Democratic Community Research Articles

President Wonder Woman and Congresswoman Batgirl: the authoritarian Überfrau and democratic resilience in superheroine comics

ABSTRACT Comic books are important sites where norms related to gender, leadership, and democratic engagement are negotiated. In this essay, we examine two comic book depictions of women’s political leadership: Diana Prince/Wonder Woman’s stint as US president, published in 1944, and Barbara Gordon/Batgirl’s tenure as a member of US Congress, published between 1972 and 1980. We contrast Wonder Woman’s tale of democratic fragility and gendered conflict with a Batgirl narrative that promotes a more complex view of women’s political agency and subordinates superheroism to the strength of democratic community. We contend that Wonder Woman #7 reflects the fascist tendencies observed in other Golden Age comics and theorize Überfrau as a counterpart to Übermensch, rooted in an ostensible ethic of protection and authoritarian white femininity. Reading Wonder Woman #7 through the lens of the Überfrau reveals the contours of an antidemocratic white women’s authoritarianism that continues to resonate in twenty-first century politics. An antidote to the reactionary Überfrau is offered by Batgirl, who eschews the role of super savior and puts the responsibility for democratic health into voters’ hands. We conclude by examining how these contrasting visions of women’s political leadership are echoed by women politicians in contemporary political culture.

Civic Place Literacies: Tracing Urban Migrant Girls' Democratic Meaning‐Making Through Virtual Transnational Practitioner Research

AbstractHistorically marginalized youth shape public life through civic literacies that are rooted in their identities and experiences with systemic injustices. Literacy scholarship has accordingly traced how practitioner inquiry, a participatory approach to knowledge production, can educationally support the flourishing of these literacies. But while marginalized youth negotiate public life across multiple national contexts of inequality, this research has remained mostly nation‐bound. This paper extends prior scholarship in a comparative, cross‐national direction by exploring how, in a virtual transnational practitioner study, two urban migrant girls based in the United States and India—multiply marginalized youth from two of the world's largest and most unequal democracies—engaged in democratic meaning‐making. Tracing how youth took up learning invitations across two separate inquiry communities and one‐on‐one conversations with the teacher‐researcher, it foregrounds their civic place literacies: that is, their meaning‐making practices which reflected how their intersectional identities in their democratic communities shaped, too, their socio‐spatial navigations of those contexts. Tracing two themes related to girls' civic place literacies across India and the United States, the article concludes with implications for how future research and praxis can center urban migrant girls' civic place literacies, agency, and resistance across borders. (WC = 203).

Offline connections, online votes: The role of offline ties in an online public election

Building democratic communities and fostering inclusive participation is challenging, especially in participatory organisations where governance and sustained contributions are critical. This study explores the dynamics of election participation within the peer-production project Wikipedia, a prime example of an online collaboration model of democratic organisation where democratically elected administrators wield special rights. While previous research on online governance has predominantly focused on online interactions, this study shifts the spotlight to the influence of offline interactions occurring at various gatherings and meetings. Using fixed effects models and large-scale observational data spanning 20 years of offline and online actions, this study finds significant effects of offline meeting participation on users’ voting behaviour. It makes use of novel data sources to emphasise the significance of offline relationships in shaping online (democratic) processes and shows that traditional findings of political science and election research regarding social capital and social networks hold within an online context.

‘This modern Cinderella’: Railway Queens, mass media, and British civic culture, 1925–75

Abstract Between 1925 and 1975, the British railway industry elected beauty queens from the daughters of employees. Focusing upon the Railway Queens, this article will reveal the importance of beauty queens as ‘civic celebrities’, a novel role for public figures that emerged between the wars and helped to sustain a vibrant civic culture across the early to mid-twentieth century. It combined the traditional ceremonial function of ‘civic’ representative with the modern consumerist ethos of media ‘celebrity’. Despite the gendered constraints of such competitions, this article posits that serving as a beauty queen enabled young working-class women to become legitimate representatives of various civic communities for the first time, whilst also enabling participation in the media’s image-making of glamorous, consumerist femininities. As such, the role rendered civic and consumer cultures more inclusive and increasingly inextricable. This article further suggests that civic celebrities altered how communities were represented to themselves within British civic culture. If elites continued to represent hierarchical communities of authority and deference, then from the 1920s onwards, civic celebrities such as beauty queens began to represent relatively democratic communities of non-partisan inclusivity and consumer aspiration.

