Facing the Nation and the University: A Model for Institutional Transformation

Author(s):  
Priscilla Leiva

This essay responds to Sánchez’s invitation to start in a specific place to consider a larger story in order to describe his impact as both a scholar and an institution builder. This essay will do so by putting two of his pieces in conversation: “Face the Nation,” which offers new conceptual frameworks to understand a multiracial society, and “Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy,” in which he theorizes the role of the university and the struggle for democracy both inside and outside its walls. By reading these two pieces together, scholars of racial formation may gain insight regarding three critical interventions that the field now takes for granted. First, multiracial interaction is regularly a research topic that complicates binaries of Black and white because Sánchez, his colleagues, and his predecessors began asking different questions about race. His students have been central to pushing the edges of the field, proving that good mentorship is more than generosity. Second, the fact that Sánchez, a preeminent historian, engages multiple fields in theorizing multiracial interaction demonstrates the political urgency of reading and writing beyond the discipline. Lastly, Sánchez’s efforts to diversify university faculty and create conditions of success for faculty of color is central to making the university live up to its promises of civic responsibility and democracy. Ultimately, his body of work both on and off the page demonstrates his importance in bringing different worlds, disciplines, and individuals together.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Olga Marques ◽  
Amanda Couture-Carron ◽  
Tyler Frederick ◽  
Hannah Scott

Many post-secondary institutions are developing policies and programs aimed at improving responses to sexual assault experienced by students. In some areas, such as Ontario, Canada, the government has mandated post-secondary institutions to do so. However significant these initiatives, they are predicated on the assumption that students trust, and want to engage with, the university following sexual violence. This study explores students’ perceptions of sexual assault policies and services on one mid-size university campus focusing specifically on how trust factors into reporting sexual victimization and using services. Findings show that students believe that sexual assault policies and programs exist, but this does not meanstudents are willing to use such resources or that they even trust that their university has students’ needs and interests at the fore. This paper discusses policy and programmatic considerations for building student trust in their post-secondary institutions to encourage student use of campus support.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Teo Ballvé

This introductory chapter briefly explores the ways in which imaginaries of statelessness have structured the political life of Urabá, Colombia. It argues that Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient regimes of accumulation and rule—yet this is not to say they are benevolent. In order to do so, this chapter approaches the state as a dynamic ensemble of relations that is both an effect and an instrument of competing political strategies and relations of power. In Urabá, groups from across the political spectrum, armed and otherwise, all end up trying to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of the state in a space where it supposedly does not exist. The way this absence exerts a generative political influence is what this chapter establishes as the “frontier effect.” The frontier effect describes how the imaginary of statelessness in these spaces compels all kinds of actors to get into the business of state formation; it thrusts groups into the role of would-be state builders.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Joel Zogry

The introduction explains the role of the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper, in the broader context of the university and the state of North Carolina. It outlines the key arguments and themes in the book: academic freedom, freedom of speech and press; the ideological evolution of the university; the political push-pull over progressivism and conservatism in the state; and the role of big-time athletics at a top-tier research institution.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Alfeetouri Salih Mohammed Alsati ◽  
Al-Sayed Abd ulmutallab Ghanem

The current research aims at identifying and measuring the political knowledge of the students of the two universities of Al- Balqaa in Jordan and Omar Al- Mokhtar in Libya. The two communities are almost similar in terms of the social formation, Arab customs and traditions, the Bedouin values, the difference in the institutional age and the political stability.The study attempts to measure and compare the political knowledge in the communities of the two universities using the descriptive and comparative analytical method. The study uses a 400 random questionnaire of 30 paragraphs to measure eight indicators divided into internal and external political knowledge, and other aspects of knowledge: general political knowledge, knowledge of the political institutions and leaders, the political interest, the geographical and historical knowledge, and knowledge of the methods of exercising the political process. The study also attempts to identifying the most important sources and the role of the university in university students’ political knowledge.The results show that the level of the political knowledge is medium while its level in the sample of the Jordanian students is high. According to the samples, the internal political knowledge is more than the external knowledge with a lack of interest in the political matters. The samples do not consider the political matters as their priorities. The political knowledge as a whole needs to much effort to be exerted to confront the current circumstances. The variables of the place of resident, age and the educational level make big difference in the political knowledge. In contrast, the level of the parental education does not create big differences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Bleiker

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 1162-1185
Author(s):  
Livia Johannesson

Courts are influential actors during the implementation of immigration policies in liberal democracies. The “liberal paradox” thesis stipulates that courts are driven by logics that hamper restrictionist immigration policies. This study contributes to this theory by exploring the norm construction of impartiality among judicial workers in Swedish migration courts when deciding asylum appeals. Its findings contradict the liberal paradox assumption that courts act according to inner logics that benefit immigrants’ rights. At Sweden’s migration courts, judicial workers show impartiality by using a skeptical approach to asylum applicants and do so to distance themselves from the political discourse of generosity that has dominated Swedish political debate for decades. The broader implications of these findings are that immigration policy theories can benefit from qualitative research exploring informal norm constructions in courts, as such work can offer new insights about the role of courts in the implementation of immigration policies.


