Celebrity, Democracy, and Epistemic Power

What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics (Meyer 2002; Mills 1957; Postman 1987) none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. This paper will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems

Double Bagged or Fries With That: Adolescents’ Perceptions of the Job Market in Four Urban Vancouver Secondary Schools

This article critically examines adolescents’ perceptions of the job market in Vancouver, British Columbia. Employing document analysis, interviews with teachers and students, and classroom observations, the article explores how adolescents in four urban schools understood the difference between having a job and a career in the context of the Career and Personal Planning Curriculum (CAPP). In taking a discourse-oriented approach, this study reveals an important social class distinction in how students conceptualized what it meant to have a job and pointed to how career education influenced their perceptions about jobs

Operator mixing in deformed D1D5 CFT and the OPE on the cover

We consider the D1D5 CFT near the orbifold point and develop methods for computing the mixing of untwisted operators to first order by using the OPE on the covering surface. We argue that the OPE on the cover encodes both the structure constants for the orbifold CFT and the explicit form of the mixing operators. We show this explicitly for some example operators. We start by considering a family of operators dual to supergravity modes, and show that the OPE implies that there is no shift in the anomalous dimension to first order, as expected. We specialize to the operator dual to the dilaton, and show that the leading order singularity in the OPE reproduces the correct structure constant. Finally, we consider an unprotected operator of conformal dimension (2,2), and show that the leading order singularity and one of the subleading singularies both reproduce the correct structure constant. We check that the operator produced at subleading order using the OPE method is correct by calculating a number of three point functions using a Mathematica package we developed. Further development of this OPE technique should lead to more efficient calculations for the D1D5 CFT perturbed away from the orbifold point.Comment: 23 page

When You Act Like an Adult, I’ll Treat You Like One . . . : Investigating Representations of Adulthood in Popular Culture

Our paper critiques the traditional What is an adult? debate. Using television as text, we examine untraditional representations of adulthood in order to keep the term adult in constant play. We suggest the need to move away from fixed notions of maturity in lieu of a fluid understanding that is mediated by social and historical specificities