Noise in sustainable transformation of aviation

Rising awareness of aviation noise's health and annoyance impacts does not coincide with the industry's sustainable transition which is primarily driven by climate change. While electrification and sustainable fuels are seen as solutions, current strategies often encourage aviation sector growth including airport and traffic expansion. National initiatives aim to accelerate aviation's sustainable transformation, aligning with increased transportation accessibility and mobility goals. There is a push for directives for electric aviation, drones, and urban air mobility (UAM). Local health and annoyance, however, are overshadowed by the pretense of the global focus. Increased noise is anticipated with projected increases in air travel and added noise from electric and drone aircraft! This paper integrates noise and annoyance considerations into sustainable aviation transformation. A system analysis, using soft system methodologies, reveals comprehensive socio-technical perspectives from aviation, urban planning, citizens, and regulation. Findings indicate future noise challenges and unfavorable conditions for noise reduction innovations. The study advocates for society-wide strategies to manage aviation noise and annoyance, emphasizing recommendations like careful design, operational considerations, noise simulations, and democratic community involvement in implementation. These insights anticipate a surge in noise-related complaints and opposition. This paper is of interest also for future aviation developers.

Viewing inclusion through the lens of democracy—Conceptualizations and enactments in three early childhood educational settings

AbstractResearch on inclusion in early childhood educational (ECE) settings points to the need for a deeper understanding of professionals' perceptions of the dilemmas and challenges situated in the varying contexts of these settings. Viewing inclusion as a complex phenomenon, this study uses the Deweyan theory of democracy as a lived experience to describe how professionals in three ECE settings understand the values of inclusion and democracy and how these values are enacted in their everyday practices of creating democratic communities. Three case studies were conducted, including individual interviews with head teachers, focus‐group interviews with professionals and semi‐structured observations in three ECE settings. The results show that the three settings present unique prerequisites and challenges for the building of democratic communities related to the varying views on inclusion and democracy. The understandings of values of inclusion and democracy and how these are enacted in the three ECE settings are discussed with regard to the possibilities and obstacles involved in the creation of democratic communities.

Preparing Teachers to Re-Build Democratic Communities and Disappearing Middle Class to Reverse Global Inequality: A Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ and Dewey-Inspired Tools to Transform World Making

‘Double structuring’ of objective economic wealth and subjective perception of wealth through language and culture produce a common world of divisions in the classroom from ‘bad taste’ to ‘good taste’. Teachers’ language and culture of instruction and ‘good taste’ perpetuate systemic injustice with unconscious bias. The tool ‘A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution (ABCDE) offers five steps to prepare teachers to recognize bias and reverse it with a Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ for Making Worlds. A—Ask questions about instructional Language and Culture and Community Languages and Cultures; B—Critique Typology of Taste: C—Develop statistical models with measures to monitor and evaluate incremental progress towards synthesizing/unifying different classroom languages and cultures into one democratic language and culture whilst honouring each; D—Create evidence-informed, logical and ethical qualitative pathways to re-building a democratic community/disappearing middle class; E—Identify a principle of unity that reverses local inequality, and through powerful Higher Education networks, mainstream it to reverse global inequality. A Professional Educators and Administrators Committee for Empowerment (PEACE) offers a systemic multi-level communication infrastructure to enable feedback loops from communities to policy makers to measure inequality and report narrowing income and wealth gaps to reverse the sharpest increase between 2019 and 2020 in global inequality since World War II.

Reckoning With the “Other” Pandemic: How Teachers’ Unions Responded to Calls for Racial Justice Amidst COVID-19

After George Floyd was murdered by police, teachers, alongside the leaders of their unions and professional associations, confronted urgent calls to address racism in their communities, schools, and classrooms, just as they were concluding an academic year rendered chaotic by COVID-19. This article leverages four waves of semistructured interviews with teachers’ union and association leaders embedded in 14 states and 45 school districts to investigate how and why teachers’ unions responded to those calls during 2020 and 2021. Local leaders were more likely to have taken concrete steps if they were serving urban or suburban and predominantly Democratic communities. Most commonly, unions offered symbolic gestures of support or sought to develop their capacity to recognize and understand bias.

Lexical Alignment is Pervasive Across Contexts in Non-WEIRD Adult-Child Interactions.

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool-aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school-aged children from a non-WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi-structured conversations that differed by task (problem-solving vs. play-based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re-using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school-age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non-WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Prefigurative Politics at Bread and Puppet Theater

Abstract Bread and Puppet (B&P) Theater is one of the oldest, most influential, and well-known puppet theaters both in the United States and abroad and has been at the forefront of puppetry, performance, and political protest for more than half a century. B&P also functions as a site of tension in prefigurative political theory, between creative world building and alternative decision-making structures. B&P fosters a powerful lived experience of prefigurative politics. The political process of envisioning alternative realities took place through performance, puppets, and the shifting sense of temporality in an isolated location. At the same time, B&P operates in a state of flux, at the center of a constant stream of apprentices, volunteers, and audience members. They rely on hierarchical decision-making to facilitate order, which challenges the prefigurative ideal of a democratic community. B&P models a mediated form of prefigurative politics in which a hierarchical governance structure and creative world building exist in tension with one another. The theater has worked within this tension to survive and even flourish. B&P complicates prefigurative politics in social movement theory and practice, as the hierarchy helps preserve some sense of order but conflicts with the more egalitarian vision of the world represented in their performances. B&P's intervention in prefigurative politics offers lessons to social movements and artistic practices in the contemporary resurgence of prefigurative politics.

