scholarly journals SOCIALIST AND EUGENIC: CZECH FAIRY-TALE FILMS AND THE NATION’S HEALTH

2021 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Victoria Shmidt
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
Female Bildungsroman ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Czech Lands

The article embeds the three most popular fairy-tale films by Vaclav Vořlíček (Girl on a Broomstick, 1971; Three Wishes for Cinderella, 1973; How to Drown Dr. Mraček or the End of Water Spirits in Bohemia, 1975) in the socialist campaigns orchestrated by the Czechoslovak government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose goal was to introduce women to new practices directly relating to reproductive behavior. I explore this cohort of “crazy” comedies stemming from the story of domestication of women as a historical continuity in the development of the comic female Bildungsroman, one of the mainstream genres interrogating nation-building and popular culture in the Czech lands from the second third of the nineteenth century until today. The core frame of the Czech female Bildungsroman, namely the binary opposition of “us/them” related to the Czech-German relationship, ascribing to women the risk of Otherness, and the call for their Czechinization through intercourse with Czech men, are deconstructed through infiltration by eugenic motives disseminated in the public discourse concerning the nation’s health between the 1960s and 1970s.

Political Settlements and Economic Transformation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Gray
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
New Institutional Economics ◽  
Technological Learning ◽  
The Core ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Settlement

This chapter sets out the analytical framework of political settlements and elaborates the framework to account for the socialist experiences of Tanzania and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. A political settlement, as defined by Mushtaq Khan, is a combination of power and institutions that is mutually compatible and also sustainable in terms of economic and political viability. The chapter clarifies the core building blocks of the approach and sets out the main differences between political settlements and new institutional economics. The chapter then defines a socialist political settlement where productive rights are formally held by the collective and formal institutions protect common and collectively owned assets. The attempts to construct a socialist political settlement left important institutional, political, and economic legacies. These shaped incentives and constraints which influenced a number of critical processes at the heart of economic development—related to technological learning, accumulation for investment, and political stabilization.

Saul Bellow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan R. Chavkin
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
White Male ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
The Public ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Colloquial Style

Over a career of six decades, Saul Bellow (1915–2005) published novels, short stories, essays, and plays that attracted immense attention from the public and the literary establishment. The value of his creative work was recognized with numerous awards, including three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fourth child of Jewish parents who immigrated from Russia, Bellow spent the first years of his life in Lachine, Canada, before he and his family moved in 1924 to Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1937, he spent a semester at the University of Wisconsin studying anthropology but quit his graduate study to become a writer. In 1938 Bellow married the first of his five wives. In 1944 he published his first novel, Dangling Man, a novel of existential alienation. Three years later he published The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism, but it was his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), that catapulted Bellow from relative obscurity to being regarded as one of the most important living American writers. This long picaresque novel was narrated by its larky eponymous hero in a vivid, colloquial style. Herzog (1964) secured his reputation as one of America’s foremost writers. With its complex style that captures the interior life, the novel was a surprising bestseller. The publication of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was probably instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year. In this complicated novel with its inextricable blending of high and low culture and many flashbacks, the narrator ruminates on widely divergent subjects and describes his comic involvement with a variety of colorful people, especially the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, modeled on Delmore Schwartz, and the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile. Bellow continued to publish for the next twenty-five years, but like John Updike and some other white male writers of his generation, Bellow’s reputation was hurt to some extent by critics upset by his white masculine-centered orientation. His popularity with the public and with critics is less than it was at the high point of his career in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but he is still regarded as one of the major 20th-century American writers. His fiction is known for its unique narrative voice, its ability to portray the intricacies of human consciousness, its metaphysical speculation, and its comedy.

Public Lands and Their Administration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam M. Sowards
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Park Service ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

For more than a century after the republic’s founding in the 1780s, American law reflected the ideal that the commons—the public domain—should be turned into private property. As Americans became concerned about resource scarcity, waste, and monopolies at the end of the 19th century, reform-minded bureaucrats and scientists convinced Congress to maintain in perpetuity some of the nation’s land as public. This shift offered a measure of protection and an alternative to private property regimes. The federal agencies that primarily manage these lands today—U.S. Forest Service (USFS), National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—have worked since their origins in the early decades of the 20th century to fulfill their diverse, competing, evolving missions. Meanwhile, the public and Congress have continually demanded new and different goals as the land itself has functioned and responded in interdependent ways. In the mid-20th century, the agencies intensified their management, hoping they could satisfy the rising—and often conflicting—demands American citizens placed on the public lands. This intensification often worsened public lands’ ecology and increased political conflict, resulting in a series of new laws in the 1960s and 1970s. Those laws strengthened the role of science and the public in influencing agency practices while providing more opportunities for litigation. Predictably, since the late 1970s, these developments have polarized public lands’ politics. The economies, but also the identities, of many Americans remain entwined with the public lands, making political standoffs—over endangered species, oil production, privatizing land, and more—common and increasingly intractable. Because the public lands are national in scope but used by local people for all manner of economic and recreational activities, they have been and remain microcosms of the federal democratic system and all its conflicted nature.

