Participation, Culture and Democracy Book · October 2018 CITATIONS 0 Linguistic Indeterminacy and Statutory Interpretation: Revisiting Ethic Adjectives in Austrian Civil Law View project International Legal Linguistics Workshop 2018 (ILLWS18) View project (original) (raw)
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Citizenship, Democracy, and the Public Sphere: Fall 2013
According to many academic and popular observers, we live now in times defined by manifold crises. Rapid changes in the scope and shape of global capitalism are responsible for new anxieties worldwide regarding the gap between the rich and the poor, the destruction of a habitable natural environment, the erosion of human rights, and the intensification of political violence. According to scholars across a variety of disciplines (including communication, political science, philosophy and critical theory, sociology, etc.), solutions to these problems depend on robust citizen participation in transparent democracies. In short, in order for politics to confront our gathering threats, politics must first be possible. This course addresses this central question: What are the conditions necessary for public life and political action? This question serves as the circumference for others: What is the proper object of political will? Does more democracy produce better outcomes? How does capitalism exacerbate or ameliorate the crises occasioned by globalization? What are the possibilities for and limits of citizenship? What are the settings or contexts that render political participation possible and effective?
Problems of Participation: Reflections on Democracy, Authority and the Struggle for Common Life
This book gathers together a collection of essays organised around three ‘problems’ of participatory democracy. These problems raise questions, conundrums and challenges for participatory practice and thinking. They point towards both difficulties and opportunities. We are not identifying ‘problems’ in order to simply criticize or reject participation. Problems are an enduring part of all worthwhile practice, driving creativity, understanding and skills. Our aim is to vitalize participatory thought and practice by raising and reflecting upon three broad problems. The first problem that the essays address is that ‘Participatory Democracy Needs Authority’. The authors of essays in this section affirm the value of democracy, paying particular attention to how it needs to be cultivated through structures of authority. Those who have authority and those who grant it are connected by bonds of trust that allow us to hold people and actions to account. Democracy’s dependence upon authority constitutes a problem, creating challenges and dilemmas, because trust takes time and emotional labour to build and often seems to be a scarce resource. Moreover, we have to deal with the fact that there are always power relations and inequalities at play – however participatory our practice or democratic our intentions. The second problem that we take up is that ‘Participatory Democracy is a Craft’. Rather than understanding democracy in terms of electoral politics, and participation in terms of handbooks and manuals brimming with the latest techniques and models, the contributors attend to the subtleties of effective participation, whether in civil society activity, processes of collaborative learning or in ‘ordinary’ life. Enhancing democracy through better forms of participation requires particular ethical and embodied sensibilities and commitments, which can only be developed through practical experience, and which need to be nurtured through slow apprenticeship. Democracy is craftwork more than it is a set of institutions, textbook techniques or processes. However, as the authors of this section suggest, it is a difficult, costly and embodied challenge to learn the skills and ethos of such craft. The final problem is that ‘Participatory Democracy is a Struggle Against Privatization’. Many advocates of participatory democracy are more or less explicitly committed to resisting ‘privatization’ both in the sense of commodification and market dominance, and in the sense of individualisation of life and experience – seeing both as opposed to equality and dignity. But many proponents of neo-liberal marketization and individualised freedom also promote myriad forms of ‘participation’. Further, as is evident in theatre box offices, ‘participation sells’. This raises awkward questions and uncomfortable challenges for proponents of participation – a challenge that the authors of this section try to address, in part, by reframing participation in terms of acting in, and creating, alternative visions of what we share in common. We hope that this collection of essays helps in opening up conversations around participation. Such conversation is crucial, not simply for specialist communities of practitioners or academics, but for everyone who is interested in democracy and dignity today. ‘Participation’ has become nigh on ubiquitous as an ambition, description and buzzword throughout social life, from marketing strategies and economic development, through government reform and alternative politics, to education and the arts. We might even say that participation is the form, the mode of organisation, that defines our present moment. Participation is our condition, our imperative and our problem.
New Modes of Participation and Norms of Citizenship
Paper prepared for delivery at the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research Workshop “Professionalization and Individualized Collective Action: Analyzing New ‘Participatory’ Dimensions in Civil Society”, 2009
Contextual analysis report: participatory citizenship in the European Union Institute of Education
2012
The concept of citizenship as merely a legal concept has been considered too narrow for modern democratic society for a number of reasons: ? Having legal rights is insufficient to enable equal possibilities for all citizens to activate their rights. Participatory forms of Citizenship require the capability to exercise rights. ? Gaining and maintaining rights requires constant action and vigilance from citizens,and a legal definition does not encompass these processes. ? The legal definition emphasizes rights, and places less emphasis on obligations.Obligations of the state upon the citizen are not always legally framed, but occur as citizens’ perceptions of norms. These participatory norms, for example voting, are crucial for the health of democracy. ? The legal definition focuses on the relationship between the state and the individual,and ignores the relationship between citizens and the associations they form, as wellas the importance of associative life in the balance of democra...
In this contribution I will explore how the democratic value of our political sphere can be regained, building on the knowledge that all of us are invested with a democratic engagement in this political realm. To achieve this I will explore key concepts of which their importance was already clear from the beginning of our democratic history, thus going back to the Greek polis. But in a first section I want to sketch the current situation and explore the possible current bankruptcy of our democratic establishment and bring to the fore some issues that increasingly seem to put our democratic values under pressure. Then, in a second section I introduce the first concept, the notion of citizenship, and look at the sort(s) of citizenship we are currently experiencing. In a third section I focus on the concept of the agon as I believe it opens up some opportunities to rethink the notion of citizenship in our current pluralist and divers societies. This will finally enable me to draw some concluding remarks and elaborate on the difficulties of our representational democracy.
Democracy and Citizenship: Expanding Domains
The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, edited by J. Dryzek, B. Honig and A, Phillips, 2006
In this chapter, first, I will explore key ways in which elements of contemporary innovative conceptions of democracy – deliberative, ‘difference’, cosmopolitan, ecological and others - seek to reconstruct and reconstrue citizens and citizenship (and often disagree with each other in the process, within and across these categories of innovation). I shall do this by pinpointing some key ways in which these innovations seek to expand the domains of democratic citizenship by reconfiguring (1) where we find citizens, (2) how they are construed, and (3) what expectations are held of them. Secondly, I try to respond to the challenges posed by innovative theories, by showing how the core notions of political representation and democracy itself need to be reconfigured in order to enable us to apply them meaningfully, and to continue the recommendatory tasks of political theory, in an era of scepticism, rapid political change and social complexity.