Civic Context Research Articles

Rethinking Digital Media and Citizenship: Conditions, Contexts, and Consequences

This special issue presents a total of seven articles concerning digital media and citizenship in various political, civic, and cultural contexts. Specifically, the entire collection investigates how digital media use and civic engagement can be conceptualized, operationalized, and theorized in the current digital media environment. The seven studies further examine how the use of traditional and newer forms of media influences civic engagement across communities of places, interests, and practices as well as different social groups at the local and global levels. With an interest in social conditions and contexts surrounding the civic utility of digital media, this special issue brings a unique perspective to the existing scholarship and provides new venues for continued scholarly attention to this important subject.

Gideon Mailer. John Witherspoon’s American Revolution.

John Witherspoon is a familiar character to historians of the American Revolution. He is remembered, perhaps more than he is for any of his other accomplishments, as the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and as the mentor to several of the most influential statesmen in the early American republic. Despite these familiar accomplishments, in John Witherspoon’s American Revolution Gideon Mailer offers a fresh look at the revolutionary clergyman, his religious beliefs, his role in the politics of the Revolution, and his influence on his students at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Yet, Mailer does more than urge scholars to look at Witherspoon anew; he makes a compelling case for them to use Witherspoon’s experience as a lens through which to more accurately gauge the interplay of religious conflict and Enlightenment philosophy in the founding of the United States. Mailer identifies an important strain of exceptionalism among American colonists who justified resistance to the imperial policies of Great Britain with the deeply optimistic philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. He explains that during the latter half of the eighteenth century, “American colonists borrowed Scottish moral sensory terminology to describe their attachment to the British Empire,” but that “the same terminology came to assume a rather different political connotation in American circles during the 1760s and 1770s,” influencing “those who sought to justify their separation from imperial jurisdiction” (8). Based on such rational arguments, “some patriots defined British corruption as contrary to constitutional theories that had developed in the American colonies” (8). Witherspoon cautioned his fellow revolutionaries about the extreme implications of such reasoning and threw a metaphorical wrench into the intellectual justifications of Revolution. While Witherspoon was an ardent supporter of American independence, “he also warned that patriots might perceive their moral abilities in unrealistic terms when distinguishing their civic ideology from Westminster authority. In describing their opposition to British corruption as a predictable manifestation of their innate ethical sensibility, they risked eschewing the importance of conversion and faith in redeemed grace” (11). Thus, Mailer argues that “Witherspoon’s moral critique of patriot reasoning prefigured a civic and theological tension that several scholars have noted in the era of the early American Republic.” Mailer therefore writes that this book “uncovers the broader constitutional and civic contexts that framed Witherspoon’s critique of moral sense theory” (11).

Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented in community partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands.

Paul’s Ekklesia as a Civic Assembly: Understanding the People of God in their Politico-Social World. By Young-Ho Park.

Park completed his dissertation at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Hans-Josef Klauck in 2012. This volume represents a revision of that dissertation. The book’s main premiss is that early Christians’ choice of self-designators reflects something accessible about their identity. Park’s primary concern is with Paul’s usage of the title ἐκκλησία for his groups. The first chapter is particularly strong. In addition to highlighting the most salient evidence of civic ἐκκλησίαι functioning autonomously in the Roman East during the imperial period, Park makes many important observations. For example, in opposition to the idea that the term ἐκκλησία would have been understood as inconsequential during Paul’s time, he observes that the continuation of the institution into the period of Roman rule was tied to the classical Greek ideal that to be free was to participate in the polis. On this point, he proposes that ‘[t]he most fundamental way of being a part of ruling is participating in the ἐκκλησία’ (p. 15). A few points are made here that could illuminate aspects of Paul’s groups. Namely, Park highlights the specifically ‘trans-local’ function of the Athenian ἐκκλησία, and he also discusses the role of the ἰδιῶται (cf. 1 Cor. 14:16–25) in civic contexts.

FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN ADOLESCENCE: THE EFFECTS OF NEIGHBORHOOD, SCHOOL, FAMILY, AND PEER CONTEXTS

Research on youth civic engagement has emphasized the importance of growing up in a civic context. We examined the relative influence of neighborhood characteristics (neighborhood opportunities and intergenerational closure), civic education at school, friends’ civic engagement, and parents’ civic engagement on civic attitudes and civic behaviors among youths. Participants were 403 11‐ to 15‐year‐old adolescents randomly selected from the city register of a midsized city in Italy. The hierarchical regression analysis found that all analyzed contexts were related to adolescent civic engagement. In particular, intergenerational closure, friends’ civic engagement, and parents’ civic engagement were associated with both civic attitudes and civic behaviors. Findings highlighted the importance of considering multiple contexts to understand what factors are associated with youth civic engagement. We discuss ways that findings can be transmitted into further research and practice to address the multiple contexts in which youths are embedded and their relative influence on adolescent civic engagement.

