Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Teaching Progress: A Critique Of The Grand Narrative Of Human Rights As Pedagogy For Marginalized Students, Robyn Linde, Mikaila M. L. Arthur

Faculty Publications

With the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, education about human rights became an important focus of the new human rights regime and a core method of spreading its values throughout the world. This story of human rights is consistently presented as a progressive teleology that contextualizes the expansion of rights within a larger grand narrative of liberalization, emancipation, and social justice. This paper examines the disjuncture between the grand narrative on international movements for human rights and social justice and the lived experiences of marginalized students in urban environments in the United States. Drawing on …

The War Next Door: Peace Journalism In Us Local And Distant Newspapers' Coverage Of Mexico, Katherine Lacasse, Larissa Forster

Faculty Publications

This study explores the relationship between proximity to a conflict and the tendency to use peace journalism rather than war journalism modes of reporting. In the context of the current drug war occurring in Mexico, articles from both local, border region US newspapers and from distant US newspapers were coded according to their usage of war or peace journalism frames. Analyses revealed that local newspapers utilized more peace journalism frames overall, and presented a less pessimistic and negative view of the conflict and parties. Distant newspapers, however, were more likely to showcase complexity of the conflict and many parties and …

Discourse And Argument In Instituting The Governance Of Social Law, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

Social Rights were initially understood as the rights of a pluralism of instituted associations; and transformed to the rights of distributive justice associated with the politics of access to welfare state corporatism. More recently, they have been understood as the rights of multicultural difference; and now as the rights to complexity (Zolo), and rights to consideration of polycontextural effect vis-a-vis transnational corporations (Teubner). Social rights are no longer subject positions versus political bodies, but also against social institutions, in particular, vis-a-vis centers of economic power.

From Rapists To Superpredators: What The Practice Of Capital Punishment Says About Race, Rights And The American Child, Robyn Linde

Faculty Publications

At the turn of the 20^th century, the United States was widely considered to be a world leader in matters of child protection and welfare, a reputation lost by the century’s end. This paper suggests that the United States’ loss of international esteem concerning child welfare was directly related to its practice of executing juvenile offenders. The paper analyzes why the United States continued to carry out the juvenile death penalty after the establishment of juvenile courts and other protections for child criminals. Two factors allowed the United States to continue the juvenile death penalty after most states in …

Trauma And The Limits Of Redemptive Critique, Richard R. Weiner, Karl P. Benziger

Faculty Publications

The authors continue to test the limits of Emile Durkheim/Maurice Halbwachs approach to collective identity in the experiences of trauma, shame, and yearning related to the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution. In a more poststructuralist vein the authors move from a focus on piacular subjectivity to one of baroque subjectivity, especially in understanding the October 2006 fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Revolution in Budapest. Specifically, what indexical undercurrents of disposition persist and can not be ignored in attempts at redemptive critique, as well as in colonized nostalgia and the re-enactment of pathos. To what extent do the commemorations of the 1956 Revolution …

Les Forms Changeants Des Contrats Dans Une Societé Aux Résaux Transnationaux, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

Alors qu’au nouveau millénaire on soulignait les « règles de collision » au sein des gouvernances globale et corporative, les crises économiques qui émergeas en 2008, ont déplacé l’accent sur l’échec des pratiques régulatrices. Les crises actuelles mettent au défi non seulement l’hégémonie néo-libérale mais aussi le modèle étatique de coordination du New deal/grande société, étant donné que nous avons passé de la société des individus à la société des organisations. Nous vivons présentement, dans une société au réseau transnational de pratiques de gouvernances corporative et contractuelle. Cette société de réseaux ne peut désormais être clairement associée aux conceptions traditionnelles …

The Changing Forms Of Contracting In A Society Of Transnational Networks, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

Whereas the new millennium brought with it a focus on collision rules within global governance and corporate governance, the economic crises emerging out of 2008 turned the focus to the failure of regulatory practices. The current crises challenge not only a neoliberal hegemony but the New Deal/Great Society coordinating state model as well; as we have moved not only beyond a society of individuals to a society of organizations. We live now in a society of transnational network contracting and corporate governance practices. This society of networks can no longer be clearly associated with traditional conceptions of state, market or …

Complementary Institutions And Reflexive Governance In Autonomous Social Law, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