‘Take your unseen heart and make it into art’: Aesthetic Transformation and Emotional Democracy

This article wants to answer three questions: first, why is not only sensibility but visibility important for modern democracy? Second, why is art or aesthetic experience important for both democracy and visibility? And third, how is it possible that aesthetic experience generates effects that conduce to democracy? Answering these questions aims at highlighting an inner connection between democracy, feelings and aesthetics. For a democratic community, on the one hand, cannot exclude feelings from political discourse, but, on the other hand, cannot accept them in their immediate and absolute form. Feelings need ‘transformation’, and the best popular medium for this is aesthetic experience.

TRUST AS THE BASIS OF A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of trust in today's unstable social life. The relevance of the research is determined by the crisis processes taking place in the modern world, the development of the world democratic community, Ukraine's orientation towards integration into the European Union and NATO. A thorough analysis of the scientific literature was carried out, on the basis of which the essence and nature of the phenomenon of trust were determined, the conditions for the formation of a culture of trust, the factors that destroy it were revealed. The role of trust in the life of society and the individual is outlined, the specifics of the formation of trust in democratic and totalitarian societies are shown. In the course of the research, methods of analysis, synthesis, and comparison were used, and a survey of student youth was conducted. Young people's perceptions of trust/distrust were analyzed, factors were identified that, according to students, influence the formation of trust and lead to its loss.

РОМСЬКІ ЖІНКИ В УМОВАХ ВІЙНИ: ЕТНОКУЛЬТУРНІ КОНТЕКСТИ РОЛІ ЖІНКИ І ЖІНОЧОГО ЛІДЕРСТВА В УКРАЇНСЬКОМУ СУСПІЛЬСТВІ

The article is devoted to the topical aspects of Ukraine's current state policy on supporting national minorities in the context of a full-scale war. On the basis of social and legal principles, fundamental norms and re-quirements for the development of a democratic community, the author examines the problematic issues of state participation in the socio-cultural sphere of national minority development (education, housing, health care, employment, social security, etc.) in Ukraine. Based on the analysis of a wide range of scientific studies of recent decades, it is established that in recent years, the state's attention to the Roma as an organic ethnic community in the multicultural space of Ukraine has successfully synergized the efforts of Roma civic activists, non-governmental organizations and local authorities. At the same time, one of the problems with integrating existing programs to support Roma mediators in various socio-cultural spheres into national government programs is the inadequate assessment of the role of women in the self-organization of territorial communities where Roma live compactly and their involvement in solving local issues. The article emphasizes the growth of the leadership potential of Roma women and their outstanding role in socially useful activities and positive impact on the overall development of territorial communities in times of war. Given the circumstances of the Ukrainian present, the author concludes that there is a great social need and expediency of applying mechanisms and tools of organizational and managerial innovations to motivate the most active involvement of Roma women leaders and activists in cooperation with the authorities in the emergency conditions of war and to study this problem in detail by means of social sciences and humanities. The article identifies ways and mechanisms for solving the current problems of the Roma community and defines the role of women's leadership in Ukrainian society.

Social Transformations and Changes in The Minds of Women

In the article, the author notes a radical rethinking of the social role ofwomen in society, identifies priority measures to ensure her rights and opportunities. The equal participation of women in the political and economic life of the country is considered by the democratic community as a necessary condition for achieving progress in socio-economic development, in addressing current political, socio-cultural, racial, ethnic and other problems.

Practice, Ethical Life and Normative Authority: The Problem of Alienation in Steven Vogel's Environmental Philosophy

In Thinking like a Mall Steven Vogel argues that there is no authoritative nature independent of human standards to which one can appeal to correct damaging environmental practices. Human practices are the only basis for interpreting the environment and our ecologically destructive practices have made our environment into the degraded thing that it is. Revising these flawed practices requires becoming alienated from them; only then can we be responsible for them. Alienation is overcome by a democratic community who chooses the practices that correct deficient ones and that we can recognise as expressions of ourselves and be at home in. This paper argues that there is a key step missing in this process, which is how we become alienated from our practices. It is only by appreciating the broader social and institutional horizon, ‘Ethical Life’, by which norms receive their authority and lose it, that we can understand alienation and the normative change necessary to correct it.