1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel R. Davis

This paper focuses on the contemporary white public and scientific preoccupation with the question of racially linked genetic differences between black and white male athletes. It is argued that the preoccupation itself is racist because it is founded on and naturalizes racial categories as fixed and unambiguous biological realities, thus obscuring the political processes of racial formation. The biological determinism underlying the preoccupation conceals both human agency and sociopolitical forces, including racism. NBC Television, by legitimating the preoccupation itself, helped to produce consent for the racial status quo. Strategies that are used to naturalize the preoccupation are exposed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Huck

Thompson, Holly. Orchards, New York: Delacorte Press, 2011. Print. Orchards is a poetic novel written by Holly Thompson. It tells the story of Kana Goldberg, an American girl, half-Jewish and half-Japanese, who is sent to spend the summer with her mother’s family in Japan working on their mikan farm. (Mikan is a type of Japanese orange.) A school-mate, Ruth, has committed suicide and Kana is a member of the group of girls who had excluded and locked horns with the girl over a boy, not realizing at the time that she suffered from bi-polar disease and that she was reaching out to the boy for support. The book is less about Kana accepting responsibility for her involvement in the confrontation with Ruth than it is about mending relationships and the process of Kana overcoming her anger and feelings of guilt. The book challenges us to set aside our own pre-conceived notions about bullying and consider the idea that everyone is vulnerable to depression, and that what gets sensationalized in the media as bullying is not always a black and white case of cruelty, but is sometimes a case of misunderstanding that escalates in dramatic fashion when emotions are mixed in. Kana’s fixation on Ruth and the pressure of a community that blames her and the other girls constitute an invisible burden that puts her at risk of the unthinkable, too. “Suicide can spread like a virus,” Kana’s grandmother warns. Kana’s ‘exile’ to a strange country turns out to be a chance to ground herself amongst her family, make peace with the presence of death in life, find confidence in who she is, and learn how to make a difference in the world of the living. Readers expecting a remorseful narrative may feel unsatisfied, but because the book reads quickly and the language is pleasurable, they may also decide to re-read it for a second impression. The reason it reads quickly is that Thompson has chosen to tell the story in a kind of free-flowing verse. Stanzas of varying lengths define sentence-like sequences, with the breaks between stanzas replacing the conventional sentence demarcators of full stops and capitalized first words. Line breaks play the role of commas, controlling the flow without impeding it. These syntactic arrangements complement the imagistic and uncluttered style of the writing, giving an inward, contemplative feel to the story. Because it is a subtle book, it would be most suitable for an older teen who is perceptive and has literary sensibilities. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: John HuckJohn Huck is a metadata and cataloguing librarian at the University of Alberta. He holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and maintains a special interest in the spoken word. He is also a classical musician and has sung semi-professionally for many years.


2020 ◽  
Vol V (IV) ◽  
pp. 41-48
Author(s):  
Kausar Shafiq ◽  
Abdul Basit Khan ◽  
Ali Shan Shah

The denial of the institutionalization of political power by various civilian as well as martial law regimes has been a constant problem in Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the first person who could do so in an effective manner, but his eternal departure in the early phase of the history of Pakistan changed the entire course of the country, and the successor leadership had to pursue self-serving politics just to prolong their rule. The same is the case with the rule of General Pervaiz Musharraf (1999-2008), which converted the parliamentary system envisaged by the 1973 constitution of Pakistan into a quasi-presidential system just to prolong the military dictatorship. The subsequent rule of the Pakistan Peoples' Party (2008-2013) was a tough period for the political leadership since the preceding dictatorship had completely altered the socio-political landscape of the country; however, the political wisdom of Mr. Asif Ali Zardari helped the country to sail smoothly during the aftershocks of the martial law regime. In that perspective, the current study intends to analyze the political developments in Pakistan during the third rule of the Pakistan Peoples' Party over the country during the period 2008-2013.


Author(s):  
Kwame Anthony Appiah

This chapter explores some of the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from above, and ethnic identity and nationalism, from below, in the light of some of the other chapters in this book. To do so, it sketches a general account of identity, with its three components: criteria of membership, psychological identification, and the treatment of members by others as members of the group, and argues that all are standardly contested. It then incorporates the insights of some of the earlier chapters that show that identification can involve (a) feelings of warmth for the nation, or (b) celebrating national culture and achievements, or (c) conceiving of one’s nation as superior to others, and it discusses the different effects of these on redistributive solidarity with minorities and migrants. Finally, it urges attention to the role of national honour in thinking about national identity and suggests that there is scope for more work on the political psychology of nationalism.


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