David McIvor | Colorado State University (original) (raw)
Papers by David McIvor
Critical Horizons, 2020
Claudia Leeb’s The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence with David W. McI... more Claudia Leeb’s The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence with David W. McIvor, Lars Rensmann, and Claudia Leeb Claudia Leeb, David W. McIvor and Lars Rensmann Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs, Washington State University, Pullman, USA; Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2013
D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory, 2017
Over the past decade, democratic theory has been becoming increasingly concerned with the social,... more Over the past decade, democratic theory has been becoming increasingly concerned with the social, cultural, and ecological environments that facilitate democratic subjectivities. In this context, scholars often turn to D.W. Winnicott. McIvor moves beyond a theory of democratic transitional objects to consider the developmental trajectory of the holding environment. Beyond objects of civic attachment, citizens need the capacity for negotiating conflict, which can be best approached through Winnicott’s concept of “integration.” McIvor argues that the difficult work of (democratic) integration is reflected in what Lichterman calls “reflexive” associations. Democratic associations (and selves) need spaces of antagonism and mutualistic collaboration in order to facilitate integration. By contrast, standard forms of civic volunteerism do little to develop citizens’ capacities for integration and, in turn, feed “false” selfhood.
Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2020
What is the value of psychoanalysis for the theorising of race in our contemporary moment? This a... more What is the value of psychoanalysis for the theorising of race in our contemporary moment? This article explores this question by engaging with theories of Afropessimism, which criticise the therapeutic ethic that traverses the wide variety of psychoanalytic approaches. Afropessimists accuse psychoanalysis of perpetuating a racialised partition in the social order complicit with ‘anti-Blackness’. While stopping short of these conclusions, I argue that psychoanalysts and social theorists need to countenance the possibilities that even their ‘race-conscious’ work might carry assumptions that are ‘anti-Black’. In doing so I will argue that attempts to mourn the traumas and losses associated with race have to find ways to account for the structural positioning of particular racialised bodies.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2017
The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased prominence in recent decades, in part ... more The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased prominence in recent decades, in part due to political experiments such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other formal or informal truth or reconciliation processes. Here, I argue that there is a fundamental mendacity to reconciliation, given stubborn asymmetries of social power and disrespect. Reconciliation as an ideal carries an impetus towards resolution that covers over the necessary role that conflict plays in political struggles-including the role that conflict plays within struggles for reconciliation. Nevertheless, despite the mendacity of reconciliation, its meaning still holds political value. Reconciliation implies an orientation towards social repair, which even the strongest critics of reconciliation cannot bring themselves to reject. Some lies are worse than others, and some lies might be noble or necessary. Reconciliation is the latter-a fiction that is less pernicious than its absence. In this light, the task is to locate means of political reconciliation that do not obscure the conflicts and asymmetries of social life but enable social actors to face up to these conflicts and to discover novel ways to repair the damage that they can do. "The last god to be still is Disagreement."-Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes What remains of reconciliation as a political ideal in an age of resentment (Mishra 2017)? In the wake of the 2008 election of Barack Obama, manic claims about a "post-racial" America found at least some resonance in public opinion polls showing a broad increase in optimism
New Political Science, 2016
Abstract Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, an... more Abstract Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Sep 15, 2014
Jurgen Habermas has a strong claim to be considered the most important and influential social the... more Jurgen Habermas has a strong claim to be considered the most important and influential social theorist of the twentieth century. He is the inheritor of a German intellectual tradition reaching back to Immanuel Kant, yet Habermas's work ranges far beyond Continental philosophy, reaching into other traditions such as analytic philosophy and American pragmatism. There are multiple areas of academic inquiry to which Habermas has made a significant contribution, and the current debates within the disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, developmental psychology, philosophy of science, sociology, cultural studies, and political theory are all influenced by his work. In addition to his scholarly contributions, Habermas has been one of the more prominent public intellectuals over the past several decades. He has contributed to political debates surrounding immigration, German unification, the expansion of the European Union, the role of religion within liberal democracies, and the memory of the Holocaust within German public life. Few individuals have made a greater contribution to both intellectual understanding and public life. Keywords: critical theory; democratic theory; public sphere
Contemporary Political Theory, 2015
Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently i... more Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth's theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called 'third generation' of critical theory, yet Honneth sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian 'cunning of recognition' that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein's concept of 'integration' offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theorywith its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracywith agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes.
