Dynamics of Faculty Engagement in the Movement for Democracy's Education at Nothern Arizona University: Backgrounds, Practices, and Future Horizons

As scholarship has become increasingly narrow and disconnected from public life, Kettering research has documented an intense sense of malaise in higher education, what Harry Boyte has called a loss of civic agency. Surprisingly, however, faculty at a few campuses have begun to self-organize to integrate civic work into their teaching and research. This study, by Blase Scarnati and Romand Coles, documents such efforts at Northern Arizona University. Rather than making civic engagement a specific project of one or two faculty, what makes this campus special is that civic engagement has taken hold across the university. Building on research by KerryAnn O'Meara, this working paper shows that civic engagement is not only fulfilling to faculty at an individual level but is starting to impact the civic culture of their institutions

Biocultural polymorphic fields, receptive agency and symbiotic evolution beyond the anthropocentric wave

I sketch aspects of Samantha Frost’s writing that I find most intriguing and discuss directions in my work that resonate with them, elaborating possible connections between her reflections on subatomic through intercellular fields, and mine on the intercorporeal sensual relations among organisms—particularly those between humans and nonhumans. I read the human sensual field, or clearing, as trafficking and teaming with the affective energies and perceptual fields of myriad other beings and suggest a theory of symbiotic selection that accounts for the emergence of extravagant receptivity. This pulls toward political ecological practices and institutions that foster receptive agency with nonhumans

The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, material flows and movements

This article analyzes recent developments in environmental activism, in particular movements focused on reconfiguring material flows. The desire for sustainability has spawned an interest in changing the material relationship between humans, other beings, and the non-human realm. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with purely individualistic and consumer responses, a growing focus of environmental movement groups is on restructuring everyday practices of circulation, for example, on sustainable food, renewable energy, and making. The shift to a more sustainable materialism is examined using three frameworks: a move beyond an individualist and value-focused notion of post-materialism, into a focus on collective practices and institutions for the provision of the basic needs of everyday life; Foucault’s conceptions of governmentality and biopolitics, which articulate modes of power around the circulation of things, information, and individuals; and a new ethos around vibrant and sustainable materialism with an explicit recognition of human immersion in non-human natural systems. These frames allow us to see and interpret common themes across numerous, seemingly disparate initiatives focused on replacing unsustainable practices and forging alternative flows

The Pragmatic Vision of Visionary Pragmatism: The Challenge of Radical Democracy in a Neoliberal World Order

Visionary Pragmatism is a project formulated in the face of a hyper-malignant mode of capitalism that is provoking and entangled with ecological collapse, dedemocratization, unfathomable inequality, destruction of the commons, intensifying xenophobia, and racism. In the book, I seek modes of radical and ecological democracy that advance beyond both modest resistance and radical posturing that is largely empty and formulaic. I explore possibilities for generating new political modes in a variety of locations, and especially at the intersections where democratic initiatives in higher education engage with myriad publics to intensify alternative processes of knowledge production, political practice, and power that are sufficiently game-transformative in their own right to stand a chance of generating radical change. Beyond myopic pragmatism and hyper-professionalized scholarship, ‘visionary pragmatism’ offers a path along which we might refashion more imaginative theory through modes of creatively engaged practice and, in turn, more radical politics in conjunction with theory thus generated and critical theory broadly construed. Stylistically, the book moves between theoretical reflection and ethnography

Higher Education Exchange: 2014

This annual publication serves as a forum for new ideas and dialogue between scholars and the larger public. Essays explore ways that students, administrators, and faculty can initiate and sustain an ongoing conversation about the public life they share.The Higher Education Exchange is founded on a thought articulated by Thomas Jefferson in 1820: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."In the tradition of Jefferson, the Higher Education Exchange agrees that a central goal of higher education is to help make democracy possible by preparing citizens for public life. The Higher Education Exchange is part of a movement to strengthen higher education's democratic mission and foster a more democratic culture throughout American society.Working in this tradition, the Higher Education Exchange publishes interviews, case studies, analyses, news, and ideas about efforts within higher education to develop more democratic societies

Walt Whitman, Jane Bennett, and the paradox of antagonistic sympathy

This essay critically engages ontological, rhetorical, ethical, and political themes pertinent to the concept of “sympathy” as it appears in the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman and Jane Bennett’s writing on him. I suggest that antagonism is immanent in the “ecology of sympathies” that Bennett theorizes, and that this partly explains why one frequently finds antagonistic articulations deeply intertwined with Whitman’s most sympathetic expressions. I propose that we use the paradoxical—even oxymoronic sounding—trope antagonistic sympathy to evoke this immanent relationship between affiliative and antagonistic flows, energies, and conditions for ethical and political cultivation. The concept of antagonistic sympathy helps us better understand Whitman, the ethical and political qualities, pulls, and implications of sympathy, and it enables us to theorize entanglements of sympathy and antagonism in ways that avoid the worst tendencies of each when isolated from the other. Antagonistic sympathy, I argue, is indispensable for radical democratic and ecological transformation in a time of rapidly intensifying planetary ecological catastrophe

The promise of democratic populism in the face of contemporary power

In its most exemplary radical democratic moments, populism has cultivated unexpected collaborative networks across vast differences to organize powerful and transformative action for a flourishing pluralist commonwealth. Such politics addresses a broad range of issues and involves diverse modalities that stretch from "everyday politics to outrageous resistance."2 Cultivating civic agency is both the means and an end of such politics, through which a diverse and dynamic 'we' becomes more capable of responding to the grievances, needs, dreams, and well-being of people and the earth

Beyond gates politics: Reflections for the possibility of democracy

Minneapolis, Minnesotaxxxvi, 293 p.: index; 23 c