Democratic Voice Research Articles

Hollowing Out Neighbourhood Governance? Rescaling Revitalisation in Baltimore and Bristol

The neighbourhood has been a prominent terrain for revitalisation in recent times, and also for studies by scholars debating the significance of networked governance as the means of public service co-ordination, democratic voice or social control. This study of the governance of neighbourhoods in Baltimore and Bristol suggests that there may be a need to rethink these perspectives, as Bristol begins to converge with Baltimore on the terrain of exclusionary city governance, neighbourhood disinvestment and self-help. If the study is representative, it may point to a retreat from neighbourhood governance and the possibility that, in the era of austerity, economically ‘unviable’ neighbourhoods face abandonment.

The influence of the nation of Islam on African American singers

ABSTRACT This article explores the responses of African American musicians to the strictures placed on the production and circulation of information following the war on terror post 9/11. This date marks the intensification of the challenging of ‘war on terror’ ideology by black artists. 9/11 also ushered in a new morality in terms of which artists and democratic voices are subjected to extreme control by the government. Most black popular musicians, though American by citizenship, do not feel included in the American nation. There are noticeable and differentiable tendencies among musicians who adopt strategies of resistance to the American state, which the artists view as practising terrorism on its own people. The lyrics of Public Enemy and Talib Kweli are most trenchant in their critiques of American domestic and foreign policy in the period both before and after 9/11. A textual analysis of the music can help uncover the extent of social ideology in the music, which not only proclaims itself a crusade against American ‘war on terror’ ideology, but sometimes openly identifies its inspiration as deriving from Islam. While selected lyrics demonstrate a quest for the liberation of black Americans from the perceived injustices perpetrated by America on its black people and the Arabs in general, the singers articulate their visions from the contradictory ideological ground of being American, victim, and visionary artist for a better society.

The Changing Nature of Private Engagement in Public Education: For-Profit and Nonprofit Organizations and Educational Reform

Recent years have seen a shifting landscape around private engagement in K-12 public education, one that involves a reorientation of education policy and practice around the principles of the marketplace. In this article, we examine the roles of both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies, as distinct from government agencies, in this movement. Past research has generally focused on subsets of these private actors (i.e., for-profit firms, charter management organizations, or alternative preparers of educators for public schools). We try to look more broadly in order to examine how private actors and the roles of those players in K-12 education are changing, both in terms of the scope of their engagement and the extent to which their role increasingly involves areas at the core of educational practice. In doing so, we consider some of the reasons for these changes, including the influence of federal policy, markets as drivers, and the broader political context. We conclude by raising questions for future research and examining how these developments intersect with values such as democratic voice, equitable distribution of resources, and the public purposes of schooling.

Democracy, accountability, and education

Educational standards, assessments, and accountability systems are of immense political moment around the world. But there is no developed theory exploring the role that these systems should play within a democratic polity in particular. On the one hand, well-designed standards are public goods, supported by assessment and accountability mechanisms. They have the potential to serve democratic goods in particular, such as transparency, equality, and public discourse. On the other hand, their very potential to advance systemic democratic goods signals a level of reach and power that threatens the achievement of these same democratic values along other dimensions. This is especially evident in the contemporary United States. Adults’ democratically legitimate control over education within a democracy may well undercut children’s legitimate claims to receiving an education that equips them for democracy. Because the latter should trump the former, democratic goods are best achieved through embedding very limited educational standards, assessments, and accountability measures within an educational system that selects, trains, and provides ongoing support to civically engaged and thoughtful educators. Under such circumstances, they may promote a virtuous circle that builds capacity, motivation, and public support for strong and effective civic education practices, while still offering the adult public a strong democratic voice in public schools.

The Media Reality in Iraqi Kurdistan

Eight years after the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, the country’s transition to a functioning democracy with press freedom is far from accomplished, even in the northern region that U.S. officials have sometimes touted as model for the country. Shortly after the February demonstrations in Suleymaniyah, Kurdistan, which left eight people dead, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) wrote to Kurdistani President Massoud Barzani to say that despite improvements in the representation of democratic voices in the region, the organization was concerned about the deterioration in the situation of journalists there since February 17. In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, Iraq underwent a media boom. Hundreds of new publications, television and radio stations sprang up across the country, and Iraqis gained access to satellite dishes and the Internet. In Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous and federal region of Iraq, independent media flourished. But in the years since the occupation, the media has fallen short of the promise. A power vacuum bred violence and later civil strife made Iraq the deadliest country in the world for journalists between 2003 and 2008, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Even after security improved in 2008 and a new coalition government was formed in Kurdistan in 2010, restrictive legislation and other barriers denied journalists the right to access information.