This book brings together recent and cutting-edge political theory scholarship on deliberative de... more This book brings together recent and cutting-edge political theory scholarship on deliberative democracy. The collection reframes deliberative democracy to be sensitive to the deep conflicts, multiple forms of communication, and aspirations for civic agency that characterize real public deliberation. In so doing, the book addresses many of the most common challenges to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.
Contemporary Political Theory
Breakdown is an apt word for encapsulating the present political moment. Liberal institutions are... more Breakdown is an apt word for encapsulating the present political moment. Liberal institutions are increasingly dysfunctional, and civic norms are steadily eroding in democracies old and new; social trust is disintegrating, and climate catastrophe manifests through extreme temperatures and increasingly violent floods, fires, and hurricanes. In this age of derangement, public traumas and fears-surrounding, for instance, racial or gender violence and inequities, or cultural, economic, technological, and climactic transformations-interface with psychological dramas and defenses. Psychic troubles-anxiety, depression, or paranoia-are increasingly public matters, if not directly political phenomena. For these reasons and more, Noëlle McAfee argues that political theory and praxis need psychoanalysis; not simply as a means of identifying the political pathologies attendant to breakdown but also for imagining alternatives in our troubled world. McAfee begins with the concept of breakdown itself, as articulated by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. For Winnicott, breakdown is an experience of primordial emptiness or an 'unthinkable state of affairs' that underlies the ego's defense organizations (p. xiii). Breakdown occurs because the ego is not mature enough to 'encompass' the phenomenon of maternal rupture or able to gather 'all the phenomena' of natal separation 'into the area of personal omnipotence' (p. xiii). Breakdown, and the original repression it inaugurates, persists within the unconscious, but it is the fear of this experience-which took place prior to the establishment of an ego capable of experiencing-that can 'destroy' the individual's life (p. xiii). Therefore, Winnicott argues that patients need to be reminded that the breakdown has already happened in order to work through the unspeakable fear that the breakdown is still yet to occur. Confronting the fear of breakdown enables the construction of an ego that can bring the event into its 'present time experience,' structured by the facilitating environment provided by analysis (xiv).
Democratic Theory, Dec 1, 2019
Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic instituti... more Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic institutions. These antidemocratic trends have prompted some democratic theorists to reject the seeming inevitability of democratic forms of government and instead to consider democracy as a fugitive phenomenon. Fugitive democracy, as we argue below, is a theory composed of two parts. First, it includes a robust, normative ideal of democracy and, second, a clear-eyed vision of the historical defeats and generic difficulties attendant to that ideal. This article considers how democratic theorists might respond to the challenges posed by fugitive democracy and the implications of such an understanding for future research in democratic theory.
Journal of Psychosocial Studies
Administrative Theory & Praxis
In recent years, there has been a notable shift toward collaborative governance as a theoretical ... more In recent years, there has been a notable shift toward collaborative governance as a theoretical and practical framework for public administration and management, and in light of this shift, public administration scholars have called for refocused attention on the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy. This article responds to this call by turning to the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas. It reviews relevant elements of Habermas’s broader social theory that illuminate the tension between bureaucracy and democracy in the context of collaborative governance. Collaborative governance is best viewed from the perspective of a critical theory attuned to the normative and political stakes of collaborative arrangements and practices. In the conclusion, the specific contributions made to collaborative governance from a critical theory perspective are discussed. The article ends with a plea for the folding of critical democratic pedagogy into the training of public managers and administrators. Public managers should be trained to see the potentials of collaboration from the perspectives of both administrator and citizen in order to see not only how processes of governance or management take place but also how those processes could and should advance the cause of democracy.
