The Democratic Surround

Author : Fred Turner
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022606414X
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Democratic Surround written by Fred Turner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “smart and fascinating” reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Reason Magazine). We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication—and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture. In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ‘50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. He tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the best-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe. Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today. “Brilliant . . . [an] excellent and thought-provoking book.” —Tropics of Meta

Author : Jennifer Holt
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113508128X
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Connected Viewing written by Jennifer Holt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As patterns of media use become more integrated with mobile technologies and multiple screens, a new mode of viewer engagement has emerged in the form of connected viewing, which allows for an array of new relationships between audiences and media texts in the digital space. This exciting new collection brings together twelve original essays that critically engage with the socially-networked, multi-platform, and cloud-based world of today, examining the connected viewing phenomenon across television, film, video games, and social media. The result is a wide-ranging analysis of shifting business models, policy matters, technological infrastructure, new forms of user engagement, and other key trends affecting screen media in the digital era. Connected Viewing contextualizes the dramatic transformations taking place across both media industries and national contexts, and offers students and scholars alike a diverse set of methods and perspectives for studying this critical moment in media culture.

Author : Kathryn Stoner
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421408775
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transitions to Democracy written by Kathryn Stoner and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen case studies by scholars and practitioners demonstrate the synergy between domestic and international influences that can precipitate democratic transitions. As demonstrated by current events in Tunisia and Egypt, oppressive regimes are rarely immune to their citizens’ desire for democratic government. Of course, desire is always tempered by reality; therefore how democratic demands are made manifest is a critical source of study for both political scientists and foreign policy makers. What issues and consequences surround the fall of a government, what type of regime replaces it, and to what extent are these efforts successful? Kathryn Stoner and Michael McFaul have created an accessible book of fifteen case studies from around the world that will help students understand these complex issues. Their model builds upon Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead's classic work, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, using a rubric of four identifying factors that can be applied to each case study, making comparison relatively easy. Transitions to Democracy yields strong comparisons and insights. For instance, the study reveals that efforts led by the elite and involving the military are generally unsuccessful, whereas mass mobilization, civic groups, and new media have become significant factors in supporting and sustaining democratic actors. This collection of writings by scholars and practitioners is organized into three parts: successful transitions, incremental transitions, and failed transitions. Extensive primary research and a rubric that can be applied to burgeoning democracies offer readers valuable tools and information.

Author : George E. Marcus
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 9780271045986
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sentimental Citizen written by George E. Marcus and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Analysis Of How emotion functions cooperatively with reason & contributes to a healthy democratic politics.

Author : Tom Cubbin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350021989
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Soviet Critical Design written by Tom Cubbin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Critical Design is the first book to explore the socialist design practice of 'artistic projecteering', which was developed by the USSR's Senezh Experimental Studio in the 1960s. Tom Cubbin examines the studio as a site for the development of the design discipline in the optimistic environment of the 1960s Soviet Thaw. He also explores how designers adapted to the fast-changing Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s, considering their approach to critical projects highlighting the Soviet state's treatment of citizens, urban heritage and public spaces. Drawing on previously unpublished visual material from private archives and also extensive interviews, this book presents a new history of the late socialist period in the USSR, which gives insight into the creative strategies of designers who engaged their practice as a contribution to broader discussions on alternative models for socialist existence. Cubbin shows how artistic projecteering must be read as a utopian activity which privileged the political and ideological over the functional.

Author : Francis Fukuyama
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300113994
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America at the Crossroads written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a critique of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, arguing that it stemmed from misconceptions about the realities of the situation in Iraq and a squandering of the goodwill of American allies following September 11th.

Author : Emily Van Duyn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197557015
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy Lives in Darkness written by Emily Van Duyn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Republicans and Democrats increasingly distrust, avoid, and wish harm upon those from the other party. To make matters worse, they also increasingly reside among like-minded others and are part of social groups that share their political beliefs. All of this can make expressing a dissenting political opinion hard. Yet digital and social media have given people new spaces for political discourse and community, and more control over who knows their political beliefs and who does not. With Democracy Lives in Darkness, Van Duyn looks at what these changes in the political and media landscape mean for democracy. She uncovers and follows a secret political organization in rural Texas over the entire Trump presidency. The group, which organized out of fear of their conservative community in 2016, has a confidentiality agreement, an email listserv and secret Facebook group, and meets in secret every month. By building relationships with members, she explores how and why they hide their beliefs and what this does for their own political behavior and for their community. Drawing on research from communication, political science, and sociology along with survey data on secret political expression, she finds that polarization has led even average partisans to hide their political beliefs from others. And although intensifying polarization will likely make political secrecy more common, she argues that this secrecy is not just evidence that democracy is hurting, but that it is still alive; that people persist in the face of opposition and that this matters if democracy is to survive"--

