With so much attention on the issue of voice in democratic theory, the inverse question of how people come to listen remains a marginal one. Recent scholarship in affect and neuroscience reveals that cognitive and verbal strategies, while privileged in democratic politics, are often insufficient to cultivate the receptivity that constitutes the most basic premise of democratic encounters. This article draws on this scholarship and a recent case of forum theatre to examine the conditions of receptivity and responsiveness, and identify (...) specific strategies that foster such conditions. It argues that the forms of encounter most effective in cultivating receptivity are those that move us via affective intensity within pointedly mediated contexts. It is this constellation of strategies—this strange marriage of immersion and mediation—that enabled this performance to surface latent memory, affect and bias, unsettle entrenched patterns of thought and behaviour, and provide the conditions for revisability. This case makes clear that to lie beyond the domain of cognitive and verbal processes is not to lie beyond potential intervention, and offers insight to how such receptivity might be achieved in political processes more broadly. (shrink)

This article explores different theoretical and political dimensions of voice in democratic theory. Drawing on recent developments in political theory, ranging form James Bohman’s work on the movement from demos to demoi in transnational politics, to William Connolly’s writings on pluralization, it develops a critical account of the emphasis within conventional pluralism on the representation of extant identities. Instead, it foregrounds the need to engage with emerging identities, demands, and claims that fall outside the parameters of dominant discursive orders. Building (...) on the works of Rancie`re and Cavell, it highlights the importance of an analytical engagement with the emergence and articulation of new struggles and voices*the processes through which inchoate demands are given political expression*so as to counter the ongoing possibilities of domination, understood here as a ‘deprivation of voice.’ The article develops an account of the centrality of the category of responsiveness to such claims and demands for democratic theory, especially in relation to a range of democratic struggles in our contemporary world. In so doing, it contributes to a growing body of work that questions the taken for granted character and status of the institutional forms of liberal democaracy. Keywords: pluralism; demoi; Connolly; Rancie`re; responsiveness; deprivation of voice; domination; Cavell; democratic subjectivity; demands; claim-making (Published: 4 December 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 297320. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i4.2118. (shrink)

From one viewpoint, interstate borders are simple ‘artefacts on the ground’. Borders exist for a variety of practical reasons and can be classified according to the purposes they serve and how they serve them. They enable a whole host of important political, social, and economic activities. From a very different perspective, borders are artefacts of dominant discursive processes that have led to the fencing off of chunks of territory and people from one another. Such processes can change and as they (...) do, borders live on as residual phenomena that may still capture our imagination but no longer serve any essential purpose. Yet, what if, although still necessary for all sorts of reasons, borders are also inherently problematic? We need to change the way in which we think about borders to openly acknowledge their equivocal character. In other words, we need to see a border not as that which is either fixed or that as such must be overcome, but as an evolving construction that has both practical merits and demerits that must be constantly reweighed. Thinking about borders should be opened up to consider territorial spaces as ‘dwelling’ rather than national spaces and to see political responsibility for pursuit of a ‘decent life’ as extending beyond the borders of any particular state. Borders matter, then, both because they have real effects and because they trap thinking about and acting in the world in territorial terms. Keywords: borders, frontiers, decent life, dwelling, territory, heterotopia, globalization (Published online: 7 November 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics. Vol. 1, No. 4, 2008, pp. 175-191. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i4.1892. (shrink)