Political Dissonance Research Articles

Home as a site of resistance/repression? The intersection of family, politics and the Hong Kong 2019 protest movement

This article illuminates the mutually constitutive nature of activism and family life in the context of a high-risk protest movement, by focusing on the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with individuals who participated in the 2019 Movement, this article captures how politics penetrated individuals’ private lives through everyday family practices, and depicts the ways in which the protest movement undermined or fostered family cohesion. The findings illustrate the heterogeneity of family political interactions during political upheaval: while families were often sites of conflict and repression, which amplified political dissonance and reinforced hegemonic power relations within the domestic sphere, they could also become spaces of activism where individuals exchange political ideas and muster resources for collective actions. This study bridges the literature of family and social movement, by demonstrating how family lives and political participation are interwoven, and simultaneously structure protest participants’ biographical and social movement trajectories.

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Deconstructing prohibitionist ideology: A sociocognitive approach to understand opinions on UK drug policy and the law

BackgroundThere is increasing support to include people who use drugs (PWUD) into debates about drug policy reform in order to improve policy legitimacy and outcomes. The aim of this paper is thus to critically analyse the perspectives of PWUD on UK drug policy and the law. This is the first empirical study to apply the four philosophical positions that underpin drug policy debates: Millian liberalism, legal moralism, strict libertarianism and paternalism (MacCoun and Reuter, 2001) to understand opinions and ideology. MethodsForty interviews were conducted with PWUD about the meaning of and motivation for their substance consumption and about their opinions on drug policy and the law. The responses were analysed using the sociocognitive approach pioneered by van Dijk 2014; 2015 from the field of critical discourse studies. The analysis involved connecting personal experiences, knowledge and opinions to broader values, attitudes and ideology, specifically the analysis focused upon the extent to which participants challenged or supported prohibitionist ideology. ResultsThe opinions of those PWUD studied were diverse and complex. There was some support for prohibition, but overwhelmingly there was resistance and challenge to it. We theorise the challenge to prohibitionist ideology on a continuum from anti-prohibition to pro-reform. Key themes from the analysis included: knowledge gaps regarding terminology; uncertainty about and lack of consideration of policy and reform; political dissonance; apprehension about public attitudes and behaviours; reform rooted in social welfare and human rights ideology; and apathy through counter-culture. ConclusionThe findings demonstrate a lack of clarity amongst some PWUD regarding drug policy and reform. Educational initiatives outlining the different reform approaches would therefore provide PWUD with invaluable knowledge and help facilitate their enagement into reform debates. Despite a lack of clarity and consistency within opinions, participants were united in their discussion of human rights, health, economics and education; therefore these topics could help frame future approaches that seek to include PWUD into debates about drug policy.

New Geographies of Urban Possibility

New Geographies of Urban Possibility

Tobacco still a major killer-will we achieve the end game?

The game of tobacco use began in Europe in 1560 when the first tobacco seeds were sent from Lisbon to the king of France, by Jean Nicot. From kings' and nobles' exclusive use, it gradually and progressively became popular among the public, as a new player. Eighty-eight years ago (1929), Fritz Linkint, an extraordinary researcher in Germany, while reviewing existing evidence regarding a wide range of cancers potentially caused by smoking, indicated that smoking was a cause of respiratory disease. Despite the overwhelming accumulated evidence of the negative effects of nicotine intake, the prevalence of tobacco use is not expected to decline in the near future. What have we missed thus far in the game that claims more than seven million deaths annually worldwide? Although tobacco use is recognized as a major health problem, the persistent habit creates a dissonance between public health initiatives to reduce tobacco consumption and the choices citizens are making. To understand this dissonance, consideration first must be given to the social meaning attributed to smoking. Second, the political dissonance between health imperatives and social agendas is discussed with regard to relevant theory. Third, health promotion strategies can make a strong contribution to win the game from a negentropic perspective, that is to say, a public health vision that is structured towards an overarching goal.