Author : Joshua Mitchell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022608745X
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tocqueville in Arabia written by Joshua Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in the democratic age. So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1835, in his magisterial work, Democracy in America. This did not mean, as so many have believed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that the political apparatus of democracy would sweep the world. Rather, Tocqueville meant that as each nation left behind the vestiges of its aristocracy, life for its citizens or subjects would be increasingly isolated and lonely. In America, more than a half century of scholarship has explored and chronicled our growing isolation and loneliness. What of the Middle East? Does Tocqueville prediction—confirmed already by the American experience—hold true there as well? Americans look to the Middle East and see a rich network of familial and tribal linkages that seem to suggest that Tocqueville’s analysis does not apply. A closer look reveals that this is not true. In the Middle East today, citizens and subjects live amidst a profound tension: familial and tribal linkages hold them fast, and at the same time rapid modernization has left them as isolated and lonely as so many Americans are today. The looming question, anticipated so long ago by Tocqueville, is how they will respond to this isolation and loneliness. Joshua Mitchell has spent years teaching Tocqueville’s classic account, Democracy in America, in America and the Arab Gulf and, with Tocqueville in Arabia, he offers a profound account of how the crisis of isolation and loneliness is playing out in similar and in different ways, in America and in the Middle East. While American students tend to value individualism and commercial self-interest, Middle Eastern students have grave doubts about individualism and a deep suspicion about capitalism, which they believe risks the destruction of long-held loyalties and obligations. Where American students, in their more reflective moments, long for more durable links than they currently have, the bonds that constrain the freedoms Middle Eastern students imagine the modern world offers at once frighten them and enkindle their imagination. When pondering suffering, American students tend to believe its causes can be engineered away, through better education and the advances of science. Middle Eastern students tend still to offer religious accounts, but are also enticed by the answers Americans give―and wonder if the two accounts can coexist at all. Moving back and forth between self-understandings in America and in the Middle East, Mitchell offers a framework for understanding the common challenges in both regions, and highlights the great temptation both will have to overcome—rejecting the seeming incoherence of the democratic age, and opting for one or another scheme to re-enchant the world. Whether these schemes take the form of various purported Islamic movements in the Middle East, or the form of enchanted nationalism in American and in Europe, the remedy sought will not cure the ailment of the democratic age. About this, Mitchell comes to the defense Tocqueville long ago offered: the dilemmas of the democratic age can be courageously endured, but they cannot resolved. We live in a time rife with mutual misunderstandings between America and the Middle East. Tocqueville in Arabia offers a guide to the present, troubled times, leavened by the author’s hopes about the future.

Author : Diana C. Mutz
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139936638
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hearing the Other Side written by Diana C. Mutz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-13 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Religion and politics', as the old saying goes, 'should never be discussed in mixed company.'And yet fostering discussions that cross lines of political difference has long been a central concern of political theorists. More recently, it has also become a cause célèbre for pundits and civic-minded citizens wanting to improve the health of American democracy. But only recently have scholars begun empirical investigations of where and with what consequences people interact with those whose political views differ from their own. Hearing the Other Side examines this theme in the context of the contemporary United States. It is unique in its effort to link political theory with empirical research. Drawing on her empirical work, Mutz suggests that it is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one.

Author : Jeremy Elkins
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812206223
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Truth and Democracy written by Jeremy Elkins and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political theorists Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris observe that American political culture is deeply ambivalent about truth. On the one hand, voices on both the left and right make confident appeals to the truth of claims about the status of the market in public life and the role of scientific evidence and argument in public life, human rights, and even religion. On the other hand, there is considerable anxiety that such appeals threaten individualism and political plurality. This anxiety, Elkins and Norris contend, has perhaps been greatest in the humanities and in political theory, where many have responded by either rejecting or neglecting the whole topic of truth. The essays in this volume question whether democratic politics requires discussion of truth and, if so, how truth should matter to democratic politics. While individual essays approach the subject from different angles, the volume as a whole suggests that the character of our politics depends in part on what kinds of truthful inquiries it promotes and how it deals with various kinds of disputes about truth. The contributors to the volume, including prominent political and legal theorists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, argue that these are important political and not merely theoretical questions.