Digital selves and decision-making contexts: towards a research agenda

The self is increasingly digitised, manifesting as a number of identities, accounts or profiles related to engagement with social, public and commercial services. These identities are multiplied across the civic, social, commercial, professional and personal contexts of their use, and the vulnerabilities of this atomised citizen are not well understood. This paper discusses the intellectual, organisational and social trends that underpin the emergence of the digital self. Building on this, the paper conceptualises the nature of the digital self and the value exchange and decision-making contexts in which it resides and acts. The conceptualisation is discussed in order to articulate a proposed agenda of research questions for the decision support systems, information systems, and related research communities.

Developing citizen leadership in Myanmar: the DeBoer fellowship

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of the DeBoer fellowship, a citizen leadership development program in Myanmar. The challenge in Myanmar of catalyzing transformative change facing government and civil society cannot be overstated. Autocratic, centralized, and a traits-based approach to leadership has been, until recently, the primary way to assess leaders in Myanmar. In this dynamic civic context, new ways of leading and learning are needed. Design/methodology/approach Interviews of DeBoer fellowship alumni were analyzed using a single case study method. The project focuses on individual participants of the program as the primary unit of analysis. In addition, direct observation and contributions from DeBoer fellowship administration and faculty were used to describe this case study. Findings The DeBoer fellows understood their challenge as one of energize others, a concept of adaptive leadership. Moreover, individuals experienced deep degrees of transformational development. Civic agency was the least noticable concept that was studied. Research limitations/implications Future research could more explicitly measure and examine the degree to which civic agency is being nurtured in leadership development programs. Practical implications Civic leadership curriculum designers should be more conscious of adult development theory when choosing programming objectives and activities. Social implications Leadership development initatives in more authoritative systems can be effective developmental experiences for participants who are motivated to improve their organizations and communities. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first effort to analyze a citizen leadership program in Myanmar.

Preserving Canadian Music Culture: The Intangible Cultural Heritage Management of Urban Spaces of Culture and the Case of the Iconic Toronto Music Venue the Silver Dollar Room

My paper deals with the intersect between live music culture and the law, specifically in the civic municipal context. My perspective is that this aspect of our culture is not adequately accounted for in the city planning, to the point that live music venues are shuttered and the culture within them extinguished as developers move in, even when the city claims it is doing so in order to develop a more culturally friendly neighborhood. In my case study, the largest and most important EDM music venue in Canada was closed under these same circumstances; bulldozed in order to make way for a less "disorderly" form of cultural infrastructure. The inconsistencies here form the crux of my research, and represent one of the most important urban scenarios today when it comes to the interaction between law and culture. My specific case-studies include The Silver Dollar Room and the recently shuttered Government.

Commedia dell’Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping “Others.” by Erith Jaffe-Berg

Erith Jaffe-Berg. Commedia dell'Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping Others. Transculturalisms, 1400-1700. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. x + 173. $104.95. With this volume, Erith Jaffe-Berg brings to a wide audience the Mediterranean perspective of Italian Commedia dell'Arte and its civic context. Focusing on Commedia's glory days of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jaffe-Berg highlights its transcultural referents, its many non-Italian and non-Christian characters and settings, the prominence of travel among its themes, and the eclectic social and financial backgrounds of its audiences. By utilizing collections of largely unpublished primary materials, Jaffe-Berg provides the study with an evidentiary base that is broad and strong and the elements for important new perspectives, including that Commedia dell'Arte offers a platform for reflection on power and cultural exchange (i). Based on the experience of Italian audiences of the continual comings and goings of foreigners, Commedia helped to mediate intercultural contact among different ethnic communities within the Italian Peninsula (4). Also noted is the sometimes illusory and always fragile nature of that contact, subject as it was to swiftly changing political, financial, and religious conditions. Particularly important is Jaffe-Berg's delineation of the role of theatre for Mantua's Jewish community and in the relationship between the community and political authority figures. Travel influenced Commedia defl'Arte in its very performance DNA, as troupes, many of which by this time were fully professionalized, often had to travel to provide themselves with sufficient income--although it should be pointed out that others remained in a single locale and supplemented theatrical work, by its nature seasonal, with other jobs. The Italian peninsula being divided into numerous states, even relatively short journeys, such as that from Venice to Ferrara or to Mantua, involved entering a different state with different social, political, and economic circumstances and different traditions. Troupes also traveled outside the peninsula, including to aristocratic and royal festivities. Thanks to their continuous movement among the leadership circles of numerous states, they were in the position of serving as cultural ambassadors of sorts (5). Performing both in palaces for elites and in public squares for open audiences, they also functioned as cultural ambassadors across internal social dividing lines, particularly of class and wealth. By including characters of diverse backgrounds and conditions in their scenarios, troupes provided themselves with a means of connecting with diverse components of their audiences, as well as allowing the development of a full range of emotions and social situations on stage and providing work for actors of varied talents. Moreover, as Jaffe-Berg asserts, they used performance as a site for sharing ideas and innovations that were otherwise restrictive; as an example, she cites the mixing of the Petrarchan language and elevated love themes of the innamorati characters with Commedia's other, bawdier tropes (5). Another important feature of the study is Jaffe-Berg's articulation of the varied effects of the sea within the plays: it both distances and connects human societies of vastly different ethnic, religious, and social customs. Travel across it destabilizes identity, a process that is accelerated by love. However, as the author shrewdly observes, while both Christian and non-Christian characters travel to the other's locales and fall in love with members of the other population, it is prevalently non-Christians who convert and who remain permanently in the other's locale (46-64). An intriguing view that Jaffe-Berg sets forth is that the Commedia stage served as a kind of map for the audience, reproducing in a small format the locales that a play involved in the same geographical relationship as a map. …

