Disabled Istanbulites’ everyday life experiences as ‘urban citizens’: accessibility and participation in decision-making

This article assesses whether the everyday experiences of disabled Istanbulites can be considered from an urban citizenship perspective. To this end, Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’ and its relationship with the literature on urban citizenship and Disability Studies is discussed, and two broad categories of analysis are presented to elaborate the issue in the case of Istanbul. These are, namely accessibility – to space, but also to education, health, and employment – and participation in decision-making. Interviews show that the limited rights-based discourses, which guided the institutional transformation of the greater and district municipalities in the early 2000s, have had almost no impact on the everyday experience of disabled Istanbulites. Istanbul remains a largely disabling city with major problems of accessibility and no room in decision-making processes for disabled people. Unfortunately, current developments do not point to the possibility of a more powerful practice of urban citizenship.     

Quality of government and regional competition: A spatial analysis of subnational regions in the European Union

Building on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.     

A rising generation of Europeans? Revisited

The EJPR article ‘A rising generation of Europeans?’ provided systematic evidence for the existence of generational differences in attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this research note, it is argued that identifying generational differences in specifically affective orientations is the crucial issue for the future of the EU. Drawing on and extending the earlier work expectations in respect to generational and life‐cycle differences in affective orientations are developed and tested, highlighting the existence of the former, their consistency across a range of indicators, and the absence of the latter. The results are an important counterpoint to the growth in ambivalence in attitudes towards the EU.     

Model villages in the neoliberal era: the Millennium Development Goals and the colonization of everyday life

What explains the recent re-emergence of ‘model village’-style social experiments, and what does this tell us about the contradictions of neoliberal development? This paper focuses on two experiments of this kind – the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Rural Cities Project in southern Mexico – both of which aim to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated set of interventions at the village level. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's work on the colonization of everyday life, I argue that the Millennium Development Goals function in these cases to facilitate and legitimate the production of social reality based on a naturalised vision of market society. These utopian projects embody the paradoxical character of neoliberalization, demonstrating the necessarily social production of the supposedly natural order on which neoliberalism is discursively premised, while reproducing the strategies of social engineering that the neoliberal project is rhetorically oriented against.     

What is the opposite of corruption?

Corruption has turned out to be difficult to define and what should be counted as the opposite to corruption remains widely disputed. If the goal for a post-conflict society is not only to become democratic and prevent a return to violence but also to reduce systemic corruption, we need to know what it is that should be fought and how the opposite to systemic corruption should be conceptualised. To define the opposite to corruption, choices have to be made along four conceptual dimensions. These are universalism vs relativism, uni- vs multidimensionality, normative vs empirical and whether the definition should relate to political procedures or policy substance. As a result of this conceptual analysis, it is argued, a universal, one-dimensional, normative and procedural definition should be preferred. The suggested definition is that of impartiality as the basic norm for the implementation of laws and policies. This conceptual analysis ends with a discussion of why such a norm has historically and in the contemporary world been hard to achieve and why it is especially problematic in post-conflict societies.     

Pyrographies: Photography and the good death

This essay theorizes the ethical potential of photography or what I call “pyrography” by enacting a version of care for death in attending closely to a sort of rehearsal for the deathbed in French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert's photo-novel Suzanne and Louise first published by Gallimard in 1980, the same year as Roland Barthes's famous essay on photography, Camera Lucida. The essay develops the transformative ethical possibilities of and queer political potentialities of pyrography by reading Guibert's project with his two elderly aunts in relation to the work of two of Guibert's intimates: Michel Foucault's “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will” and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. In Mourning Diary, Barthes describes the plan for Camera Lucida as an ephemeral monument to his dead mother whose loss he calls, following the last work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: “the catastrophe that has already occurred.” Through its own writing with fire of the death we fear that has already occurred and that we cannot access directly, photography may enable the kind of “as if” work or projective imaginative enactment for which Winnicott calls. This essay put this concept of the photographic pyre or pyrographies to work to characterize a kind of photographic act. Pyrography is a facture of and with the flammable, not of and about the past, but for the present and future. It is a practice of making volatile structures for feeling with the taboo scenes of the conjunction of old age, desire, and death that create spaces not just for mourning the losses that have actually happened. Pyrographies shape spaces in which one might begin to imagine and transact with care the losses and the letting go yet to come. Pyrographies, I am suggesting, trade in the illusions of presence. They give us the catastrophe that has already occurred in palpable form, enabling us to negotiate shame and fear but also desire toward the seemingly impossible: the good death.     

民工城市适应的典型案例与场域分析

民工的城市适应是一个需要迫切关注的社会问题。本文结合案例资料,通过全面描述新生代民工城市生活状况,从场域惯习理论的角度分析了新生代民工的城市适应问题。在此基础上认为,新生代民工的城市适应就是其习性的调整与其所在的场域相互匹配、相互建构的过程。     

陈云的人生哲学及其现实意义

陈云的人生哲学内涵丰富,主要表现在：为共产主义奋斗终生的人生理想,实事求是的人格精神,淡泊名利的人生境界,柔中寓刚的性格特征。学习陈云的人生哲学,对进一步保持党的先进性,加强党员干部的理想信念教育,形成求真务实的优良作风,都具有重要的意义。     

论私有财产权的人权属性及在人权体系中的地位

私有财产权是个人维持其生存和发展的最基本的物质保障,是人之为人不可或缺的一项基本权利,它不是财产作为物的权利,而是人作为人支配物的权利,是一项基本的人权.财产权与生命权和自由权一道被称为三大基本人权,是人权大厦的基石.财产权又构成生命权、自由权发挥作用的物质基础和条件,是生命权、自由权自然延伸的结果.没有财产权作为基础的生命权和自由权是不现实的,财产权越安全,生命权就越有保障,自由权就更为真实和牢靠.     

也论诚实信用原则的扩张

诚实信用原则被公认为"民法"中的一项基本原则,然而,现在私法和公法领域都出现了适用诚实信用原则的现象.面对此现象,有的学者表示赞同,有的学者则提出了质疑.鉴于此,沿着历史的脉络,在分析诚实信用原则形成与发展规律的基础上,充分论证现代诚实信用原则在法律领域中的扩张及其意义.