Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of ...

This is the second of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. Melissa Williams examines citizenship as identity in relation to the project of nation-building, the shifting boundaries of citizenship in relation to globalization, citizenship as shared fate, and the role of (...) multicultural education within the view of citizenship-as-shared-fate. She argues the other side of the same coin to that presented by Shelley Burtt in the previous chapter: according to Williams, the liberal state often demands too much in the way of loyalty from traditional groups, and when it does, it runs a strong risk of becoming oppressive and illiberal. Moreover, she holds that there is no need for a single shared identity among citizens of the liberal state. Her conception of people tied together by a shared fate is to this extent compatible with Burtt’s attempt to make liberalism’s commitment to autonomy more hospitable to groups of individuals encumbered by unchosen attachments, but her notion of citizenship as shared fate also goes further than that, and possibly stands in some tension with, Burtt’s view, since it allows and even encourages people to develop primary affiliation to all kind of groups – traditional as well as global. (shrink)

Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was (...) concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence. (shrink)

This article searches for a way of theorizing the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect, with the aim of clearing the ground for an approach that establishes the basis of this interconnectedness by reference to mechanisms common to all living things. It establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think the categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on according to a fundamental decentring, finally breaking with both (...) subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point; the same epistemological shift implies the rejection of the anthropocentric divide between humans and animals, while avoiding species of sociobiologism, pre-formationism, geneticism and other monocausal paradigms. What the new problematic of life enjoins us to rethink are the standpoint of singularity rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality as a principle enabling us to think the self—other, human—animal, nature—culture and human—world in terms of compossibility and complex becoming. This view about the co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world, grounded in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being as existential condition circumscribing the relation to the other. This shift at the level of ontology is explored via an engagement with the work of Simondon and his conceptual apparatus, particularly ideas of psychic and collective individuation, the pre-and transindividual, the associated milieu; this perspective is re-articulated by way of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, Ettinger’s concept of the ‘I—other plurality’, and cognate concepts that point to a new terrain for theorizing affect. (shrink)

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the (...) borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière who both have raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can be captured as a particular order. In the paper I introduce the figure of the ignorant citizen in order to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on particular knowledge about what the good citizen is. I introduce a distinction between a socialisation conception of citizenship education and civic learning and a subjectification conception of citizenship education and civic learning in order to articulate what the educational implications of such an ‘anarchic’ understanding of democratic politics are. While the socialisation conception focuses on the question how ‘newcomers’ can be inserted into an existing political order, the subjectification conception focuses on the question how democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in always undetermined political processes. This is no longer a process driven by knowledge about what the citizen is or should become but one that depends on a desire for a particular mode of human togetherness or, in short, a desire for democracy. (shrink)

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At (...) the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

This paper identifies and addresses some dilemmas to be faced in promoting educational projects concerned with human rights. Part of the difficulty that human rights education initiatives must cope with is the way in which value has been historically conferred upon particular notions such as freedom and justice. I argue here that a just education must grapple head‐on with the conceptual dilemmas that have been inherited and refuse to shy away from the implications of those dilemmas. To do this I (...) address the fundamental fictions upon which rights are based and view those fictions as nonetheless useful for opening up the ethical terms of human rights education. With reference to the work of Arendt, Lyotard and Levinas, I conclude that the real potential of human rights education lies in its capacity to provoke insights that help youth live with ambiguity and dilemma, where freedom, justice, and responsibility cannot be dictated to them, but rather involve tough decisions that must be made in everyday life. (shrink)

This article argues that the failure of certain theories of reflexive identity transformation to consider more fully issues connected to gender identity leads to an overemphasis on the expressive possibilities thrown up by processes of detraditionalization. By ignoring certain deeply embedded aspects, some theories of reflexive change reproduce the `disembodied and disembedded' subject of masculinist thought. The issues of disembodiment and disembeddedness are explored through a study of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on `habitus' and the `field'. The idea of (...) habitus yields a more dynamic theory of embodiment central to a feminist understanding of gender identity as a durable but not immutable norm. The idea of the `field' provides a more differentiated analysis of the social context in which the reflexive transformation of gender identity unfolds. This in turn offers a way of thinking of possible transformations within gender identity as uneven and non-synchronous phenomena. (shrink)

