Scholars from both disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations will discover the need to consult and use this volume.

This article explores different theoretical and political dimensions of voice in democratic theory. Drawing on recent developments in political theory, ranging form James Bohman’s work on the movement from demos to demoi in transnational politics, to William Connolly’s writings on pluralization, it develops a critical account of the emphasis within conventional pluralism on the representation of extant identities. Instead, it foregrounds the need to engage with emerging identities, demands, and claims that fall outside the parameters of dominant discursive orders. Building (...) on the works of Rancie`re and Cavell, it highlights the importance of an analytical engagement with the emergence and articulation of new struggles and voices*the processes through which inchoate demands are given political expression*so as to counter the ongoing possibilities of domination, understood here as a ‘deprivation of voice.’ The article develops an account of the centrality of the category of responsiveness to such claims and demands for democratic theory, especially in relation to a range of democratic struggles in our contemporary world. In so doing, it contributes to a growing body of work that questions the taken for granted character and status of the institutional forms of liberal democaracy. Keywords: pluralism; demoi; Connolly; Rancie`re; responsiveness; deprivation of voice; domination; Cavell; democratic subjectivity; demands; claim-making (Published: 4 December 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 297320. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i4.2118. (shrink)

In the present interview, Jürgen Habermas answers questions about his wide-ranging work in philosophy and social theory, as well as concerning current social and political developments to whose understanding he has made important theoretical contributions. Among the aspects of his work addressed are his conception of communicative rationality as a countervailing force to the colonization of the lifeworld by capitalism and his understanding of philosophy after Hegel as postmetaphysical thinking, for which he has recently provided a comprehensive historical grounding. The (...) scope and relevance of his ideas can be seen from his reflections on current issues, ranging from the prospects of translational democracy at a time of resurgent nationalism and populism, to political developments in Germany since reunification, to the role of religion in the public sphere and the impact of the new social media on democratic discourse. (shrink)

The twenty-first century has brought a renewed interest in democratic theory and practices, creating a complicated relationship between time-honoured democratic traditions and new forms of political participation. Reflecting on this interplay between tradition and innovation, Aletta J. Norval offers fresh insights into the global complexities of the formation of democratic subjectivity, the difficult emergence and articulation of political claims, the constitution of democratic relations between citizens and the deepening of our democratic imagination. Aversive Democracy draws inspiration from a critical (...) engagement with deliberative and post-structuralist models of democracy, whilst offering a distinctive reading inspired by contemporary work on the later Wittgenstein. This is a creative and insightful work which reorients democratic theory, elucidating the character of the commitments we engage in when we participate in democratic life together. (shrink)

This article explores the formation of democratic subjectivity and its connection to change. Drawing on Wittgenstein's account of aspect seeing, it seeks to elucidate the processes through which political grammars change. More specifically, it illuminates two dimensions of the formation of democratic political subjectivity: the initial " identification as" a democratic subject and its repeated renewal, necessary to the maintenance of a democratic ethos. I argue that by drawing a distinction between "aspect dawning" and "aspect change," it is possible to (...) capture the key characteristics of these two dimensions. This account is developed in contrast to existing democratic theory, which either does not deal sufficiently with the formation of subjectivity or does not give full attention to the specific requirements of the formation of democratic forms of identification. (shrink)

Starting from existing interpretations of Cavell’s account of moral perfectionism, this article seeks to elaborate an account of democratic responsiveness that foregrounds notions of ‘turning’ and ‘manifesting for another’. In contrast to readings of Cavell that privilege reason-giving, the article draws on the writings of Cavell as well as on Foucault’s work on parreēsia to elaborate a grammar of responsiveness that is attentive to a wider range of practices, forms of embodiment and modes of subjectivity. The article suggests that a (...) focus on the notions of ‘turning’ and ‘manifesting for another’ is crucial if we are to account for the processes through which political imagination is opened up so as to bring about novel ways of being and acting. The arguments are illustrated with reference to recent events in the Arab Spring as well as to the politics of redress in a posttransitional social movement, Khulumani. Keywords: democracy; responsiveness; Cavell; Foucault; parrēsia; frank-speaking; moral perfectionism; reason-giving; ‘turning’; ‘manifesting for another’; political imagination (Published: 23 December 2011) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 4, No. 4 , 2011, pp. 207-229. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v4i4.14448. (shrink)

The shift from government to governance has become a starting point for many studies of contemporary policy-making and democracy. Practices of Freedom takes a different approach, calling into question this dominant narrative and taking the variety, hybridity and dispersion of social and political practices as its focus of analysis. Bringing together leading scholars in democratic theory and critical policy studies, it draws upon new understandings of radical democracy, practice and interpretative analysis to emphasise the productive role of actors and political (...) conflict in the formation and reproduction of contemporary forms of democratic governance. Integrating theoretical dialogues with detailed empirical studies, this book examines spaces for democratisation, institutional design, democratic criteria and learning, whilst mobilising the frameworks of agonistic and aversive democracy, informality and decentred legitimacy in cases from youth engagement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (shrink)

Likert scales are useful for collecting data on attitudes and perceptions from large samples of people. In particular, they have become a well-established tool in soundscape studies for conducting in situ surveys to determine how people experience urban public spaces. However, it is still unclear whether the metrics of the scales are consistently interpreted during a typical assessment task. The current work aims at identifying some general trends in the interpretation of Likert scale metrics and introducing a procedure for the (...) derivation of metric corrections by analyzing a case study dataset of 984 soundscape assessments across 11 urban locations in London. According to ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, soundscapes can be assessed through the scaling of 8 dimensions: pleasant, annoying, vibrant, monotonous, eventful, uneventful, calm, and chaotic. The hypothesis underlying this study is that a link exists between correlations across the percentage of assessments falling in each Likert scale category and a dilation/compression factor affecting the interpretation of the scales metric. The outcome of this metric correction value derivation is introduced for soundscape, and a new projection of the London soundscapes according to the corrected circumplex space is compared with the initial ISO circumplex space. The overall results show a general non-equidistant interpretation of the scales, particularly on the vibrant-monotonous direction. The implications of this correction have been demonstrated through a Linear Ridge Classifier task for predicting the London soundscape responses using objective acoustic parameters, which shows significant improvement when applied to the corrected data. The results suggest that the corrected values account for the non-equidistant interpretation of the Likert metrics, thereby allowing mathematical operations to be viable when applied to the data. (shrink)

This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the (...) procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor. (shrink)