Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation

Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation PDF Author: Jonathan Beecher Field
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962383
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation

Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation PDF Author: Jonathan Beecher Field
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962383
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Listening, Community Engagement, and Peacebuilding

Listening, Community Engagement, and Peacebuilding PDF Author: Graham D. Bodie
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000889408
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book explores the role of listening in community engagement and peacebuilding efforts, bridging academic research in communication and practical applications for individual and social change. For all their differences, community engagement and peacebuilding efforts share much in common: the need to establish and agree on achievable and measurable goals, the importance of trust, and the need for conflict management, to name but a few. This book presents listening – considered as a multi-disciplinary concept related to but distinct from civility, civic participation, and other social processes – as a primary mechanism for accomplishing these tasks. Individual chapters explore these themes in an array of international contexts, examining topics such as conflict resolution, restorative justice, environmental justice, migrants and refugees, and trauma-informed peacebuilding. The book includes contemporary literature reviews and theoretical insights covering the role of listening as related to individual, social, and governmental efforts to better engage communities and build, maintain, or establish peace in an increasingly divided world. This collection provides invaluable insight to researchers, students, educators, and practitioners in intercultural and international communication, conflict management, peacebuilding, community engagement, and international studies.

Selfie Democracy

Selfie Democracy PDF Author: Elizabeth Losh
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262370514
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
How politicians’ digital strategies appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley. Smartphones and other digital devices seem to give us a direct line to politicians. But is interacting with presidential tweets really a manifestation of digital democracy? In Selfie Democracy, Elizabeth Losh examines the unintended consequences of politicians’ digital strategies, from the Obama campaign’s pioneering construction of an online community to Trump’s Twitter dominance. She finds that politicians who use digital media appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, smartphones and social media don’t enable participatory democracy so much as they incentivize citizens to perform attention-getting acts of political expression. Losh explores presidential rhetoric casting digital media as tools of democracy, describes the conflation of gender and technology that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, chronicles the Biden campaign’s early digital stumbles in 2020, and recounts the TikTok campaign that may have spoiled a Trump rally. She shows that although Obama and Trump may seem diametrically opposed in both style and substance, they both used mobile digital media in ways that reshaped the presidency and promised a new kind of digital democracy. Obama used data and digital media to connect to citizens without intermediaries; Trump followed this strategy to its most extreme conclusion. What were the January 6 insurrectionists doing, as they livestreamed themselves and their cohorts attacking the Capitol, but practicing their own brand of selfie democracy?

Endlings

Endlings PDF Author: Lydia Pyne
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452968845
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
Amid the historical decimation of species around the globe, a new way into the language of loss An endling is the last known individual of a species; when that individual dies, the species becomes extinct. These “last individuals” are poignant characters in the stories that humans tell themselves about today’s Anthropocene. In this evocative work, Lydia Pyne explores how discussion about endlings—how we tell their histories—draws on deep traditions of storytelling across a variety of narrative types that go well beyond the science of these species’ biology or their evolutionary history. Endlings provides a useful and thoughtful discussion of species concepts: how species start and how (and why) they end, what it means to be a “charismatic” species, the effects of rewilding, and what makes species extinction different in this era. From Benjamin the thylacine to Celia the ibex to Lonesome George the Galápagos tortoise, endlings, Pyne shows, have the power to shape how we think about grief, mourning, and loss amid the world’s sixth mass extinction.

All through the Town

All through the Town PDF Author: Antero Garcia
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452969639
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
The role of the humble school bus in transforming education in America Everyone knows the yellow school bus. It’s been invisible and also omnipresent for a century. Antero Garcia shows how the U.S. school bus, its form unaltered for decades, is the most substantial piece of educational technology to ever shape how schools operate. As it noisily moves young people across the country every day, the bus offers the opportunity for a necessary reexamination of what “counts” as educational technology. Particularly in light of these buses being idled in pandemic times, All through the Town questions what we take for granted and what we overlook in public schooling in America, pushing for liberatory approaches to education that extend beyond notions of school equity. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Aspirational Fascism

Aspirational Fascism PDF Author: William E. Connolly
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957371
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilities This quick and engaging study clearly lays out the United States’ current democratic crisis. Examining the early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany, William E. Connolly detects synergies with Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. Tapping into a sense of contemporary fragility, Aspirational Fascism pays particular attention to how conflicts between neoliberalism and the pluralizing left have placed the white working class in a bind. Ultimately, Connolly believes a multifaceted democracy constitutes the best antidote to aspirational fascism and rethinks what a politics of the left might look like today. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Should You Believe Wikipedia?

Should You Believe Wikipedia? PDF Author: Amy Bruckman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108490328
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Our online interactions create new forms of community and knowledge, reshaping who we are as individuals and as a society.

Rescue Me

Rescue Me PDF Author: Margret Grebowicz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452968756
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
What exactly is it we want from dogs today? This is a little book about the oldest relationship we humans have cultivated with another large animal—in something like the original interspecies space, as old or older than any other practice that might be called human. But it’s also about the role of this relationship in the attrition of life—especially social life—in late capitalism. As we become more and more obsessed with imagining ourselves as benevolent rescuers of dogs, it is increasingly clear that it is dogs who are rescuing us. But from what? And toward what? Exploring adoption, work, food, and training, this book considers the social as fundamentally more-than-human and argues that the future belongs to dogs—and the humans they are pulling along.

Does the Earth Care?

Does the Earth Care? PDF Author: Mick Smith
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452967067
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Rethinking our relationship with Earth in a time of environmental emergency The world is changing. Progress no longer has a future but any earlier sense of Earth as “providential” seems of merely historical interest. The apparent absence of Earthly solicitude is a symptom and consequence of these successive Western modes of engagement with the Earth, now exemplified in global capitalism. Within these constructs, Earth can only appear as constitutively indifferent to the fate of all its inhabitants. The “provisional ecology” outlined in Does the Earth Care?—drawing on a variety of literary and philosophical sources from Richard Jefferies and Robert Macfarlane to Martin Heidegger and Gaia theory—fundamentally challenges that assumption, while offering an Earthly alternative to either cold realism or alienated despair in the face of impending ecological disaster. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Futures of the Sun

Futures of the Sun PDF Author: Imre Szeman
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452971587
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Who will lead the transition from fossil fuel–dependent societies into renewable energy futures? Energy transition is crucial to the struggle against climate change. But even while embracing the death of fossil fuels, some want to preserve the current social and political order. Futures of the Sun explores the competing eco-stories being offered by people intent on shaping the transition to fit their vision and version of a renewable society. Imre Szeman explains how and why key players are working hard to make sure a greener, cleaner future will look much like the world we live in today. He examines the rhetoric, ideology, and politics of liberal nationalists intent on fighting a war against climate change, billionaire solar entrepreneurs who believe only in themselves, and the populist far right who want no change at all. Offering possible new critical and political avenues, Szeman reveals how those on the environmental left can ensure their vision of egalitarianism beyond the status quo can become the reality of our renewable future.