ETHNOPOLITICAL PROCESSES IN SLOVAKIA (1989-1995)

This article provides the first overview in Ukrainian historiography of the preconditions, emergencу, establishment and initiation of the activities of a political entity representing the Ukrainian population of the Slovak Republic – the Podduklianske Democratic Community (hereinafter referred to as the PDC, original name: Podduklianske Civic Forum). The PDC collaborated with the Regional Government in Prešov, primarily in the socio-economic sphere, and outlined the party’s objectives. The PDC is aimed to address political, economic, social, and national-cultural issues of the Ukrainian population in the Prešov region. At the same time, there is a recognition of the increased political activity of representatives of the Hungarian national minority in Slovakia, resulting in the formation of Hungarian political parties in Slovakia, which emerged immediately after the collapse of the communist regime. It is noted that Hungarian political entities in Slovakia had their representatives in Parliament as a result of the elections in 1990, 1992, and 1994, which allowed them to actively participate in the political life of the state. The positive aspect of the activities of Hungarian political parties in Slovakia was that different party platforms did not prevent them from creating an electoral coalition. It is mentioned that the Roma community was also represented at the level of the Slovak national and regional political arena. However, Roma political parties failed to gain significant electoral support and representation in the Slovak Parliament.

Who are the people? Associative freedom and the democratic boundary problem

ABSTRACT The justification of criteria for the delineation and composition of democratic communities poses a significant challenge for democratic theory. The article argues that the all-subjected principle (ASP), advocated inter alia by Robert Dahl, fails to provide a convincing solution of the democratic boundary problem. Based on a detailed critique of the ASP, an alternative approach that builds on the right of association and a territorial principle is suggested. In contrast to non-territorial associations, such as religious communities, territorially organized states have specific obligations to permanent residents that include the granting of voting rights. In response to possible objections it is argued that the freedom of association can be sensibly applied to the creation and maintenance of states. Moreover, it is shown that the territorial principle on which the proposed solution of the democratic boundary problem relies differs from the ASP in important respects. Finally, some practical consequences for controversial cases, such as immigrants, anarchists, and expatriates, are elucidated.

The Secret Agent: Necropolitics, Democracy, and the Community without Qualification

In its juxtaposition of liberal government and terrorist violence, metropole and colony, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent explores the imbrication of modes of biopolitical and necropolitical sovereignty. Taking as its starting point Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, which has not yet been widely discussed in relation to Conrad’s work, this essay argues that Conrad analyses a shift from biopolitical liberal democracy to necropolitical terror. Necropolitics, however, also forms the basis on which radically democratic communities of the biopolitically outcast can form communities of resistance to sovereign power.

Radical design praxis and the problematics of intent

ABSTRACT This article explores counter-design as a radical meaning-making practice for community co-design. Radicalism, here, is an ongoing process of complicating and unsettling daily practices to reveal and thus acknowledge socio-political context. Semiotic analysis of ethnographic research with grassroots organisations is taken as the point of departure to understand how communities co-design meaning, and in turn how we might co-design new meanings through countering. Through counter-design in place, we observe small semiotic moments that problematise the rhetoric of horizontal democratic organising amongst the realities of coercion and power asymmetries. These semiotic moments are thus significant for how they reveal the reproduction of meaning and how this constructs, and can subsequently limit, the possible actions for these communities. In this sense, our approach constitutes a design praxis, through which we analyse what it means to employ countering against existing institutional power, both for our participants and for ourselves as designers. Here, we reveal the tenuousness of (designer/ly) intent in relation to and in combination with the artifice of readymade community designs, as these are shaped by work ‘on the ground’ and consider how this might impact the co-creation of democratic communities.

Liberal Democracy in Estonia: Cracks Behind the Seemingly Spotless Façade

Estonia is often seen as a model student among the post-communist countries. Many renowned think tanks and organizations measuring the quality of democracy (e.g., Freedom House, Varieties of Democracy, Bertelsmann Foundation) often give Estonia the highest scores in the region. However, the seemingly spotless façade hides growing tensions and emergent contradictions. The current paper will focus on the two most worrisome trends that have become evident in recent years, if not even earlier: (1) the limited success in integrating the large Russian-speaking minority and (2) the rise of the populist radical right. The failure to integrate the ethnic minorities would increase frustration and political alienation among Russian speakers, making it more difficult to build a healthy, cohesive democratic community. However, the rise of the populist radical right, namely the remarkable electoral success of EKRE (Estonian Conservative People’s Party), has proven to be a bigger challenge because it demonstrates that many Estonians are deeply dissatisfied with how democracy works in their country. The article discusses whether it would be possible for dissatisfied Estonians and Russians to join forces to challenge the current liberal democratic model in Estonia. The analysis shows that even if the initial attempts have failed, one could not entirely rule out that prospect.