The personal, the political and the popular: a woman's guide to celebrity politics

This article looks at articulations of gender, politics and citizenship by examining two European female heads of state: Tarja Halonen (Finland) and Angela Merkel (Germany). It discusses their personae in the context of emerging public debate about the merits and shortcomings of what is nowadays called ‘celebrity politics’, constituted by popularization and personalization. The analysis suggests that the increasing presence of popular culture in politics presents a complex and often unfavourable arena to women because of its inbuilt and extreme polarization of femininity and politics. It shows how Tarja Halonen and Angela Merkel have bypassed the personalization of politics and present a thoroughly political and professional persona to the public, rigidly concealing their private lives. As a result, female politicians - at least the two heads of state analysed here - tend to represent a classic ideal of political citizenship with clear boundaries and singular codes and conventions

Plato on pleasure and illusion

Scholars have typically ignored Plato’s views on the nature and value of pleasure (hêdonê) or rejected them as confused, flawed, and not worthy of our attention. In stark contrast, *Plato on Pleasure and Illusion* seeks to develop a more charitable, more sympathetic account of Platonic hedonic theorizing—specifically focusing on the proposal that pleasure is philosophically and ethically problematic because it can be highly deceptive. Chapter 1 makes sense of the Phaedo’s claim that the good life involves renunciation from bodily pleasure and argues that this ethical ideal is rooted in the suggestion that such pleasure inflates the reality and clarity of the messy sensible world in which we find ourselves. Chapter 2 studies Republic 9’s proposal that what presents itself as a pleasure may not always be the real thing and argues that this puzzling idea pivots on an objectivist theory of pleasure on which something only counts as a pleasure if it involves the fulfilment of a need. Chapter 3 turns to the Philebus and examines its equally puzzling claim that pleasures can be false in the same way in which beliefs can be false. Having clarified that this position is driven by a sophisticated cognitivist theory of pleasure, on which pleasure is a special way of apprehending the world, I explain how hedonic cognitivism and hedonic fallibilism (as I call these positions) fit into the larger aims of the Philebus. Chapter 4, lastly, looks at another argument in the Philebus in which it is suggested that, as a restorative process, pleasure cannot be the good our lives as a whole are aimed at reaching—even though the hedonist cannot appreciate this from a first-person, introspective perspective

Privacy concerns in smart cities

In this paper a framework is constructed to hypothesize if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities (as inhabitants, workers, visitors, and otherwise). The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people's concerns about privacy: one dimensions represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, the other dimension represents that people's privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance purposes most paramount. These two dimensions produce a 2 × 2 framework that hypothesizes which technologies and data-applications in smart cities are likely to raise people's privacy concerns, distinguishing between raising hardly any concern (impersonal data, service purpose), to raising controversy (personal data, surveillance purpose). Specific examples from the city of Rotterdam are used to further explore and illustrate the academic and practical usefulness of the framework. It is argued that the general hypothesis of the framework offers clear directions for further empirical research and theory building about privacy concerns in smart cities, and that it provides a sensitizing instrument for local governments to identify the absence, presence, or emergence of privacy concerns among their citizens

And the Winner Is … : Authenticity Work and Gender in Reality TV

Peer reviewe

Do crying citizens make good citizens?

The present paper is framed within current debates about the need to rethink citizenship, especially with respect to the question of whether there is a legitimate place for emotion in the public sphere. Emotion has not traditionally been seen as a key to good citizenship, and there has been a fair amount of aversion among media critics towards the ‘‘emotionalization’’ of the public sphere and spectacular outbursts of public emotion. This paper looks at the coverage of the murders of Dutch filmmaker and journalist Theo van Gogh in 2004 and Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, and shows that the issue is not simply whether emotions should be allowed in the public sphere or not, but rather how they are articulated and how they achieve different understandings of citizenship.Peer reviewe