Neoliberal Lives is a comprehensive and thorough account of the social, and political transformations that have shaped the lives of most Americans for the last four decades, as well as set the stag...

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Community Action Programs (CAPs) of the 1960s to explore the generation of democratic subjectivity. Barbara Cruikshank’s Foucault-inspired critique of the CAPs focuses attention on how they operated as modes of governance. These investigations enrich our understanding of the CAPs, but they also miss important aspects of their history. They miss the practices by which actors reconfigure what Jacques Rancière calls the “partition of the sensible” on which the programs were based. Focusing on such moments allows us to develop a different conception of the democratic subject than both the would-be promoters of democracy and the scholars of governmentality utilize: the democratic subject is neither disciplined nor resistant, but rather appears in activities that throw existing subject-positions and the existing order of sense into flux. It then becomes possible to identify moments of democratic emancipation within the workings of subject-forming powers.

Karl Marx wrote that, for him, all criticism begins with the criticism of religion. In religion, at least the monotheistic religions in Europe in the 1800s, God is the Supreme Being. As the story g...

In academia, a scholar’s work is constantly pigeonholed by other academics into established categories for our various subjects of inquiry. In the case of democratic theory, it is to label one as a...

In this book, Victor Wallis develops a masterful, critical overview of United States history with a focus on democratic politics, or the lack of such politics. He argues persuasively that the widel...

ABSTRACTIdeological commitments to neoliberalism have re-shaped demo-cratic institutions. Situating public higher education as an institution of democracy, this article identifies and unpacks the ways in which traditional approaches to leadership learning and development in public higher education affirm neoliberal ideology in the United State of America (USA). Artificially produced consumer demand for specific types of leadership education in higher education are increasingly positioned to play on the social, political, and economic insecurities of those disadvantaged by neoliberal ideology. The “Tripod Ontology” of leader, follower, and shared purpose is proble-matized through the political lens of power and choice. A critical ontology of leadership education and devel-opment in higher education that resists neoliberal ideology will center practices of immanent critique. Interpretative work that creates space for dialogue, relationship, and everyday practice can become part of the ontological basis of a critical approach to leader-ship learning and development in higher education.

ABSTRACTThis article provides a critical reading of the idea of ‘the reasonable’ in contemporary politics, as reflected in the work of John Rawls. I argue that this concept is best understood as a practice of political identification, which provides the template for mutual accommodation without concurrent agreement on any substantive commitments. However, by constructing a teleological story in which the reasonable leads naturally back to the liberal principles of justice, Rawls reveals the limits of the concept. Rather than ending political disagreement by establishing a shared foundation, prioritizing reasonableness only repurposes conflicts by transforming disagreement into a series of debates over the meaning of reasonableness itself, battles which are every bit as partisan and vicious as those Rawls sought to exclude. Revitalizing the idea of the reasonable requires abandoning the effort to deploy it as a technique of exclusion. Instead, reasonable politics should be oriented toward engagement with unreasonable critics.

The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future is the most recent work by Australian environmental ethicist Arran Gare. Gare is one of the world’s leading prop...

ABSTRACTWomen simultaneously occupy a space of both strength and vulnerability in Mexico. While existing institutions, traditions, and gender norms create the conditions whereby feminicide and forced disappearances proliferate, responses to these events prominently feature maternal calls for justice. How do the victims’ mothers counter extreme gender violence in Ciudad Juárez? Existing accounts of maternal politics typically fall into three wide categories: celebratory accounts, critical approaches, and the theatrical dimension of maternal politics. While these accounts provide important insights into the political power of maternal politics, they do not adequately explain its pedagogical function. Bringing to bear the insights of Judith Butler’s performative theory of public assembly and Rita Laura Segato’s anthropology of violence, this article suggests that maternal politics transforms private experiences of extreme gender violence into political expressions of strength and agency to politically beget what Segato defines as counter pedagogies of cruelty.

ABSTRACTIn the discipline of International Relations (IR) and beyond, the concept of crisis is essentially contested, and one specific usage, it seems, is called into question by alternative uses of the term. The article develops the argument that crisis must not be misunderstood as exogenous to social construction; indeed, the very notion of crisis only makes sense if understood as produced entirely in what we will later specify as discourse. In this way, it can be illustrated how allegedly objective crises are expressions of particular configurations of social forms of power. The discourse theoretical notion of dislocation will be introduced in order to develop an understanding of crisis as a qualitative as well as constitutive feature of the social crisis. Crisis can in this sense be seen as a permanent attribute of the social, not some transitory condition that appears from time to time.