Urban development and the politics of dissonance

ABSTRACTUrban development and the politics of dissonance. Territory, Politics, Governance. A major reason for the peripheral treatment of political conflict in established theories of urban development derives from the tendency to underplay questions of territory and spatial governance. In this paper, we examine the implications of territorial discrepancy amongst governance arrangements and introduce the notion of ‘urban political dissonance’ in order to engage sustained patterns of conflict or incongruity. This focus implies examination of strategic action on the part of competing urban interests which may result in policy incoherence, institutional manoeuvring in pursuit of divergent objectives and difficulties in finding workable compromise, with potentially significant implications for economic development outcomes. An illustrative case study is presented of growth politics in Oxford, UK, where a central and unresolved dilemma over the physical expansion of the city has effectively defined the nature of development politics for a generation, leading to ongoing political conflict and policy incongruity.

The Authoritarian Resurgence: Iran’s Paradoxical Regime

Abstract: Clerical authoritarianism in Iran is full of many paradoxes. The country has a dour, maledominated, undemocratic structure of power, yet pulsating beneath this mirthless authoritarianism pulsates a youthful, internet-savvy society bent on realizing more and more of its democratic rights. The women’s movement, fighting against misogynist laws, is a prime example of this political dissonance. A new kind of micro-political defiance, spread through myriad loci of life—from underground theater and art groups, to sexual ethics and social media—has begot talk of “culture wars” in Iran. While some dismiss the regime's tolerance of these acts of defiance as merely a form of “repressive tolerance” others see it as a new kind of cultural politics geared toward not a regime change but a change of regime through the gradual inexorable resistance to the regime’s failed and increasingly failing efforts at “social engineering.”

Which and Whose Shari’a?: Historical and Political Perspectives on Legal Articulation of Islam in Indonesia

Attempts at the implementation of shari’a in Indonesia have always been marked by a tension between political aspirations of the proponents and the opponents of shari’a and by resistance from the secular state. The tension had led to the profound and ongoing legal political dissonance in the formal application of shari’a rules in the country. A continuum between conflicts in meanings and direct contradictions in terms has resulted in a debate of which and whose shari’a to be implemented. This paper looks at the roots as well as the sources of those dissonances. It observes a number of conditions that make the articulation of religious law dissonant. It argues that more direct dissonance is discernible between the aspiration for the formal implementation of shari’a and constitutional rights of religious freedom. Arguing that despite shari’a has been able to seep into scattered legal aspects within Indonesian state and society and that the state has allowed shari’a to be incorporated in many ways into its legal system, nationally and regionally, it concludes that the state continues to control and restrict this dispersion and that shari’a remains tightly confined in Indonesia

Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South by T.R.C. Hutton (review)