Cornell University Press
This chapter begins to develop the idea of a democratic work of mourning by first displacing it f... more This chapter begins to develop the idea of a democratic work of mourning by first displacing it from the immediate context of contemporary dramas of reconciliation and social repair. In particular, it turns back to the city-state of Athens in the fifth century BCE and specifically to its annual festival the Great Dionysia (where the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were originally performed). The Athenian tragic festival offers an intensely rich practice of representing and honoring trauma and violence. Through a reading of the dramatic festival and of Aeschylus' Oresteia, it lays the conceptual groundwork for a theory of democratic mourning. It is argued that Aeschylus and the Athenian experience can help us to think about an “Oresteian” politics of mourning that is irreducible to either a Periclean or an Antigonean approach.
Journal of Public Deliberation, 2014
Review of Democracy as Popular Sovereignty by Filimon Peonidis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).
Sowing Seeds in the City, 2016
The interest in and enthusiasm for urban agriculture (UA) in urban communities, the non-profit se... more The interest in and enthusiasm for urban agriculture (UA) in urban communities, the non-profit sector, and governmental institutions has grown exponentially over the past decade, and a key part of the appeal of UA is its potential to improve the civic health of a community. In this chapter we provide a theoretical framework—deep democracy—that helps to contextualize nascent attempts at civic agriculture within a broader struggle for democratic practices and relationships. We argue that urban agriculture efforts are well positioned to help citizens cultivate lasting relationships across lines of difference and amidst significant power differentials—relationships that could form the basis of a community's collective capacity to shape its future.
Political Studies Review, 2016
Nancy Now is an edited volume in which Verena Andermatt Conley and Irving Goh bring together a nu... more Nancy Now is an edited volume in which Verena Andermatt Conley and Irving Goh bring together a number of essays on the work of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the prominent figures of contemporary French thought. In particular, it focuses on the theme of time and the importance of the now in Nancy’s philosophy, as this is revealed through the contrast between finitude and infinitude: the finitude of human life and the infinitude of one’s trace, the finitude of the community and infinitude of one’s relation to the other, the finitude of the moment and the infinitude of the thought, as well as the finitude of the form and the infinitude of becoming. In addition, the finitude–infinitude theme is also approached through Nancy’s relationship with the father of the philosophy of ‘deconstruction’ and his mentor, Jacques Derrida – a relationship that is to be understood as a never-ending dialogue that Derrida’s death only momentarily paused. In general, I would describe this volume as a call to those interested in French thought and continental philosophy to (re)read and appreciate Nancy Now. Conley and Goh have done a good job of putting together a collection of thoroughly written essays by scholars who are experts on Nancy’s ‘deconstructive’ philosophical work. However, there are times where the main theme, that is, time in Nancy, is lost in the plethora of philosophical terms and neologisms which the authors employ to explore the multidimensional work of Nancy. I do not consider this as a major drawback, as I see it as necessary to providing a more accurate understanding of Nancy and to cover the many ways in which the concept of time appears in his philosophy. Even so, I feel that readers who are not familiar with Nancy’s work may from time to time find themselves wandering into unknown territories. On a different note, I think that the approximation of time through the relationship between Nancy and Derrida stands out as a more tangible way to capture the whole contrast between the finitude and infinitude of time. All in all, Nancy Now is a collection that (re)introduces one of the most prominent figures in contemporary continental philosophy while emphasising the diachronicity of his work.
Contemporary Political Theory
In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition wer... more In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition were asked to reflect on the politics of mourning. Political theorists have increasingly turned to mourning as a prism through which to view the differential politics of grief and grievance (for an overview see McIvor and Hirsch, 2019). Yet in this particular moment it is impossible to think about the linkages between politics and grief outside the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. As this exchange was coming together, the virus was beginning its spread. While only some of the contributions directly confront the question of death and democracy during a pandemic, all speak to the ways that loss, grief, and politics are intertwinedsomething that the current crisis has made abundantly clear.