This book serves as both an introduction to the concept of resistance in poststructuralist thought and an original contribution to the continuing philosophical discussion of this topic. How can a body of thought that mistrusts universal principles explain the possibility of critical resistance? Without appeals to abstract norms, how can emancipatory resistance be distinguished from domination? Can there be a poststructuralist ethics? David Hoy explores these crucial questions through lucid readings of Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and others. He traces the (...) genealogy of resistance from Nietzsche's break with the Cartesian concept of consciousness to Foucault's and Bourdieu's theories of how subjects are formed through embodied social practices. He also considers Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida on the sources of ethical resistance. Finally, in light of current social theory from Judith Butler to Slavoj Zizek, he challenges "poststructuralism" as a category and suggests the term "post-critique" as a more accurate description of contemporary Continental philosophy.Hoy is a leading American scholar of poststructuralism. Critical Resistance is the only book in English that deals substantively with the topical concept of resistance in relation to poststructuralist thought, discussions of which have dominated Continental social thought for many years. (shrink)

We aim to show how collective emotions can be incorporated into the study of episodes of political contention. In a critical vein, we systematically explore the weaknesses in extant models of collective action, showing what has been lost through a neglect or faulty conceptualization of collective emotional configurations. We structure this discussion in terms of a review of several “pernicious postulates” in the literature, assumptions that have been held, we argue, by classical social-movement theorists and by social-structural and cultural critics (...) alike. In a reconstructive vein, however, we also lay out the foundations of a more satisfactory theoretical framework. We take each succeeding critique of a pernicious postulate as the occasion for more positive theory-building. Drawing upon the work of the classical American pragmatists–especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead–as well as aspects of Bourdieu's sociology, we construct, step by step, the foundations of a more adequate theorization of social movements and collective action. Accordingly, the negative and positive threads of our discussion are woven closely together: the dismantling of pernicious postulates and the development of a more useful analytical strategy. (shrink)

Human rights discourses are increasingly being coupled to discourses on citizenship and citizenship education. In this paper, I consider the premise that human rights might provide a theoretical underpinning for citizenship. I categorise citizenship into five main categories—moral, legal, identity-based, participatory and cosmopolitan. Bringing together theoretical and documentary evidence, I argue that human rights cannot logically be a theoretical underpinning for citizenship, regardless of how citizenship may be conceptualised. This is because human rights discourses are located within a universalist frame (...) of reference, in contrast to that of citizenship, which is located within a more particularist frame. Human rights are conceptually distinct from citizenship, and the conflating of human rights with citizenship not only is conceptually incoherent, but may actually obstruct the empowerment and active participation of individual citizens in the context of a political community. (shrink)

Citizenship education is currently the subject of worldwide attention, and this book reports on research in a range of countries including South Africa, Finland, Portugal, Argentina, Australia. the US and Canada.

"These essays make a splendid book. Ignatieff's lectures are engaging and vigorous; they also combine some rather striking ideas with savvy perceptions about actual domestic and international politics.

This article seeks to explore existing conceptualisations of emotional capital in educational research, and to undertake a critical analysis of these conceptualisations, including a reflection on my own explorations of teachers' and students' emotional practices. Drawing from Bourdieu's work, I offer a theoretical discussion of how emotional capital as a conceptual tool suggests a historically situated analysis of the often unrecognised mechanisms and emotion norms serving to maintain certain 'affective economies'. This point is made in reference to a brief discussion (...) of my ongoing ethnographic work over the last ten years. I conclude the article with outlining some new possibilities of theorising the potentiality and usefulness of the concept of emotional capital in the field of educational research. (shrink)

Citizenship under Fire examines the relationship among civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace. Drawing on examples from Israel and the United States, Sigal Ben-Porath seeks to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war, and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes.Perhaps the most worrisome one, Ben-Porath contends, is a growing emphasis in schools and elsewhere on social conformity, on tendentious teaching of history, and (...) on drawing stark distinctions between them and us. As she writes, "The varying characteristics of citizenship in times of war and peace add up to a distinction between belligerent citizenship, which is typical of democracies in wartime, and the liberal democratic citizenship that is characteristic of more peaceful democracies."Ben-Porath examines how various theories of education--principally peace education, feminist education, and multicultural education--speak to the distinctive challenges of wartime. She argues that none of these theories are satisfactory on their own theoretical terms or would translate easily into practice. In the final chapter, she lays out her own alternative theory--"expansive education"--which she believes holds out more promise of widening the circles of participation in schools, extending the scope of permissible debate, and diversifying the questions asked about the opinions voiced. (shrink)

A leading authority on Continental philosophy examines the concept of critical resistance within recent poststructuralist social thought.