In the corridors and in the streets: a comparative study of the impacts of social movement campaigns in the EU

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IAU Dark and Quiet Skies, UNOOSA, NoirLabs, SATCON2, International Law Working Group Report

International Law Working Group of the IAU's Dark and Quiet Skies Conference; objective to advise the UN Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Spac

Dark and Quiet Skies II Working Group Reports:

This Report presents the main results of the Conference “Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society II” which took place on-line on 3–7 October 2021. This conference was the logical follow-up of the first one, organized as an on-line workshop with the same title on 5–9 October 2020. Both conferences were co-organized by UNOOSA, IAU and the Government of Spain and were well attended. The focus of the second conference was about the feasibility of implementing the recommendations presented by the first one in its extensive report. The main qualifying difference between the first and the second conferences was a more explicit involvement of the industrial stakeholders and of space policy experts, whose contributions were instrumental in presenting a credible review of the proposed mitigating measures as well as of possible regulatory guidelines

Contentious information: Accounts of knowledge production, circulation and consumption in transitional Egypt

While the 2011 Egyptian Uprising renewed attention to revolutionary news platforms such as Al-Jazeera and Facebook, citizens continued to be understudied as active consumers of information. Yet citizens’ perceptions of their informational milieu and how they responded in consuming, processing, and interpreting facts offer crucial insight into the turbulent transition that followed the initial uprising. This study analyzes Egyptian citizens’ accounts of their information environment and practices amid socio-political change. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 politically-engaged citizens from various political and professional backgrounds. Participants were asked to discuss the state of public discourse, the institutions responsible for the circulation of information, and their own practices to become informed, with on-going political controversies used as case studies. The findings are presented into two parts. The first part compiles responses regarding institutions (the state, broadcast media, and social media) which were found to be functionally interconnected and interdependent, forming Egypt’s information ecosystem. This ecosystem systematically rendered information elusive, equivocal, and unreliable, but also demonstrated the importance of official information, a tolerance for partisan news, and the complementary role of social media. The second part examines citizens’ practices (the characteristics of consumers, the types of sources they relied upon, and the tactics they employed to become informed) which constituted an information culture, the information ecosystem’s counterpart. This culture was characterized by skepticism, mistrust, ingenuity, bias, and elitism, with sources being conceived as individuals and classified according to their proximity and type of knowledge; and consumers employing tactics involving the parsing of subtexts and the juxtaposing of claims from multiple texts. The characteristics, sources, and tactics of consumers reflected an information culture influenced by and responding to socio-political conditions. Drawing on both the disciplines of media and information studies, this study offers a new approach for exploring the societal dimensions of information through the narratives of citizens on the production, circulation, and consumption of information in the context of dramatically shifting political and media landscapes. Besides advancing information practices research beyond traditional settings, the fieldwork was conducted in the weeks prior to the controversial overthrow of Egypt’s first elected president and therefore provides insights into a dramatic episode in the country’s transition

Germany - mind the gap: understanding public opinion and elite interpretations of EU concerns in Germany

Germany has long been viewed as a country of Europhiles, but recently the country has been displaying signs of growing Euroscepticism. When asked to think about Europe, a sizeable minority of Germans expresses concern over a loss of social security or jobs, a loss of national identity and culture, or Germany's financial contributions to the European Union (EU). German political elites across the left–right spectrum have left these concerns largely unaddressed and continue to advocate for the European project. This raises questions about there being a potential gap between public and elite conceptions of EU fears. Our comparison of survey data on German public opinion with insights from elite interviews with political leaders reveals that there is indeed a gap between public opinion and elite interpretations of the EU. Political decision-makers across the left–right spectrum perceive fears in Germany to be largely generalised, non-concrete and unrelated to evaluations of the EU. However, this is the case for a minority of Germans only. The majority show a pattern of concrete, distinguishable concerns, suggesting that we cannot speak about EU fears in the aggregate. Citizens' levels of anxiety are directly related to their evaluations of Germany’s future strategy in the EU: those who are more worried overall are more likely to want Germany to leave the EU or work towards reducing the EU's powers. While we find citizens' concerns to be dependent on both pragmatic economic evaluations and more emotive variables such as the degree of national and European identification, politicians focus on pragmatic economic evaluations. They underestimate the impact of emotional affiliations as expressed through identity on German public opinion. Given German political elites' limited understanding of the public’s concerns, it is not surprising to find that 3 Germany politicians have difficulties addressing them. Although politicians recognise the importance of representation for citizens' evaluations of the legitimacy of the EU, the measures they suggest remain largely one-dimensional, centred on explaining the EU’s procedures and increasing identification with the EU. Politicians, it seems, struggle to think of measures to improve the EU's problem-solving capacity. In order to close the gap between public and elite conceptions about the EU in Germany, it is crucial to support politicians in their task of understanding and addressing citizens' worries. This requires research and debate on EUrelated concerns, strategies for the transfer of knowledge about their underlying drivers and instruments to facilitate public–elite interaction about the EU as well as a broader range of policy options to address EU concerns across several levels of governance

