige a investigar aspectos da educação para a cidadania no Brasil, tomando como referência a relação entre a cidadania e o processo educacional que ocorre no espaço escolar do ensino médio, sobretudo no âmbito da disciplina Sociologia. O foco da pesquisa é a comparação dos sentidos de cidadania identificados nos discursos de alunos, a partir de suas vivências curriculares de Sociologia, com os significados presentes nos discursos dos documentos curriculares para o ensino dessa disciplina no nível médio, e também cotejando tais sentidos com as considerações sobre as abordagens de educação para a cidadania que transparecem no discurso dos professores de Sociologia dos alunos participantes. O discurso dos alunos foi observado a partir de mapas mentais com foco na cidadania construídos por 21 estudantes de uma escola secundária da cidade de João Pessoa, e foi relacionado à análise de documentos curriculares para o ensino de Sociologia no nível médio (PCN, OCEM e Referenciais para o Ensino Médio da Paraíba), e ao discurso dos professores, observado a partir de entrevistas. Trata-se de um estudo de caso, e a metodologia de análise utilizada se apoiou em pressupostos teórico-epistemológicos e em categorias da Teoria do Discurso de Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe, dentre as quais destacamos: discurso, hegemonia, eixos da equivalência e diferença, significante flutuante, articulação, antagonismo e deslocamento. O estudo das diferentes formações discursivas mencionadas se voltou para analisar que concepções de cidadania são hegemonizadas no campo educacional, observando as dinâmicas de interdiscursividade e o imbricamento dessas concepções com as dimensões de agência, experiência e identificação. A educação para a cidadania foi discutida tendo por base três perspectivas de análise: uma perspectiva desenvolvimentista ou de responsabilidade social, uma perspectiva crítica ou voltada para a justiça social, e uma perspectiva de processo e prática do cotidiano. Ao final da pesquisa, sugerimos algumas implicações dos sentidos de cidadania priorizados nos campos educacionais observados. Tais implicações repercutem no desenvolvimento de um trabalho pedagógico e curricular de maneiras específicas, que podem contribuir (ou não) para a emergência de cidadãos participativos não só do ponto de vista social, mas também político, e que podem ser relevantes (ou não) para o fortalecimento de formas radicais e plurais de democracia.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-08-20T13:46:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Zaira Maria Arretche_Dissertacao.pdf: 767049 bytes, checksum: 415dbfa6b2a80e7434eec25f1e1859dc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-11 / This essay examines the concepts of political representation of three contemporary democratic theories. It aims at exploring their theoretical consistency both regarding the democratic process and the electoral representativeness. The elitist theory of democracy, as framed by Joseph Schumpeter, is based upon the assumption that voters lack discernment skills while political elites have leadership capacity. As a result, representation can be grounded on authority formalism, as well as political participation could be restricted to the choice of representatives. Democracy would be ensured by this decision-making method. The republicanist Philip Pettit's theory, by its turn, is based on republican principles. The non-domination ideal requires the active participation of society, not only in the choice of representatives. Instead, the capability to compete in the decision sphere of power would allow voters to recall representatives by means of control mechanisms established by the rule of law. The theory of radical democracy, as framed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, lacks the prescriptive features of the two previous ones. It is based on a new analytical perspective of society, which breaks with essentialism dichotomy. They propose an agonistic model of democracy, which takes into account the plural nature of manhood, which is antagonistic and affectionate. As a result, this theory frames the role of representatives differently. As theories of representative democracy, these models of representation present themselves as critical operacionalization, with internal contradictions. As a result, they may, on some dimensions, de-constitute themselves either as democratic theories or as theories of representation. / Esta dissertação analisa as ideias de representação política de três teorias contemporâneas da democracia, com o propósito de demonstrar sua pertinência teórica no que diz respeito ao processo democrático e à representatividade eleitoral. A ideia de representação na teoria democrática elitista, tal como postulada por Joseph Schumpeter, baseia-se no pressuposto da incapacidade de discernimento por parte do eleitor, em contraposição à capacidade de liderança da elite política. Este pressuposto empírico conferiria justificativa moral para o formalismo da autoridade e à participação eleitoral restrita à escolha dos representantes. Nestas bases, as decisões políticas seriam democráticas. A teoria republicana, por sua vez, tal como formulada por Philip Pettit, tem por base o ideal de não-dominação. Por ser republicana, requer a participação ativa da sociedade, para além da escolha dos representantes. O cidadão teria capacidade para disputar decisões nas esferas de poder e destituir seus representantes, através da instituição do império da lei, com diversos mecanismos de controle. Por fim, a teoria da democracia radical, tal como formulada por Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe, não apresenta as características prescritivas das teorias anteriores. Baseia sua análise da sociedade em uma nova perspectiva, de ruptura com o essencialismo dicotômico. Propõe um modelo agonístico da democracia, que leva em consideração a natureza humana plural, antagônica e afetiva. Estes pressupostos implicam um reordenamento da função dos representantes. Enquanto teorias da democracia representativa, estes modelos de representação constituem-se em uma operacionalidade fundamental, os quais podem apresentar, algumas vezes, contradições internas, culminando por desconstituí-las como teorias democráticas ou como teorias representativas.