Of, By, and For Which People? Government and Contested Heritage in the American Midwest

Two government-owned and managed heritage sites in Indiana, USA, offer an opportunity to explore the role of governments in adjudicating the competing paradigms of value and contested uses. Strawtown Koteewi is a Hamilton County park and Mounds State Park is part of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources statewide park system. Each site has come under scrutiny in recent years. Strawtown Koteewi is one of the most significant sites in the area for understanding the history of Native peoples. After almost a decade of archaeological excavations, several Native American groups, under the auspices of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), initiated repatriation processes for the recovery of human remains, and some objected to the ongoing archaeological research. At Mounds State Park a coalition of citizens opposed a planned dam project intended to ensure a safe and plentiful water supply and to spur economic development in the area. In each case, the government entities have had to navigate the political landscapes of competing claims about the sites. These case studies expose the fissures between authorized heritage discourse and the paradigms of meaning among the diverse constituencies of the sites, and they highlight the tenuous position of public governance in privileging competing cultural, economic, and social interests. While not unique, the state and county agencies’ positions within these fields of power and their strategic choices reveal some of the barriers and constraints that limit their actions as well as the deep-seated ideologies of policies that perpetuate settler colonial politics in the control and interpretation of indigenous heritage

Politics of nanotechnologies in food and agriculture

The chapter discusses the reasons for the delay in the regulatory intervention concerning nanotechnologies used in the agriculture and food sectors. The main finding is that unregulated introduction of nanoinnovation into the food system is due to the current neoliberal food policy and to the power struggles that characterize the economic, social and political dynamics within the global supply chain. Therefore, it is necessary to put the ‘question concerning technology’ at the center of the regulatory debate in order to implement a regulatory system able to face nanorisks. Which means looking at the way in which technology controls power relationships within society. Attention should be shifted from efficiency to power issues, and new technologies should be assessed from a political rather than an economic or ethical perspective

Reformism and political participation in Iran

Chapter 1 introduces the topic and the contention of this book. Is political participation possible in the Islamic Republic, and if so, to what extent? What type of political participation is permitted? This chapter elucidates the construction of the argument that underpins this book: that political participation, encouraged by the reformist governments (1997–2005) with the goal of renewing state legitimacy and controlling autonomous activism, eventually led to the development of independent citizens, critical of the state and its engineered participation. Despite being carried out by a minority, the political work of such independent activists was not marginal: without them, in fact, the Green Movement of 2009 would have not taken shape. This chapter discusses theories of democratisation and authoritarian resilience, along with Foucault’s governmentality, to contextualise this book’s approach to the study of reformism. This book contributes to the debate about the implications of top-down reforms for social reproduction, offering an innovative interpretation of reformism and an original analysis of social movements from a political science perspective