‘Emancipation’ or ‘regulation’? Law, globalization and indigenous peoples’ rights in post-war Guatemala

During the last two decades processes of legal globalization have led to the increasing codification of the collective rights of indigenous peoples. In Latin America this shift towards ‘codifying culture’ began with a series of constitutional reforms during the 1990s which recognized a series of rights of indigenous people and the ratification by many states of the International Labour Organization's Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples. For many, this regional ‘neoliberal multicultural’ turn (Hale, 2002, 2006) was not about recognizing rights as such, but rather heralded a series of governmental policies signalling limited acceptance of cultural diversity which ultimately facilitated transnational forms of capitalist accumulation. The limited gains of state-endorsed multiculturalism and the threats posed to indigenous livelihoods by the current commodities boom have encouraged a growing number of counter-hegemonic legal engagements, or legal globalization ‘from below’, which resort to ever more transnationalized legal pluralities (Santos & Rodríguez-Garavito, 2005). Indigenous people across Latin America continue to judicialize their protests, appealing to legal entitlements, including both ‘hard law’ (treaty and constitutional law) and ‘soft law’ (such as the internal norms of multilateral development institutions), in order to claim greater autonomy and protest against the effects of dominant patterns of economic development. Using Boaventura de Sousa Santos's heuristic device of the regulatory and emancipatory dimensions of law (Santos, 1998, 2002), in this article I examine the effects of legal globalization and the appropriation of legal instruments and discourses by indigenous people in post-war Guatemala. Specifically, I highlight the distinct legal frameworks, and conflicting notions of property, development, citizenship and democratic participation and voice at play in recent mobilizations against mining projects. The conclusions reflect on the possible effects of judicializing indigenous peoples’ political demands.

Review: <em>The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education</em> by Diane Ravitch

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 283 pp. ISBN 978-0465014910. In the opening chapter of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch explains the sequence of events that led to her change of heart about the best road to success for public education in the United States. Ravitch spent the early 1990s working in the Republican administration as the Assistant Secretary of Education, supporting the choice and accountability movements. Two decades later, she is an adamant critic of those same movements. After critically reviewing years of her writing, she felt the need to explain why she “had returned to [her] roots as a partisan of American education” (p. 13). In doing so, Ravitch lays out a well-informed history of how the United States has arrived at its high-stakes testing state of education, organizing a strong argument about how the country has lost sight of the democratic function of public education, as well as how essential a strong curriculum is to the success of our nation’s schools. Ravitch presents a compelling case that the “public” is slowly eroding from public education across America. Particularly, the democratic voices of parents and communities are heard less and less as the districts and philanthropies collude in pushing for higher test scores, with an “at all costs” attitude. In her assessment of federal education legislation, particularly No Child Left Behind, Ravitch argues that the high-stakes testing environment drives everything taught in the classroom to the detriment of the students. In the end, Ravitch believes that we are left with measurements of how well students can take multiple-choice tests rather than what they actually learn. Equally as concerning, since most states only cover English, mathematics, and occasionally science, nation-wide budget cuts to the curriculum are focused on arts, physical education, and foreign languages. However, Ravitch’s argument is unclear, leaving two options outlined in undesirable terms. The reader is left to consider the problem of creating a national set of standards that are far too liberal (identified as problematic when considering race, class, and gender), while dismissing scripted curriculum that allows little room for imagination and creativity. Herein lies the largest flaw in the book: she spends chapter after chapter explaining where the U.S. has gone wrong in education—which has led, apparently, to the “Death” of the Great American School System—but spends little time on possible solutions. Such is the case as she connects the Balanced Literacy movement in New York’s District 2 to the ostracizing of parents in discussions at the schools. It is not surprising that Ravitch focuses much of the book on New York, considering her work at Columbia and her appointment at New York University. Ravitch points out the opposition to District 2 Superintendent Tony Alvarado’s

