Experiencing Globalization: Active Teaching and Learning in International Political Economy

This article explores the teaching and learning challenges for the discipline of international studies (IS) that arise from the contemporary social, economic, and political changes usually labeled "globalization." The focus is upon the challenge posed to IS by a transformation in the nature of the relationship of teachers and students to the subject matter that they study: that is, teachers and students increasingly experience and contribute to globalization in the course of their daily lives as they simultaneously teach and learn about it. Significantly for the study of globalization in IS, pedagogical debates surrounding active teaching and learning highlight the potential for strategies that actively engage students' interests and everyday experiences with the subject itself. On this basis, the article outlines some potential routes into the active teaching and learning of globalization in the field of international political economy, illustrating these with examples from classroom activities and exercises.     

改进新时期思想政治工作必须处理好几个关系

要改进新时期的思想政治工作,实现思想政治工作的创新,就必须突出理性教育,重视非理性教育,使二者紧密结合;用大道理统揽小道理,用小道理阐发大道理,使二者相互补充;坚持指导思想一元化,正确对待多元化观念,用一元化统领多元化.     

海峡两岸青年政治价值观异同比较

青年的政治价值观反映青年对所处社会的政治现实与理想的基本评价.源于海峡两岸社会政治背景的差异,两岸青年在政治效能感、政治理想追求、政治现实的评价和两岸关系发展等问题上相异也十分明显,但两岸青年对社会政治昌明的追求和共同传承的爱国主义精神纽带,又构成了两岸青年的政治价值观的相通之处.为了促进台湾青年对祖国大陆的了解与信任,必须加大对台政策宣传,积极推进两岸青年的沟通与交流.     

坚持对上对下的统一 始终代表人民的根本利益——学习“三个代表”思想的体会

实现最广大人民的根本利益 ,要求我们把对上级负责和对群众负责统一起来。但是在实践中两者的统一却存在着一些问题 ,其根源在于监督机制、干部管理体制等存在缺陷。要实现对上对下的统一 ,必须建立有效的权力制约与监督机制 ,加快干部选拔任用制度的改革 ,大力加强法制建设 ,加强世界观、人生观和价值观的教育     

Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

Swampwalls: dark matter and the lumpen army of art

Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. Meanwhile, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production warehouse this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly.     

Governing the souls of young women: exploring the perspectives of mothers on parenting in the age of sexualisation

The sexualisation of young women has emerged as a growing concern within contemporary western cultures. This has provoked adult anxieties that young women are growing up too fast by adopting inappropriate sexual practices and subjectivities. Psychological discourses have dominated, which position sexualisation as a corrupting force that infects the ‘true self’ of young women, so they develop in abnormal ways. This in turn allows psychological practices to govern how to parent against sexualisation within families. To explore this further, six mothers each with daughters aged between 8 and 12 took part in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore how they conceptualised and parented against the early sexualisation of young women. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis was employed, which suggested that the mother's talk was situated within a psychological discourse. This enabled sexualisation to be positioned as a corrupting force that disrupted the natural development of young women through deviant bodily practices (e.g. consuming sexualised goods), which prevented them from becoming their ‘true self’. Through the disciplinary gaze of psychology, class inequalities were reproduced where working class families were construed as ‘chavs’ who were bad parents and a site of contagion for sexualisation.     

Shifting linkages in ethnic mobilization: the case of RMDSZ and the Hungarians in Transylvania

The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) has been the most stable actor in the Romanian party system over the past two decades. However, in this article, we argue that beyond this apparent stability, the linkages between RMDSZ and its voters have undergone a gradual, yet significant shift. The ethnic block voting of Transylvanian Hungarians was closely connected to the concept of a self-standing and parallel “Minority Society,” and to the practices of institution building that the minority elites engaged in in the early 1990s. However, since its first participation in the Romanian government in 1996, RMDSZ has gradually departed from this strategy, a phenomenon that was also closely connected to a process of elite change within the organization. The present RMDSZ leadership puts less and less emphasis on policy programs that could reinforce the institutional system of the minority; consequently, it is unable (and unwilling) to organizationally integrate the community activists of the minority society who previously had played a key role in the process of (electoral) mobilization. At the rhetorical level, RMDSZ did not abandon the goal of building a parallel Hungarian minority society, but in its linkages to the Hungarian electorate, clientelistic exchanges have become predominant.     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

Revolution,power and the Third World: a review of Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power,Volume 4

The fourth volume of Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power is the last in his historical sociological series, which has centred on an analysis of ideological, economic, military and political power in human societies from the start of civilisation. Mann’s final volume provides an important overview of the period of American hegemony and its worldwide effects, the rise and crisis of neoliberalism, the contrasting fates of the USSR and Maoist China, the vagaries of American empire, and modern revolutions. The implications of his study, particularly regarding the history and theory of revolutions, are of the utmost value to anyone on the Revolutionary Left today, especially in the Third World. While Mann’s study is primarily focused on the West, it provides important lessons to be drawn for the Third World.