Critical Horizons, 2020
Claudia Leeb’s The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence with David W. McI... more Claudia Leeb’s The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence with David W. McIvor, Lars Rensmann, and Claudia Leeb Claudia Leeb, David W. McIvor and Lars Rensmann Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs, Washington State University, Pullman, USA; Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2013
D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory, 2017
Over the past decade, democratic theory has been becoming increasingly concerned with the social,... more Over the past decade, democratic theory has been becoming increasingly concerned with the social, cultural, and ecological environments that facilitate democratic subjectivities. In this context, scholars often turn to D.W. Winnicott. McIvor moves beyond a theory of democratic transitional objects to consider the developmental trajectory of the holding environment. Beyond objects of civic attachment, citizens need the capacity for negotiating conflict, which can be best approached through Winnicott’s concept of “integration.” McIvor argues that the difficult work of (democratic) integration is reflected in what Lichterman calls “reflexive” associations. Democratic associations (and selves) need spaces of antagonism and mutualistic collaboration in order to facilitate integration. By contrast, standard forms of civic volunteerism do little to develop citizens’ capacities for integration and, in turn, feed “false” selfhood.
Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2020
What is the value of psychoanalysis for the theorising of race in our contemporary moment? This a... more What is the value of psychoanalysis for the theorising of race in our contemporary moment? This article explores this question by engaging with theories of Afropessimism, which criticise the therapeutic ethic that traverses the wide variety of psychoanalytic approaches. Afropessimists accuse psychoanalysis of perpetuating a racialised partition in the social order complicit with ‘anti-Blackness’. While stopping short of these conclusions, I argue that psychoanalysts and social theorists need to countenance the possibilities that even their ‘race-conscious’ work might carry assumptions that are ‘anti-Black’. In doing so I will argue that attempts to mourn the traumas and losses associated with race have to find ways to account for the structural positioning of particular racialised bodies.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2017
The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased prominence in recent decades, in part ... more The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased prominence in recent decades, in part due to political experiments such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other formal or informal truth or reconciliation processes. Here, I argue that there is a fundamental mendacity to reconciliation, given stubborn asymmetries of social power and disrespect. Reconciliation as an ideal carries an impetus towards resolution that covers over the necessary role that conflict plays in political struggles-including the role that conflict plays within struggles for reconciliation. Nevertheless, despite the mendacity of reconciliation, its meaning still holds political value. Reconciliation implies an orientation towards social repair, which even the strongest critics of reconciliation cannot bring themselves to reject. Some lies are worse than others, and some lies might be noble or necessary. Reconciliation is the latter-a fiction that is less pernicious than its absence. In this light, the task is to locate means of political reconciliation that do not obscure the conflicts and asymmetries of social life but enable social actors to face up to these conflicts and to discover novel ways to repair the damage that they can do. "The last god to be still is Disagreement."-Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes What remains of reconciliation as a political ideal in an age of resentment (Mishra 2017)? In the wake of the 2008 election of Barack Obama, manic claims about a "post-racial" America found at least some resonance in public opinion polls showing a broad increase in optimism
New Political Science, 2016
Abstract Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, an... more Abstract Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Sep 15, 2014
Jurgen Habermas has a strong claim to be considered the most important and influential social the... more Jurgen Habermas has a strong claim to be considered the most important and influential social theorist of the twentieth century. He is the inheritor of a German intellectual tradition reaching back to Immanuel Kant, yet Habermas's work ranges far beyond Continental philosophy, reaching into other traditions such as analytic philosophy and American pragmatism. There are multiple areas of academic inquiry to which Habermas has made a significant contribution, and the current debates within the disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, developmental psychology, philosophy of science, sociology, cultural studies, and political theory are all influenced by his work. In addition to his scholarly contributions, Habermas has been one of the more prominent public intellectuals over the past several decades. He has contributed to political debates surrounding immigration, German unification, the expansion of the European Union, the role of religion within liberal democracies, and the memory of the Holocaust within German public life. Few individuals have made a greater contribution to both intellectual understanding and public life. Keywords: critical theory; democratic theory; public sphere
Contemporary Political Theory, 2015
Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently i... more Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth's theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called 'third generation' of critical theory, yet Honneth sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian 'cunning of recognition' that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein's concept of 'integration' offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theorywith its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracywith agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes.