Time, technology and troublemakers: 'fast activism' and the alter-globalization movement in Canada

"This study documents and critically evaluates the history of the alter-globalization movement in Canada. It makes a contribution to existing scholarship by providing the most comprehensive historical account available of the movement's major mobilizations during the past fifteen years. The study also deploys an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to examine the largely overlooked temporal dimensions of contemporary activism in the age of instant communication. While recent years have seen a proliferation of scholarship lauding the advantages of ""new media activism,"" of which the alter-globalization movement in an example par excellence, most of this literature neglects what are arguably more pressing questions regarding the ways in which contemporary social actors conceptualize and organize time, and the implications of these hegemonic temporal norms for patterns of collective action. To redress this gap, this study evaluates the social, cultural and political implications for activism of the process of time-space compression, driven by the basic dynamics of capitalism and facilitated by digital communication technologies. Using evidence collected from semi-structured interviews, it therefore not only offers the first systematic and in-depth account of the history (and pre-history) of the Canadian alter-globalization movement, it also demonstrates that the social acceleration of time facilitated by new media technologies encourages a tendency toward ""fast activism"" by diminishing three activist time-related practices in particular: building sustained movement infrastructure, learning from the past, that is, collective memory, and thinking reflexively about the future, that is, long-term strategic planning. The study's conclusion offers some tentative suggestions for improving the political capacities and potentials of today's anti-status quo troublemakers.

Building Democracy for All: Interactive Explorations of Government and Civic Life

Designed as a core or supplementary text for upper elementary, middle and high school teachers and students, Building Democracy for All offers instructional ideas, interactive resources, links to primary sources, multicultural materials, and multimodal learning materials for interest-building explorations of United States government as well as students’ roles as citizens in a democratic society. It focuses on the importance of community engagement and social responsibility as understood and acted upon by middle and high school students—core themes in the 2018 Massachusetts 8th Grade Curriculum Framework, and which are found in many state history and social studies curriculum frameworks around the country. Building Democracy for All has been developed by a collaborative writing team of higher education faculty, public school teachers, educational librarians, and college students who are preparing to become history and social studies teachers. The primary editors and curators are from the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education. Contributing teachers come from school districts in the Connecticut River valley region of western Massachusetts (Amherst, Gateway, Westfield, Hampshire Regional, and Springfield). As an open resource, the book is being revised constantly by the members of the writing team to ensure timely inclusion of online resources and information.https://scholarworks.umass.edu/tecs_ed_materials/1001/thumbnail.jp

Home and the Woman Question: A Feminist Genealogy of Neoliberal Discourse

This thesis is about the woman question and how it presents in neoliberal discourse through the story of home. It begins with an observation that home has an increasing visibility in popular culture and academia where it is explored, investigated and displayed. Home is also of interest to feminist theorists who recognise the struggle women have to be at home in the world and the potential of home as a critical space. In contrast to feminist theory and cultural celebration, home has a utilitarian, hidden and abstract quality in Government discourse in Britain. My argument is that the woman question threads through this abstract rendition of home, yet as home becomes more prominent, gender disappears. Questions of gendered and unpaid domestic labour, of women's rights in the public sphere, and of lived material inequalities, circulate in academic and cultural debates yet do not disrupt the story of home as it is played out in policy settings. In this study I analyse neoliberal discourse and its social turn to discern its logic, and how it works strategically through policy language to reconfigure or produce gendered subjects and social life in its own terms. Feminist theorists have uncovered neoliberal strategies and their effects, and I have drawn on their work to focus on subjectivity, agency and situation as an indication of the presence of home where it is abstract or absent as a word in neoliberal language. The study aims to bring unspoken and unwritten assumptions about home into view, so as to focus on the work that home does to constitute and regulate gender. The purpose is to make contemporary configurations of the woman question, as they filter through the idea of home, available to feminist critique and politics