Radically Rethinking Citizenship: Disaggregation, Agonistic Pluralism and the Politics of Immigration in the United States

The status of citizenship and the rights extended to non-citizens are among the most contentious and hotly debated political issues in numerous Western polities. Some scholars, most notably Seyla Benhabib, have deemed the contemporary changes a ‘disaggregation of rights claims’, in which the interplay between ideals of particularism and universalism lead to an ‘unbundling’ of civil, political and social rights with formal national membership. Yet this theoretical framing harbors deficiencies that complicate our understanding of the contemporary politics of immigration. In this article, I critically examine this account to show both its theoretical shortcomings and the incomplete explanations to which these deficiencies lead. In particular, I focus on the case of the 2006 protests in response to restrictionist immigration reform in the United States. Furthermore, I suggest ways in which an agonistic pluralist approach to citizenship and immigration issues provides us with a richer account of the political negotiations under way, as well as a means to re-conceptualize democratic voice and, at least in part, to begin democratically legitimating borders and access to political membership.

Myanmar's Nuclear Ambitions

In June 2010, the Oslo-based activist organisation Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) released a documentary film about Myanmar's nuclear ambitions, and published a detailed report entitled ‘Nuclear R...

Report: Citizen Journalism in Burma and the Legacy of Graham Spry

This report explores issues arising from the 2009 Graham Spry Memorial events on the subject of citizen journalism in Burma, staging an encounter between aspects of the work of Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) and Graham Spry’s legacy as a politically-engaged intellectual and lobbyist. I discuss the role of DVB as a “citizen journalism” network embedded in a “space of flows.” Particular emphasis is placed on the organization’s judicious use of “old” and “new” media in the struggle for democracy in Burma. The report also takes up Nancy Fraser’s notion of “scales of justice” to discuss the power of media flows in a transnational public sphere and the limits of citizen journalism within pro-democracy movements in autocratic regimes such as that of Burma. I conclude with a discussion of the stakes of representation and inclusion, notably for questions of gender and ethnic diversity.

Race, class, gender and voice: four terrains of liberation

This article focuses on the complex conceptual and practical terrain offered by the concept of ‘liberation’, both analytically and practically. It argues that liberation is best considered to be a multi-dimensional process, evoking an approach to its study (and to its practice) that would take seriously its resonance, for purposes of the analysis of Africa, as implicating struggle on the levels of race, class, gender, and (democratic) voice. The article then seeks, with special reference to South Africa, to suggest the costs that have accompanied a collapsing of the meaning of the term ‘liberation’ into a mere metaphor for national emancipation from colonial/quasi-colonial and racially defined rule. Comfortable as the narrowing of its definition in such a way may be to the domestic elites who have succeeded their former colonial rulers into possession of formal power, it leaves great scope for merely rationalising the imposition of a kind of recolonisation upon the territories concerned and ensuring the continued subordination in class, gender, and political terms of the vast mass of the ostensibly ‘liberated’ population. In sum, in both political and theoretical terms the concept ‘liberation’ must be reclaimed so as to permit both more precise scientific investigation and more militant and engaged practical work.

The Implications of Climate Change Litigation for International Environmental Law-Making

Climate advocates are increasingly raising specific climate change concerns before domestic courts, human rights tribunals, international commissions and other national and international decisionmaking bodies. Win or lose, these litigation strategies are significantly changing and enhancing the public dialogue around climate change. This article discusses the awareness-building impacts of climate litigation as well as related impacts such strategies may have on the development of climate law and policy. The article argues that litigation's focus on specific victims facing immediate threats from climate change has increased the political will to address climate change both internationally and nationally. It has also shifted the debate towards questions of compensation and adaptation, and has brought new and democratic voices to the climate policy debate. As a result, climate litigation is leaving an important imprint on climate policy regardless of whether a tort action in the United States or the Inuit human rights claims, for example, ultimately prevail - and as demonstrated by the recent US Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, some climate claims will prevail, setting important precedents for the future direction of climate law and policy.

Indigenous Knowledge in the Life Sciences Classroom: Put on Your de Bono Hats!