This book brings together recent and cutting-edge political theory scholarship on deliberative de... more This book brings together recent and cutting-edge political theory scholarship on deliberative democracy. The collection reframes deliberative democracy to be sensitive to the deep conflicts, multiple forms of communication, and aspirations for civic agency that characterize real public deliberation. In so doing, the book addresses many of the most common challenges to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.
Contemporary Political Theory
Breakdown is an apt word for encapsulating the present political moment. Liberal institutions are... more Breakdown is an apt word for encapsulating the present political moment. Liberal institutions are increasingly dysfunctional, and civic norms are steadily eroding in democracies old and new; social trust is disintegrating, and climate catastrophe manifests through extreme temperatures and increasingly violent floods, fires, and hurricanes. In this age of derangement, public traumas and fears-surrounding, for instance, racial or gender violence and inequities, or cultural, economic, technological, and climactic transformations-interface with psychological dramas and defenses. Psychic troubles-anxiety, depression, or paranoia-are increasingly public matters, if not directly political phenomena. For these reasons and more, Noëlle McAfee argues that political theory and praxis need psychoanalysis; not simply as a means of identifying the political pathologies attendant to breakdown but also for imagining alternatives in our troubled world. McAfee begins with the concept of breakdown itself, as articulated by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. For Winnicott, breakdown is an experience of primordial emptiness or an 'unthinkable state of affairs' that underlies the ego's defense organizations (p. xiii). Breakdown occurs because the ego is not mature enough to 'encompass' the phenomenon of maternal rupture or able to gather 'all the phenomena' of natal separation 'into the area of personal omnipotence' (p. xiii). Breakdown, and the original repression it inaugurates, persists within the unconscious, but it is the fear of this experience-which took place prior to the establishment of an ego capable of experiencing-that can 'destroy' the individual's life (p. xiii). Therefore, Winnicott argues that patients need to be reminded that the breakdown has already happened in order to work through the unspeakable fear that the breakdown is still yet to occur. Confronting the fear of breakdown enables the construction of an ego that can bring the event into its 'present time experience,' structured by the facilitating environment provided by analysis (xiv).
Democratic Theory, Dec 1, 2019
Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic instituti... more Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic institutions. These antidemocratic trends have prompted some democratic theorists to reject the seeming inevitability of democratic forms of government and instead to consider democracy as a fugitive phenomenon. Fugitive democracy, as we argue below, is a theory composed of two parts. First, it includes a robust, normative ideal of democracy and, second, a clear-eyed vision of the historical defeats and generic difficulties attendant to that ideal. This article considers how democratic theorists might respond to the challenges posed by fugitive democracy and the implications of such an understanding for future research in democratic theory.
Journal of Psychosocial Studies
Administrative Theory & Praxis
In recent years, there has been a notable shift toward collaborative governance as a theoretical ... more In recent years, there has been a notable shift toward collaborative governance as a theoretical and practical framework for public administration and management, and in light of this shift, public administration scholars have called for refocused attention on the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy. This article responds to this call by turning to the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas. It reviews relevant elements of Habermas’s broader social theory that illuminate the tension between bureaucracy and democracy in the context of collaborative governance. Collaborative governance is best viewed from the perspective of a critical theory attuned to the normative and political stakes of collaborative arrangements and practices. In the conclusion, the specific contributions made to collaborative governance from a critical theory perspective are discussed. The article ends with a plea for the folding of critical democratic pedagogy into the training of public managers and administrators. Public managers should be trained to see the potentials of collaboration from the perspectives of both administrator and citizen in order to see not only how processes of governance or management take place but also how those processes could and should advance the cause of democracy.