A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Measuring News Media Literacy

Measuring news media literacy is important in order for it to thrive in a variety of educational and civic contexts. This research builds on existing measures of news media literacy and two new scales are presented that measure self-perceived media literacy (SPML) and perceptions of the value of media literacy (VML). Research with a larger sample of college undergraduate students and a smaller sample of adults enabled the validation of these measures. Results confirm the value of conceptualizing news media literacy using the theoretical subcomponents of authors & audiences, messages & meaning, and representation & realities. The VML scale, in particular, proved especially consequential in predicting knowledge about and attitudes towards the media.

Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History. Edited by R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012. v + 218 pp. $69.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Catholics the American Century: Recasting Narratives of History . Edited by R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings . Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press , 2012. v + 218 pp. $69.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesCatholics the American is an excellent and timely contribution to the ever-emerging field of Catholic Studies. Kathleen Sprows Cummings and R. Scott Appleby have assembled an impressive group of scholars who reflect on the role Catholics the mid to late twentieth century played their own parishes and communities and more broadly, as part of the American historical landscape. An organizing theme of the essays is the limitations and possibilities of assimilation for mid-twentieth-century American Catholics. Moreover, the risks and rewards of assimilating into a broader American civic context for Catholics are explored by Robert A. Orsi, Lizabeth Cohen, Thomas J. Sugrue, R. Marie Griffith, David G. Gutierrez, and Wilfred M. McClay. John T. McGreevy sets the tone for unpacking the tensions between Catholics' assimilation to mainstream culture as they maintain an ethno-religious distinctiveness. In his introductory essay, he writes, how these Catholic ideas and institutions at once inhabited and facilitated assimilation into society is the central drama of twentieth-century Catholic (4). McGreevy's introductory piece, the six main essays, and R. Scott Appleby's concluding essay are all excellent examples of thoughtful, revisionist Catholic Studies scholarship. Taken individually as well as collectively, they seek to excavate this historic and ongoing drama of assimilating, maintaining distinctiveness, and crafting American Catholic realities.In chapter 1, U.S. Catholics Between Memory and Modernity, Robert Orsi revisits and challenges any assumption that American Catholics were indistinguishable from other Americans the 1960s and 1970s. While was true that Catholics were throwing out in great trash heaps the old statues that filled their churches, and special instruments needed for various rituals, Catholics waited with great excitement for news of the intervention of the nonhuman the zone of the human (14). As Orsi points out, American Catholics were eagerly modern but at the same time embraced a divergent ontology which set them apart from mainstream American culture (15). American Catholics, Orsi argues, were at once assimilationists as well as staunchly anti-assimilationalist and occupied an in-between realm of uneasy existence with dominant culture. Orsi ends his provocative essay by insisting that it is necessary to hold together creative tension the fact that Catholics have and have not been like their fellow citizens before the American Century (42).Picking up on this focus on American Catholics being simultaneously tune with modernity and the mysterious, Lizabeth Cohen reflects on the current trend of globalizing American Catholic Studies. In chapter 2, Re-viewing the Twentieth through an American Catholic Lens she writes that American Catholic history is at once local, national, transnational, and and should be interpreted as such. As much as Orsi shares his concerns with scholars' interpretation of American Catholics as modern pro-assimilationists, Cohen points out the limitations of a strictly globalizing focus within history more broadly. Specifically, she is concerned with what is lost when historians insist on reading American Catholic history as strictly transnational and global. Historians can and should, she argues, move back and forth across registers of local, national, and international (53). She advocates a thorough and convincing way for a broadband transnational history, one that moves agilely among the local, the national, and the global and proposes that this comprehensive historical focus is the greatest challenge that awaits twentieth-century U. …

