What not to wear: religious rights, the European Court and the margin of appreciation

The issue of religious dress, specifically female Muslim religious dress, has been the subject of intense controversy within Europe over recent years. In the United Kingdom comments by Jack Straw MP, Leader of the House of Commons and a former Home and Foreign Secretary, that he felt uncomfortable talking to women at his constituency surgery who wore the Muslim veil sparked a storm of intense and, at times, acrimonious debate. In France the banning of headscarves in State schools has provoked major controversy. In the Netherlands the Dutch Parliament voted to ban the burka in public places and in five Belgian towns its wearing has been banned on pain of a fine

Still in Deficit: Rights, Regulation, and Democracy in the European Union

Critics of the EU's democratic deficit standardly attribute the problem to either sociocultural reasons, principally the lack of a demos and public sphere, or institutional factors, notably the lack of electoral accountability because of the limited ability of the European Parliament to legislate and control the executive powers of the Commission and the Council of Ministers. Recently two groups of theorists have argued neither deficit need prove problematic. The first group adopts a rights-based view of democracy and claims that a European consensus on rights, as represented by the Charter of Fundamental European Rights, can offer the basis of citizen allegiance to EU wide democracy, thereby overcoming the demos deficit. The second group adopts a public-interest view of democracy and argues that so long as delegated authorities enact policies that are ‘for’ the people, then the absence of institutional forms that facilitate democracy ‘by’ the people are likewise unnecessary—indeed, in certain areas they may be positively harmful. This article argues that both views are normatively and empirically flawed. This is because there is no consensus on rights or the public interest apart from the majority view of a demos secured through parliamentary institutions. To the extent that these remain absent at the EU level, a democratic deficit continues to exist

Pragmatism and Freedom of Speech

Over the past twenty years or so, pragmatism in one form or another has experienced a remarkably broad resurgence, if not a literal renaissance. Pragmatists of various sorts have of late flourished in the study and practice of the law. The prominence of pragmatism should encourage reflection on what pragmatism is likely to actually deliver and to not deliver, in practice, over the long term. Pragmatism in some minimal sense surely engages our sympathies

Taking great pains: critical theory, affective pedagogies and radical democracy

The consolidation of neoliberal capitalism over the past decade has been intense, as has the articulation of critical and creative responses to it. One of the most remarkable is the turn towards forms of political resistance that seek liberation from the logics of state and capital while – or through – simultaneously creating alternative, radically democratic modes of existence. Many of these draw on anarchistic and autonomist traditions of critical theory which assert the possibility of prefiguring alternative political projects as well as critiquing existing ones, thus appearing to transcend what Herbert Marcuse described as a ‘vicious circle’ of liberation (1964, 1967). We have thus seen a proliferation of work on problems of prefigurative politics, autonomy, co-operation and self-valorisation; significantly, there is renewed attention to pedagogy in critical theory and as a political practice. However, there is still little attention to the affective and social labour that this type of prefigurative theory and practice requires, or to the systemic critique of the conditions of possibility for it to constitute a challenge to neoliberalism. My concern is that these lacunae can lead to misinterpretations of the meaning of radical democracy and of its possibilities and limitations as a challenge to the logics of neoliberal capitalism and other forms of dehumanising power. In this paper, I draw on work with British-based cultural workers who are active in radical-democratic projects to illustrate how bringing practical work into conversation with critical theories of political subjectivity, on the one hand, and theories of affective pedagogy and politics, on the other, can contribute to strengthening both theories and practices of radical democracy

The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics

That human beings have the potential for rationality and the ability to cultivate it is a fact of human nature. But to value rationality and its subsidiary character dispositions - impartiality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, prudence, self-reflection, self-control - is another matter entirely. I am going to take it as a given that if a person's freedom to act on her impulses and gratify her desires is constrained by the existence of others' equal, or more powerful, conflicting impulses and desires, then she will need the character dispositions of rationality to survive. The more circumscribed one's freedom and power, the more essential to survival and flourishing the character dispositions of rationality and the spirit may become

Re-Worlding the Virtual: Exploring Art and Archipelagic Education through Virtual Environments

This paper expands on the use of virtual environments to address educational questions around social isolation, embodiment and knowledge production. Supported by curricular experimentations with archipelagic thinking, it reflects on the potential for virtual environments to provide novel educational contexts for students to explore the relationship between art and environment at a time of climate transition. Archipelagic thinking is a theoretical framework that emerged out of Island studies and postcolonial discourse in the late 20th century. Emphasising relational flow between islanders, islands, entities and worlds, archipelagic thinking seeks to address the epistemological distinctions between centre and periphery, between the northern and southern hemispheres, what Boaventura De Sousa Santos has called ‘the abyssal line’(De Sousa Santos, 2018). Within this context, post-abyssal pedagogies are pedagogies that challenge the epistemic injustices between official and unofficial knowledge, mapped out through geographic location. These theoretical frameworks became the methodological ground upon which a virtual pedagogical experiment was developed in the MA Art and Environment, in west cork. Aiming to create a more embodied educational experience within virtual reality, archipelagic spaces were constructed to support exchanges with local voices and local knowledge. Re-worlding the virtual through these processes, the Virtual Archipelago was further expanded into a European-wide conference on the ethics and politics of virtual reality education in arts institutions. Reflecting on the values and principles that have emerged through these discussions this paper points towards some possible research directions