We approach institutions as stabilizing structures with consequences of functional incorporateness. Yet we also imagine, assert and enact claims and warrants as institutionalizable practices. There are functional supports. And there are the warranted claims of categorical normativity. Normativity in itself can be understood in terms of compliance with or acquiescence in legitimating structures. Yet normativity itself can be understood as a solidarism we intersubjectively co-constitute. The challenge in political thought has been dealing with the disincorporateness associated with modernity, specifically how a new order and dialogue may be of heterogeneous social values. A new way of ordering socioeconomic relationships of …

Ideas, Constructivism, And Complentarity In Insititutionalism, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

Colin Crouch recently chided the proliferation of institutionalisms (e.g., historical, normative, ideational, discursive, constructivist) as a growing cottage industry more focused on creating intellectual fiefdoms than extending political theory. In this vein, we can assess the recent constructivist institutionalism developed by Colin Hay out of the ideational and discursive institutionalism efforts of himself, Mark Blyth,Vivian Schmidt, J.L. Campbell and Ove Pedersen. This constructivism reproduces all of the weaknesses of the sociology of knowledge without heeding the contributions of critical theory, poststructuralism, interpretivism (e.g., Mark Bevir), polycontexturality (e.g., Gunther Teubner) or recent economic theory. We are challenged to represent a polycontextural …

Piacular Subjectivity And Contested Narrative In The Imre Nagy Memorials, Karl P. Benziger, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

The funeral of Imre Nagy on June 16, 1989 can be seen as a critical moment in the Hungarian transition to a democratic republic as it explicitly undermined the moral and political authority of the communist government then in power. This Nagy memorial signified a longing for a national identity tied to the spirit of republicanism that had been thwarted in 1956 and had roots going back to 1848. The unity of purpose displayed by the Hungarian people at the funeral brings to mind Emile Durkheim_s analysis of piaculum and the conscience collective. This is what the sociologist, Robert Bellah …

Assessment Governance, Richard R. Weiner, Karl P. Benziger

Faculty Publications

There has emerged a web of exogenous forces emanating from national and regional accreditation associations, particularly a satellite professional association involved in teacher preparation called the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). The reality of this web contradicts the implicit idealist sentiment in John Ishiyama’s report on the “Assessment of Student Outcomes’ meetings at the 2004 TLC where he describes “assessment as a voluntarist/bootstrapping “bottom up” effort of individual faculty members. [PS.27: 3, July 2004, 483-85.] Faculty are increasingly bombarded by outside agencies for standards inventory matrices, evaluation rubrics, and course maps.

Traces Of The Stillborn? , Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

The architect Daniel Libeskind has written a noted lecture, "Traces of the Unborn." We might add, "Traces of the Stillborn." There is a tendency in historical institutionalism (HI) to concentrate on the retrieval of traces of paths taken rather than (1) to consider the processes involved in the selection of paths; and (2) to reflect upon the conditions of institutional emergence and sedimentation of paths, whether taken or untaken. Contrary to the path-dependency obsessed historical institutionalism of a Paul Pierson, this paper stresses the significance of historical case studies of institutional emergence in the earlier 20th century and …

Retrieving Civil Society In A Postmodern Epoch, Richard R. Weiner

Faculty Publications

This article develops Jurgen Habermas' emphasis on critical theory as a means to retrieve the social and restore its place as a central concept in the social sciences. It argues that Habermas has been misinterpreted by varieties of thinkers across political, ideological, and intellectual domains; and has been misused by neo-conservatives and postmodernists in particular. Habermas' critical theory is driven by an emphasis on social and political praxis, and establishes the possibility of an authentic social existence. At the base of this existence is a solid moral order that defines human existence in terms of Reason rather than in terms …

Eritrean Liberation Front, Richard A. Lobban Jr.

Faculty Publications

The author of this issue, Richard Lobban, is trained as an anthropologist. He took his B.S. at Bucknell, an M.A. at Temple University, and is currently completing his Ph. D. at Northwestern University. Since 1964 he has been active with various liberationmovements, beginning with Frelimo in Tanzania.

Mr. Lobban went into Eritrea with the ELF to attend the First National Congress of the Eritrean Liberation Front. He traveled hard and dangerously while observing the operations of the liberation army and the response of villagers to it. In such a role he styles himself as a 11progres sive free -lance journalist. …