Cornell University Press
This chapter begins to develop the idea of a democratic work of mourning by first displacing it f... more This chapter begins to develop the idea of a democratic work of mourning by first displacing it from the immediate context of contemporary dramas of reconciliation and social repair. In particular, it turns back to the city-state of Athens in the fifth century BCE and specifically to its annual festival the Great Dionysia (where the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were originally performed). The Athenian tragic festival offers an intensely rich practice of representing and honoring trauma and violence. Through a reading of the dramatic festival and of Aeschylus' Oresteia, it lays the conceptual groundwork for a theory of democratic mourning. It is argued that Aeschylus and the Athenian experience can help us to think about an “Oresteian” politics of mourning that is irreducible to either a Periclean or an Antigonean approach.
Journal of Public Deliberation, 2014
Review of Democracy as Popular Sovereignty by Filimon Peonidis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).
Sowing Seeds in the City, 2016
The interest in and enthusiasm for urban agriculture (UA) in urban communities, the non-profit se... more The interest in and enthusiasm for urban agriculture (UA) in urban communities, the non-profit sector, and governmental institutions has grown exponentially over the past decade, and a key part of the appeal of UA is its potential to improve the civic health of a community. In this chapter we provide a theoretical framework—deep democracy—that helps to contextualize nascent attempts at civic agriculture within a broader struggle for democratic practices and relationships. We argue that urban agriculture efforts are well positioned to help citizens cultivate lasting relationships across lines of difference and amidst significant power differentials—relationships that could form the basis of a community's collective capacity to shape its future.
Political Studies Review, 2016
Nancy Now is an edited volume in which Verena Andermatt Conley and Irving Goh bring together a nu... more Nancy Now is an edited volume in which Verena Andermatt Conley and Irving Goh bring together a number of essays on the work of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the prominent figures of contemporary French thought. In particular, it focuses on the theme of time and the importance of the now in Nancy’s philosophy, as this is revealed through the contrast between finitude and infinitude: the finitude of human life and the infinitude of one’s trace, the finitude of the community and infinitude of one’s relation to the other, the finitude of the moment and the infinitude of the thought, as well as the finitude of the form and the infinitude of becoming. In addition, the finitude–infinitude theme is also approached through Nancy’s relationship with the father of the philosophy of ‘deconstruction’ and his mentor, Jacques Derrida – a relationship that is to be understood as a never-ending dialogue that Derrida’s death only momentarily paused. In general, I would describe this volume as a call to those interested in French thought and continental philosophy to (re)read and appreciate Nancy Now. Conley and Goh have done a good job of putting together a collection of thoroughly written essays by scholars who are experts on Nancy’s ‘deconstructive’ philosophical work. However, there are times where the main theme, that is, time in Nancy, is lost in the plethora of philosophical terms and neologisms which the authors employ to explore the multidimensional work of Nancy. I do not consider this as a major drawback, as I see it as necessary to providing a more accurate understanding of Nancy and to cover the many ways in which the concept of time appears in his philosophy. Even so, I feel that readers who are not familiar with Nancy’s work may from time to time find themselves wandering into unknown territories. On a different note, I think that the approximation of time through the relationship between Nancy and Derrida stands out as a more tangible way to capture the whole contrast between the finitude and infinitude of time. All in all, Nancy Now is a collection that (re)introduces one of the most prominent figures in contemporary continental philosophy while emphasising the diachronicity of his work.
Contemporary Political Theory
In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition wer... more In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition were asked to reflect on the politics of mourning. Political theorists have increasingly turned to mourning as a prism through which to view the differential politics of grief and grievance (for an overview see McIvor and Hirsch, 2019). Yet in this particular moment it is impossible to think about the linkages between politics and grief outside the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. As this exchange was coming together, the virus was beginning its spread. While only some of the contributions directly confront the question of death and democracy during a pandemic, all speak to the ways that loss, grief, and politics are intertwinedsomething that the current crisis has made abundantly clear.