Reviewed by: Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South by T.R.C. Hutton Andrea S. Watkins Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South. By T.R.C. Hutton. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. xii, 430.) Feud violence in Appalachia, and more specifically in Kentucky, has been a staple of popular culture for the past one hundred and fifty years. Hot-headed, quick-to-draw, tribal mountaineers who appeared in newspapers, cartoons, novels, movies, and television programs shaped Americans perceptions of eastern Kentucky, and the area with one of the most violent reputations was “Bloody Breathitt” County. T.R.C. Hutton’s thorough examination of Breathitt County violence reveals a citizenry caught in an intense political struggle for control rather than in long-simmering familial hatred. Beginning with the political reasons for the founding of Breathitt County, Hutton lays the foundation for the intense political rivalries and questions of legitimacy that emerged in later years. A Democrat county carved from three Whig counties, from its earliest days Breathitt County was ruled by one-party politics. During the Civil War the county was pro-Confederate, an interesting fact that challenges the narrative that eastern Kentucky, and Appalachia in general, was a Union stronghold. Residents, white and black, who had struggled economically in the years leading up to the war opposed the Confederacy and its citizen supporters, and a brutal personal civil war played out within the county. Hutton explores the motivations and actions of both sides and argues that after the war’s end “political rupture remained, as did the blurred lines between soldier and civilian” (4). After the war, violence in the county mirrored that of Southern states; a biracial Unionist/Republican minority fought a county government controlled by Confederate veterans. In an effort to unite the country and to portray Kentucky as the loyal Union state, Bluegrass leaders and newspapers assigned the violent public actions a private meaning that served to hide the political dissonance of the period. Hutton details the nineteenth-century meaning of the word feud, which suggested violence among equals, and how it was used to describe the intraracial violence as something held over from an earlier era in an attempt to depict Breathitt County violence as a world apart from the current political and social climate of the state. The discovery of the wealth of natural resources available in the county led Kentuckians and other outsiders to the conclusion that the isolated, ignorant, poor, revenge-obsessed residents [End Page 105] would find redemption in economic progress and religious conversion. This idea fueled missionary work in the 1880s, and the various reports from the mission field increased the national notoriety of Breathitt County. Hutton provides an in-depth look at several key figures throughout the county’s history, including William Strong and Edward Callahan, and he links many of the noted “feuds” to struggles for political control within the county, not to personal vendettas. He argues that the assassination of political agitator William Goebel in 1900, combined with the dangerous reputation of mountaineers, provided “a means for Kentuckians and other Americans to reconcile (or confuse) political and communal uses of violence and draw boundaries between the two Kentuckys” (162). Obscuring the political reasons and assigning the term feud to such actions as the murders of men like James Marcum allowed elites within and without Breathitt County to benefit from violence “even as they distanced themselves from it” (205). The final chapter of the book traces the history of written accounts about Breathitt County violence through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carefully examining not only how outsiders portrayed the county’s violence but also how the residents’ interpretations of events changed over time. There is also a valuable explanation of how the term feud was used in popular, nineteenth-century fiction. The research and insights Hutton presents provide a fresh look at a topic of renewed interest for historians and general audiences alike. By highlighting the real motivations for violence in Breathitt County, Hutton links the county to the larger themes of racial and political violence in the United States. This work gives evidence that the residents of Breathitt County were...

Dual Performance Feedback and Elite Law Firm Mergers

This paper examines how institutional logics interrelate with the organizational learning process to generate strategic changes. Although organizational actors are surrounded by contradictory demands stemming from multiple logics, organizational actors interact with those demands through aspiration levels. When organizations fail to satisfy conflicting demands compared to aspiration levels, decision makers experience intense political dissonance among members, which interrupt their decision making processes on strategic changes. In contrast, when organizations produce satisfactory performance on either of conflicting demands, decision makers are less likely to be exposed to this dissonance; thus they are more likely to search for solutions by taking greater risks. Using a longitudinal dataset of 217 largest law firms in the United States from 2005 to 2012, this paper shows relative commitment to the public legal service moderates the relationship between economic performance feedback and corporate acquisi...

A Cacophony of Dissonance

A Cacophony of Dissonance

Political Dissonance and Personal Harmony: Negotiating with North Korea and Iran

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?

The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, Issue 2, pp. 274–284, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ jm.2009.26.2.274. 1 Paul Mitchinson, “The Sound of Political Dissonance,” National Post, 21 July 2001; Martin Brody, “ ‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory,” Musical Quarterly 77 (1993): 161–92; Martin Brody, review of Joan Peyser, To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since The Rite of Spring, Notes 57 (2000–2001): 153. 2 Brody, “ ‘Music for the Masses,’ ” 186. Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?

Developing beliefs about literacy instruction: A cross‐case analysis of preservice teachers in traditional and field based settings

This paper reports the results of three similar case studies of preservice teachers enrolled in literacy methods courses. In each study, preservice teachers beliefs about literacy were described through the use of multiple data sources before, during, and after the course. The settings of the studies included: a university based course with no field experience, a university‐based course with unsupervised field experience, and a field‐based course. Preservice teachers in each program experienced change. Factors contributing to the changes common to all programs were instructor modeling, course assignments/readings, cognitive dissonance, and reflection. Only students participating in the field‐based program, however, described a greater variety of dissonance factors impacting their beliefs about literacy instruction. Factors unique to the field‐based course include: cultural dissonance, emotional dissonance, experiential dissonance, and political dissonance. Implications support a field‐based model of teacher education for development of a complex view of the process of literacy teaching.