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The whole world was united in its condemnation of the pre-1994 regime in South Africa. Apartheid meant that many South Africans were robbed of their democratic voices and cultural identities. In this article, the authors would like to pose the question: Are you guilty of apartheid in your biology classroom? Does every student have a voice in your classroom? Do you respect the various cultural backgrounds of your students, and the indigenous knowledge they bring to the classroom? The development of the National Science Education Standards (1996) in the U.S. was guided by several principles, one being that school science reflects the intellectual and cultural traditions that characterize the of contemporary science. Also, Teaching Standard A has a subsection that states that a teacher should select science content and adapt and design curricula that meet the interests, understanding, abilities and experiences of students (National Science Education Standards, 1996). Recent research (Zeidler, Sadler, Simmons & Howes, 2005) also points to the value of a socio-scientific issues (SSI) approach to science teaching. The SSI approach encourages students to consider how science-based issues affect their own lives and to reflect on the moral principles that underpin science. This article gives suggestions on how both the above-mentioned principles can be accommodated in the life science classroom. We do not argue that all indigenous knowledge claims should be accepted, or that they should be seen as science. This article builds on Content Standard G (History and Nature of Science), and that scientific explanations must meet certain criteria. We show how knowledge claims in the field of traditional healing could be scrutinized and subjected to experimental procedures in the classroom (National Science Education Standards, 1996). The Relevance of Science Education Study (ROSE) showed that a very high negative correlation exists between students' perceptions of the relevance of and the development index of the country (Sjoberg & Schreiner, 2006). The more developed a country, the more irrelevant students often find the curriculum. A possible reason for this might be that curricula in developed countries subscribe to what Odora Hoppers (2004) calls cosmopolitan knowledge, anchored in philosophies and scientific discoveries that might be alien to some students. This westernized focus on biology is often at the expense of indigenous knowledge (IK)--a that Odora Hoppers (2004) calls apartheid. Though indigenous knowledge is most often marginalized in the biology classroom, it sustains millions of people economically, socially, and spiritually. Even in biology classes where IK is considered, it is often very clinical. Metaphorically one can say that IK included in the classroom is, more often than not, preserved in a formaldehyde solution. In this article we would like to show, based on our designed-based research, how one can include IK in a lively and academically sound way. In our view, many teachers are hesitant to incorporate IK in the classroom out of fear of infecting classroom teaching with pseudoscience. The teaching strategy explained in this article is anchored in Western science, though it embraces cultural aspects and indigenous knowledge. It gives practical ideas on how one can address the practice of contemporary science, as described in the National Science Education Standards (1996): Science is a way of knowing that is characterized by empirical criteria, logical argument, and skeptical review. Students should develop an understanding of what science is, what science is not, what science can and cannot do, and how science contributes to culture. (1) You will need to adapt the activities for your particular situation, tapping into the cultural diversity in your classroom. …

Why Unions Still Matter

The first edition of Why Unions Matter was published in 1998. In it I argued that unions mattered because they were the one institution that had dramatically improved the lives of the majority of the people and had the potential to radically transform both the economic and political landscape, making both more democratic and egalitarian. I showed with clear and decisive data that union members enjoyed significant advantages over nonunion workers: higher wages, more and better benefits, better access to many kinds of leaves of absence, a democratic voice in their workplaces, and a better understanding of their political and legal rights. What is more, unions benefitted nonunion workers through their political agitations and through what is called the "spillover" effect—nonunion employers will treat their employees better if only to avoid unionization.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

“Out of Place”: Home and Empire in the Works of Mahmud Ahmad Al-Sayyid and Dhu Nun Ayyub

This essay highlights silenced aspects of Arab-Iraqi nationalism. While scholars of Iraqi nationalism paid great heed to intellectuals affiliated with the state, I explore sources that were written outside of official circles, namely, novels, to rescue a more nuanced understanding of Iraqi nationalism and, concurrently, to reconstruct the richness of the Iraqi cultural field. I focus on two intellectuals, Mahmud Ahmad al-Sayyid (1904-37) and Dhu Nun Ayyub (1908-84), two socialists whose novels critique the state and its elites. I argue that, despite the prominence of Pan-Arabism in Iraqi national historiography, their works reveal the existence of Eastern forms of Iraqi national identity that emphasize the connections among Iraqi, Indian, and Turkish nationalism(s). Such works also complicate our periodization of Iraqi history. Whereas scholars agree that after the end of World War II the Iraqi public sphere was invigorated by radical voices from the Left, these novels demonstrate the early existence of critical and democratic voices in the interwar period.

