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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Beyond Gatekeeping: Propaganda, Democracy, And The Organization Of Digital Publics, Jennifer Forestal Dec 2020

Beyond Gatekeeping: Propaganda, Democracy, And The Organization Of Digital Publics, Jennifer Forestal

Political Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

While there is disagreement as to the severity of the digital disinformation problem, scholars and practitioners have largely coalesced around the idea that a new system of safeguards is needed to prevent its spread. By minimizing the role of citizens in managing their own communities, however, I argue that these gatekeeping approaches are undemocratic. To develop a more democratic alternative, I draw from the work of Harold D. Lasswell and John Dewey to argue that we should study the organization of digital publics. For citizens to engage in democratic inquiry, publics must be organized so that they can (1) easily …


Legalizing Corporate Political Speech: How Citizens United Laid The Groundwork For Corporations' Right To Political Speech, Karen Sebold Sep 2020

Legalizing Corporate Political Speech: How Citizens United Laid The Groundwork For Corporations' Right To Political Speech, Karen Sebold

Political Science Teaching and Learning

The right to political speech is essential for democracy, but should corporations have the same rights as individual persons? In this presentation, Prof. Sebold explains how the US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United determined that political speech extends to corporations and what that ruling may imply for US politics.


Constitution Con, Samantha Reardon, Elizabeth Friedly Sep 2020

Constitution Con, Samantha Reardon, Elizabeth Friedly

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.


Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law Sep 2020

Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.


Rancière’S Equality And James’S Pragmatism: Renewing Our Democratic Republic Through A Revised View Of Intelligence, Matthew Schmitz Jul 2020

Rancière’S Equality And James’S Pragmatism: Renewing Our Democratic Republic Through A Revised View Of Intelligence, Matthew Schmitz

Educational Studies Summer Fellows

The prevailing theory of intelligence in American society encourages restrictive treatment of others and endorses a dull impression of human capabilities. In the process of poking at their domestic opponents, modern Democrats and Republicans combine to expose our collective shortcomings on this front. Our discourse too often focuses on jockeying for position and too rarely focuses on the rich intellectual community we inhabit. Through an analysis of William James’s Pragmatism and Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I look to recapture a liberating view of intelligence that enables us to revise our interpretation of citizenship in an American democratic republic. …


The Consent Of The Governed, Carter A. Hanson Jul 2020

The Consent Of The Governed, Carter A. Hanson

Student Publications

The Consent of the Governed is a Kolbe Fellowship project investigating gerrymandering through the lens of mathematics, Supreme Court litigation, and the potential for redistricting reform. It was produced as a five-episode podcast during the summer of 2020; this paper is the transcription of the podcast script. The project begins with an analysis of the impact of gerrymandering on the composition of the current U.S. House of Representatives. It then investigates the arguments and stories of Supreme Court gerrymandering cases in the past twenty years within their political contexts, with a focus on the Court's reaction to different mathematical methods …


Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton Jan 2020

Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton

All Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill-equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, “the people” cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies, designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change policy has focused on technocratic fixes that operate predominantly through executive action to escape democratic politics — with vanishingly little to show for it after a change in presidential administration. To help craft a more durable U.S. climate change strategy, this Article scrutinizes the purported …