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 535-535
Author(s):  
Valerie Bunce
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Scientific Validity ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
The Public ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The 1960S

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

Gender insurgency and neoliberal reform: the academy twice transformed?

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Richard Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Considerable Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
Neoliberal Reform ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Internal Relations ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring

English higher education, like other parts of the public sector and higher education in other countries, is currently undergoing considerable change as it is being restructured as if it were a market in which universities, departments and academics compete against one another. This restructuring is producing new processes of subjectivity that discipline those who work and study in higher education institutions. Feminist poststructuralists have suggested that this restructuring is enabled partly through new forms of accountability that seemingly offer the 'carrot' of self-realisation alongside the 'stick' of greater management surveillance of the burgeoning number of tasks that academics, amongst others, must perform. This paper, located in the context of these changes, builds on Judith Butler's insight that processes of subjection to the dominant order through which the self is produced entail both mastery and subjection. That is, submission requires mastery of the underlying assumptions of the dominant order, In this paper I adopt an auto/biographical method and a critique of abstract social theories to explore how the neoliberal restructuring of universities interacts with the gender order. Many universities are being remoulded as businesses for other businesses, with profound effects on internal relations, the subjectivities of academics and students, and practices of education and scholarship. Yet I doubt if we can understand this, nor resist the deep corruption, through grasping neoliberalism's dynamics alone. A longer memory and a more concrete analysis are needed. Today's intense individualisation impacts on pre-existing social relations, which inflect it unpredictably. From my own experience, I evoke the baseline of an older academy, gender-segregated, explicitly patriarchal and privileged in class and ethnic terms. I stress the feminist and democratic gains of the 1960s and 1970s. I sketch the (neoliberal) strategies that undermine or redirect them. I write this, hoping that the next episode can be written differently.

The Transnationalization of Public Spheres and Global Policy

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-256
Author(s):  
Ingrid Volkmer
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Global Policy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Container Model

The globalized spheres of digital communication require a substantial revision of conventional conceptions of ‘the public sphere’. This article lays out the core strands of such a new debate by identifying the limitations of traditional public sphere approaches which are caused by the boundedness of the foci on the national ‘container’ model associated with the European nation state. Instead of limiting publicness to national boundaries, new approaches are required to understand the new discursive spheres of connectivity of citizens across all society types, today enabled by digital communication. Such an approach is necessary to map out the new dimension of public discourse. The article concludes with the suggestion of a model of publicness understood as ‘reflective interdependence’ connecting citizens across societies.

In the service of the nation: intellectuals’ articulation of the Muslim national identity1

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva Lucic
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Building Activities ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This article explores the emerging national narratives about Muslim national identity in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. After the national recognition of a Bosnian Muslim nation, which was proposed by the members of the Central Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the intellectuals’ task to endow the national category with cultural repertoire. Hereby affirmative as well as negating discursive practices on the national status of Muslims entered the debates, which geographically expanded the republican scope of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The author examines internal discussions of the LCY on that issue as well as the intellectuals’ engagement in the public spheres in Socialist Yugoslavia. By integrating the nation-building activities of intellectuals outside Yugoslavia, the author postulates for a trans-national dimension of nation-building processes.

scholarly journals Political ethics about the phenomenon of politics in its interaction with morality

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 05002
Author(s):  
Marina Shirokova
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The article considers the reasons for the formation of political ethics as a science and a discipline. Its appearance was caused by the crisis of the state domestic and foreign policies in the 1960s and 1970s, the collapse of value orientations in the public consciousness, as well as the loss of the authority of politics in the eyes of society. All this led to a steadily high interest in ethical issues and criticism of politics from a moral standpoint. The author traces the evolution of the interpretation of the concept of politics from antiquity to our days. Like all human activities, politics needs values and the axiological system. But in the modern world, the dehumanization of politics is taking place. Thus, the issue of restoring ties between politics and morality is largely a matter of continuing existence and prospects for human development.

The Nativity scene in a shared religious space: The case study of Saint-Pierre’s Church in Montreal

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-371
Author(s):  
Monica Grigore-Dovlete ◽  
Lori G Beaman
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Major Transformation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Material Religion

Once called “the priest-ridden province,” the transformations brought about by the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s left the churches in Quebec deserted, while the idea of a secular Quebec became part of the public discourse about Quebec identity. Lacking the financial support of an active community, many Catholic churches were demolished or repurposed. They were thus transformed into residential or institutional spaces, entering what might be conceptualized as a secular order. Some churches managed to delay this major transformation by sharing their space with another religious community. This is the case of a Catholic church located in Montreal that we call Saint-Pierre’s Church. Today, the old building of Saint-Pierre’s Church accommodates two Christian communities: one is French-speaking Catholic and the other is Romanian Orthodox. At first glance, no tensions seem to trouble their coexistence. However, people’s perspectives of religious artifacts depict a slightly different image. Starting from participant observation and interviews carried out in 2016 and 2017 with members of both communities, we use the material religion framework to examine the power of materiality to invoke people’s emotions and to tell a story. The material religion framework allowed us to explore how the understanding of the shared place is linked to the dynamics and the contingencies of each community, and how the transformation of religious space happens in a rapidly changing context to which traditional majoritarian religion is attempting to adjust.

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