Republican Responsibility in Criminal Law

Retributivism so dominates criminal theory that lawyers, legal scholars and law students assert with complete confidence that criminal law is justified only in light of violations of another person’s rights. Yet the core tenet of retributivism views criminal law fundamentally through the lens of individual actors, rendering both offender and victim unrecognizably denuded from their social and civic context. Doing so means that retributivism is unable to explain even our most basic criminal law practices, such as why we punish recidivists more than first time offenders or why “hate crimes” are of special concern. A republican view of criminal law brings our most natural intuitions back into focus by insisting that the core of criminal responsibility lies in the offender’s attack on the civic bonds that make living in a society as equals possible. By grounding our punishment practices in an Aristotelian republicanism that for so long was the unquestioned basis of mutual responsibility, we understand that hostility, as expressed in the offender’s “civic character,” matters to us all while still seeing our obligations to reintegrate both victim and offender into our shared civic project.

Speculum Urbis : The Chester Cycle as a Tool of Social Cohesion and Transformation

Studies of the Chester cycle have seen a turn towards the importance of context, looking to archival material to understand the cycle's history and significance, and discovering localized narratives within the text that coexist with the text's scriptural content. Recognizing the text's historical embeddedness reveals its cultural function as a tool for civic transformation. Anachronisms, allusions to the civic context of performance, and generalized references to labour all serve to reflect an image of the city to its inhabitants. This image represented the interests of the civic elite, but, given the longevity of the production, must also have spoken to the majority of the audience.

EPINICIAN AND THE POLIS

Abstract The paper draws up a map situating the surviving epinicia in the various cities where they were performed and discussing the eventual relationship between said performances and the civic context (or part of it) to which they were addressed. This issue is approached on various levels. In particular, the nature of the city is considered and, with a special attention to clients and recipients of the epinicion, an attempt is made to assess the extent to which the city is a strong political structure, featuring a collective identity and shared values and demanding loyal behaviour towards fellow citizens.

Religion and Civic Participation among the Children of Immigrants: Insights from the Postcolonial Portuguese Context

Religious mobilisation is a central aspect of ethno-cultural diversity in European societies. Focusing on the postcolonial Portuguese context, this article investigates the religious-civic activism of two groups of immigrant offspring living in the Greater Lisbon Area. Guiding research questions are the following: How is the religious mobilisation of immigrant youth associated both with degrees of social and cultural integration and with perceived conflict in inter-ethnic relations? To what extent is religious activism mediated by historical and cultural traditions related to specific gender and inter-generational dynamics? How do experiences of living out religion affect the multi-dimensional identity constructions of immigrant youth, and how do these ongoing identity processes promote strategies for ongoing action? Comparative analysis confirms that religious identities may create varied means and projects for civic activism, not only among children of immigrants who feel positively integrated but also among those who experience inter-ethnic conflict. Situated uses of religion require, however, a tacit knowledge concerning the civic and political context, and a certain capability of networking both within and beyond communities. The findings also reveal that youths’ religious mobilisation is mediated by specific gender and inter-generational dynamics. The paper calls for further work on the impact of the various forms of trans-boundary ‘positional moves’ upon the identity projects of immigrant emergent generations, including those sustained by long-distance emotional and imagined relations.

Towards a Female Topography of the Ancient Greek City: Case Studies from Late Archaic and Early Classical Athens (c.520–400 BCE)

In this article, I seek to move beyond the traditional, polarised model of ancient Greek cities which views the civic sphere as gendered male in contrast with the domestic sphere which was gendered female. I argue that this model oversimplifies a much more complex set of relationships, leading scholars to underplay the possibilities for female agency within the built environment of the Classical city (polis) and to underestimate the scope of women's activities within Greek society more generally. Taking Athens as an example, I suggest that space was not rigidly divided between ‘public’ and ‘private’ zones. Instead, a number of factors led to flexibility which enabled a woman to enter civic space in order to carry out a variety of activities on her own behalf, on behalf of her household and also as a representative of her household in the context of the wider community. The civic context was thus an inverse parallel for the domestic sphere which, although constructed as female, was clearly also an important arena for male activity.