Are More Democratic Donor Countries More Development Oriented? Domestic Institutions and External Development Promotion in OECD Countries

Summary This paper reveals how political institutions within OECD countries affect those countries’ foreign policies toward the developing world. For identifying the overall development orientation, the paper uses the Commitment to Development Index, which aggregates different foreign policy fields such as development assistance, trade, investment, and environmental policies according to their development orientation in poor countries. The result of regressions analysis demonstrates that the varying quality of democratic voice and accountability in 21 OECD countries explains a large part of the differences with regard to the Commitment to Development Index.These findings suggest that the existence of democratic and transparent political institutions is not only important in developing countries because they orient politicians toward the encompassing interests of society. A similar logic applies for rich countries’ policies toward poor countries.

Of youth-harps and songbirds: the sweet music of Wasulu

In 1992 the West African nation of Mali proudly became a democratic republic under the leadership of the dynamic president, Alpha Oumar Konare. With this political transition came a host of dramatic cultural changes in the nation’s capital, Bamako. One such change was a new kind of music called wassoulou. Gritty and funky, yet deeply rooted in the Wasulu traditions of Mali’s southeastern heartland, wassoulou and its brilliant female singers carried a new voice to Bamako and beyond: a democratic voice that expressed fresh, youthful, and feminine perspectives about life. In the early 1990s, this new sound invaded the nation’s commercial music sector, radio, and television with astounding success and swiftly became the driving musical force in popular culture.

Bringing Politics (and the State) Back Into Global Justice Theorizing

Carol Gould's Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights is an ambitious work of social theory that brings normative demo cratic theory to bear upon the prospects for extending democracy and human rights globally. Writing in the tradition of critical social theory, Gould discerns from contemporary social develop ments the potentiality for social transformation. Thus, her hopes for extending human rights and democracy within and across state boundaries is grounded in her claim that the growing inter dependence of economic, cultural, and social relations is engen dering inter-societal relationships and norms. Those working across borders on common emancipatory projects (be it fighting trafficking in women; global warming; or cross-border labor exploitation) advance cross-border demands for democratic voice in the decisions that affect them and over the common

Superintendent perspectives and practice of accountability, democratic voice and social justice

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report on the superintendent portion of the UCEA Voices III project.Design/methodology/approachA four‐year study to determine how school leaders, from several locations and contexts, describe their perceptions of and experiences with educational leadership related to the study themes, school improvement, democratic community, and social justice.FindingsStudy findings indicate that superintendents articulated these study themes in more general and practical terms than found in the academic literature, and share a belief that the themes may be mutually exclusive, and require contextual interpretation to be functional. The paper concludes by calling for extending our ideas of how to practice social justice, solicit broader community voice, employ shared decision making, and measure accountability.Originality/valueAuthors recommend that practitioners place more emphasis on individualized contextual and cultural realities that can minimize or even counter the intended effects of these leadership approaches in practice. Conclusions suggest that superintendents understand and practice a more inclusive form of social justice, sometimes having to control and filter majority stakeholder inputs to achieve more ethical, socially just, educational decisions. The study provides a critical and needed empirical evaluation of the theoretical concepts of shared decision‐making, inclusion of community stakeholders, and practicing social justice. As superintendents attempt to practice these concepts in a real‐world context, they have discovered and provided insights into the limitations of these ideas.

State political culture, primary frontloading, and democratic voice in presidential nominations: 1972–2000

In light of the notorious “frontloading” phenomenon in U.S. presidential nominating elections, this paper examines the relationship between state political culture and state primary scheduling, for the purpose of understanding how differences in institutionalized community values may have affected the equity with which democratic voice has been distributed in modern presidential nominations. Using stratified event history analyses of nomination campaign schedules from 1972 to 2000, we find that “moralistic” states tend to schedule primary dates earlier in the campaign season than do individualistic or (especially) traditionalistic states, particularly in states with more ideologically liberal elites. Moreover, this tendency toward frontloading among moralistic states becomes more dramatic as racial homogeneity increases relative to other states. These results disturbingly reveal that the democratic voices of racial minorities have often been muffled under the modern institution of presidential nominations.