Toward an Account of Intolerance: Between Prison Resistance and Engaged Scholarship

The word “intolerance” bears almost exclusively negative connotations. It is treated invariably, almost ideologically as a vice. What would it mean to reconceive of intolerance as a virtue—or, at the very least, a positive affect? In this essay, I analyze two complementary archives of positive intolerance: the records of the Prisons Information Group (the GIP) and the writings of one of its members: Michel Foucault. For the GIP, intolerance—as a militant refusal of intolerable material and political conditions—is essential to the prison activist effort. Relatedly, for Foucault, scholarship—as the creative and/or critical act of naming and changing public awareness of intolerable conditions—can be a mode of political intolerance against an oppressive state. When paired together, these two archives trouble the easy severance of theory and practice, suggesting both that prison resistance efforts involve intellectual assessments of the intolerable and that engaged scholarship often doubles as intolerant activism. Both archives, moreover, agree that such intolerant activism is always rooted in personal investments and local struggles. This analysis allows me to suggest that, if the struggle against forces of marginalization and exploitation mobilizes resistant intolerance as a political and intellectual strategy, then intolerance may very well be commendable. It might, in fact, be virtuous

Addressing the Health and Physical Activity Needs of Girls in the Boston Metropolitan Area

This report examines girls' level of participation in sports and physical activity in the Boston metropolitan area and its relation to girls' health. Girls' sports and physical activity delivery systems, as well as public policy affecting the availability of such systems are reviewed

Women in the 2006 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games: An Analysis of Participation, Leadership and Media Coverage

Increasing women's participation in the Olympic Movement as participants and leaders has been a slow and challenging process. While the number of "events" open to female athletes has increased steadily during the past 30 years, the actual number of female Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games participants and the number of opportunities to medal within those events has yet to equal the number of male participants or medals.The 2006 Paralympic Winter Games statistics are a good illustration of this discrepancy; while there are nearly an equal number of events open to female athletes, the total number of female Paralympic athletes was 99 of 474 or 20.9%. And, while women's participation has attempted to "catch up" with small increases in participation numbers, men's events and participation opportunities have continued to increase, thereby perpetuating and increasing the participation gap. For instance, there were 1,006 women (38.3%) and 1,627 men (61.7%) in the 2006 Olympic Winter Games compared to 886 women (36.9%) and 1,513 men (63.1%) in 2002. Interestingly, the same continued growth of men's sport and, as a result, the perpetuation of the gender gap has occurred in U.S. high school and college sport in the wake of Title IX's push for gender equity (BFHSA, 2006; NCAA, 2006). Some countries claim that the lack of women in their delegation is a result of lack of funding. The majority of these countries cite other reasons for the exclusion of women, such as social, cultural and religious differences (Good, 2002). However, the Olympic Charter specifically states that "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement." (IOC, 2004). Thus, social, cultural and religious differences between men and women are not legitimate justifications for the lack of women in delegations. While the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has made significant efforts to play a leadership role in growing women's participation, it has had limited success in encouraging the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the 203 National Olympic Committees (NOC) and international winter sport federations (IF) to commit to gender equality. Women are also significantly underrepresented in the IOC and on IF boards of directors, the international governance structures that determine whether women's sports are offered in Olympic, Paralympic and world championship competition. There are few women serving as members of National Olympic Committees (NOC), such as the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), that determine the size and composition of their respective national Olympic and Paralympic delegations and whether developmental programs are offered to support women's sports participation. And, like the situation in the United States, the underrepresentation of women is also reflected within each country's respective National Sports Governing Bodies (NGB) boards of directors (e.g., USA Hockey, U.S. Figure Skating, etc.) and at community leadership levels where grassroots participation opportunities ultimately determine the Olympic and Paralympic participation pipeline. Without strong leadership from governing boards at all levels, insufficiencies in financial support and programmatic infrastructure will continue and the number of female Olympic and Paralympic athletes will continue to lag behind men. Olympic status raises the visibility of both sports and athletes, opening new doors to media visibility, high earnings through prize money and endorsements, college scholarships and jobs and key influencer connections. More significantly, Olympic status also ignites the aspirations of millions of girls who are inspired to participate by the heroes they see. With an estimated audience of 2 billion, the Olympic Winter Games is the most widely viewed forum for winter sports (USA Weekend, 2006). Thus, it is important to regularly examine the state of women's participation as leaders and athletes in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. This report specifically examines such participation and leadership in the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games from both an international and United States perspective

Curiosity: philosophy and the politics of difference

This dissertation takes the concept of curiosity, typically understood as a purely epistemological issue, and investigates its political stakes. I argue that curiosity is not only an underappreciated method of philosophy but also a critical practice for building inclusive political communities. By analyzing poststructural accounts of curiosityespecially from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida-I identify two primary modes of curiosity. First, there is a curiosity that objectifies and often fetishizes what is different, and, second, there is a curiosity that destabilizes and transforms. While philosophy has historically dismissed both in favor of a respectful and reliable wonder, I argue that a critical account of curiosity is essential if we are to predicate our political ethos on shared subjecthood. Finally, drawing on archival material from Foucault\u27s prison activism and Derrida\u27s death penalty abolition seminars, I take punishment as a case study in curiosity, demonstrating curiosity\u27s centrality not only to juridical trials and media coverage, but also its tactical importance for prison resistance movements and abolitionist efforts. While curiosity has the capacity to underscore already reigning structures of political privilege, it can also destabilize ideologies

The Curiosity at Work in Deconstruction

Beginning with Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign, I identify two forms of curiosity: 1) scientific curiosity, which proceeds through objective dissection and 2) therapeutic curiosity, which proceeds through observational confinement. Through an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of both sorts of curiosity, I notice and develop a third, deconstructive form of curiosity. Through repeated turn to the work of Sarah Kofman, I characterize this third curiosity as, by turns, linguistic, animal, and critical. As linguistic, this curiosity is a penchant for wordplay and a keenness for the unsteady reservoirs of signification, resisting any clean dissection of meaning or the confinement of terms. As animal, it tracks a scent, regularly suspending its paw, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge. And as critical, it combats the illusions of pure revelation and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, undergirding it. Finally, I consider in what way Derrida’s resistance to philosophy may be read on the grounds not of a singular wonder but of multiple curiosities

Empowerment

This entry discusses the various roles of media and communication in terms of empowerment and social change. It does so by focusing on a temporal and historical dimension which relates to innovations in terms of media and communication technologies going from the print-press over radio broadcasting and the internet. Besides this, we also identify a special dimension going from the local to the trans-national, but also exposing media and communication as a space of contention. Finally, a strategic dimension is identified focusing on how political actors and social movements frame issues and attempt to influence, at times successfully at other times less so, the process of meaning making