Schools for Democracy

Scholars have long argued that civic organizations play a vital role in developing members’ civic capacity. Yet few empirical studies examine how and the extent to which civic skills transfer across distinct and separate civic contexts. Focusing on Latino immigrant members of a Los Angeles janitors’ labor union, this article fills a void by investigating union members’ involvement in an independent civic arena—their children’s schools. Analyses of random sample survey and semi-structured interview data demonstrate that labor union experience does not simply lead to more civic engagement, as previous research might suggest. Rather, conceptual distinctions must be made between active and inactive union members and between different types of civic engagement. Results show that active union members are not particularly involved in plug-in types of involvement, which are typically defined and dictated by school personnel. Instead, active union members tend to become involved in critical forms of engagement that allow them to voice their interests and exercise leadership. Furthermore, findings suggest that the problem solving, advocacy, and organizing skills acquired through union participation do not uniformly influence members’ civic engagement. Experience in a social movement union serves as a catalyst for civic engagement for some, while it enhances the leadership capacity of others.

Porticoes and churches: episodes in thematic decorum

A classical church portico – say, St Paul's in London – implies a rite of passage and mediation between the city and the interior rituals of the institution; it beckons the street, while offering shelter to those who want to observe the crowd. In contrast, the spectacular interiors of Modernist churches are often entered without theatre – the plain outer door [1], for example, of Jørn Utzon's Bagsværd Church (Copenhagen, 1973), provides little hint of the magical cloud-like movement of vaulted space within. This is not simply a matter of the changing formal language of architecture (namely, interior space taking priority over exterior shell), but also how the church might be defined in wider civic and historical contexts. Here the Classical theory of decorum remains helpful, for Vitruvius proposed that identifying a building's theme (statione) – that is, the social and institutional destination of the building – was the first step in determining appropriate form, the prerequisite one before considering the related determinates of decor, namely stylistic coherence (consuetudine) and site (natura). The issue of thematic appropriateness is above all important for the front, which announces the building like a frontispiece does a text. Yet as the church portico demonstrates, a thematic motif was rarely the straightforward application of a code, for in the period when architectural decorum prevailed – loosely speaking the fifteenth to nineteenth century in Italy, France and England among other places – how a genre was defined and what constituted the repertoire of appropriate form were contested.

Síntesis: la salud en todas las políticas, un reto para la salud pública en España. Informe SESPAS 2010

The objective of SESPAS Report 2010 is to enhance the incorporation of the principle of Health in all Policies in public health in Spain. The fundamental principle behind this slogan is very simple: Health is strongly influenced by the environment, how we live, work, eat, walk or enjoy our leisure time. Moreover, these living conditions depend not only on individual decisions but are determined by social, cultural, economic or environmental factor. Consequently, policy decisions that influence the health of people not just those related to services or health policy, but primarily those taken in other public, private, political and civic contexts. SESPAS Report 2010 has four parts. It begins with and introductory chapter on the challenges of incorporating the principle of Health in all Policies in public health. The second part consists of several articles of reflection on the relationship between the health care system and public health. The third part focuses on cross-sectoral public health policies. The report ends with several articles on crosss-cutting issues such as public health education, information, research, evaluation and ethics in public health policies.

Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900–1930

In the early twentieth century, ornithology underwent significant changes. So far, these changes, basically, have been studied by focussing on the elite of professional biologists working at universities or state museums. However, important developments also occurred in what Lynn Nyhart has called “the civic realm” of science – the sphere given form by private naturalist associations, nature writers, taxidermists and school teachers. This article studies the changing dynamics of civic ornithology, by looking at one particular case: the influential orinthological observatory in Rossitten, East-Prussia. This observatory, the first of its kind, was founded in 1901 and led, for the first three decades of its existence, by the minister Johannes Thienemann. This article analyses the ornithological practices Thienemann developed in Rossitten and the rhetoric he used to defend these practices. In both, so it is argued, one finds a mixture of the traditional, locally anchored naturalist approach with the new ideals of the “modern” and “experimental” university laboratories. The innovations which Thienemann introduced in this hybrid form of ornithology called for specific spatial strategies which made optimal use of the natural chatacteristics of his workplace and which mobilized a large civic network of geograhically scattered amateurs. At the same time, his work also altered the space he shared with the birds – materially, conceptually and culturally. Thus, this article maintains Thienemann's ornithology can only be understood by acknowledging its continuous interaction with the geographical and civic context in which it arose.