A Call to Action—The Essential Role of Advocacy

Editor's Note: The Perspectives featured in this issue of Public Administration Review were adapted from May 2016 commencement addresses: Anna Maria Chavez, the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, spoke on the 12th at Arizona State University's College of Public Service and Community Solutions; Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Leader in the United States House of Representatives spoke on the 7th at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service; and Tommy Thompson, the former Governor of Wisconsin and Secretary of Health & Human Services, spoke on the 15th at the University of Wisconsin's La Follette School of Public Affairs. These Perspectives reaffirm the highest principles of American public administration: that by and large, government is NOT the problem, and quite often indeed holds the solution; that effective and helpful public policy depends on informed expert opinion and research; and that those who enter public service should do so with a commitment to the notion that America best fulfills its promise when we seek the well‐being of all people, including the least fortunate. We chose these messages from among a wealth of commencement speeches because while they come from leaders with quite different political views, background, and experience, taken together they offer a coherent and inspiring call to public service. Dan Feldman, Perspective and Commentary Editor     

“The guerilla is like a poet”

Abstract

And once more, the company brought with it harassment and destruction. This time, however, it was the PANAMIN main office that sent the orders to have the Manobos taken off their land. PANAMIN, the supposed friend of the cultural minorities, ordered their evacuation. And so they were trucked in a BUSCO vehicle like cattle, and dumped at the Quezon public school and Catholic chapel. Dumped and left there. With little food, little medicine, little shelter. It was there they lived for one month. One long month.     

Enjoy their symptom: of woman,men and other interesting figures in Greek literary texts

Voela and Tamboukou use Slavoj ?i?ek’s notion of the symptom as a lens through which to look at representations of female figures in Greek literary texts of the early twentieth century by Gregorios Xenopoulos. In mapping the construction of the figure of the modern woman in the matrix of discourses, fantasies and power relations of fin-de-siècle Greece, they draw on psychoanalytic insights, interrupted by Foucauldian interventions. Following Judith Butler’s move of making trouble they attempt to open up a dialogic space between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian approaches to the female subject, contextualized in a specific social, historical and cultural milieu. It is in this context that they discuss, first, how feminine and masculine subjectivities are represented in man’s speech; second, how unintended excesses and interruptions occur in the problematic representation of women; and, third, how madness and ultimately death come to play a significant role in the power relations between the sexes.