Suchergebnisse

This study takes as its point of departure the theorizing on citizenship and globalization. Today it is common to discuss a "flexible" citizenship beyond the paradigm of the nationstate, which, besides its legal aspects of rights and obligations, also includes identification with and participation in various communities, primarily political ones. "Politics", in this context, is considered to be constituted on the micro-level, discursively between individuals (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The aim of the study is to, through the study of collective meaning making, contribute to the theory building about citizenship and globalization. The study consists of three cases, each of which attracted much media attention, with varying degrees of proximity and distance. The construction of political community, on various levels on the globalization scale (subnational, national, transnational) within the collective meaning making, is studied. The aim of the study also includes the analysis of the discursive resources that are used for the making of meaning. "External" discourses such as media messages and interpersonal communication are analyzed as well as "internal" ones: e.g. values, norms, identifications and experiences. In addition, the study aims at localizing the construction of meaning and community within the structural context , and relating it to current structures of power. The thesis is concluded with a suggestion of how to relate the discursive construction of political identity to deliberative democracy theory. The empirical material is collected by means of focus-groups interviews, including 2–5 people, with a total of 133 respondents. The transcribed material is analyzed by means of critical discourse analysis, CDA. The study identifies two different types of identity constructions: processes of nationalization, where the experienced Swedish identity and community function normatively in the making of meaning, and processes of subnationalization, among those groups that somehow felt excluded from and mistreated by the national (Swedish) environment. The thesis concludes that the collective making of meaning within an assumed national community contains ideological elements and works to a large extent in the service of power. However, the subnationally compressed communities create meaning in an oppositional manner, compared with the nationalized community and in relation to structures of power. Active citizenship is thus best located in conflict, among groups that experience exclusion and oppression in different situations (Mouffe 1995b). If this is right, the focus must shift from consensus to communication, efforts to open up discursive bridges between the hegemonic community and dissident voices should be made (c.f. Aronowitz 1995). An important space for transgressing communication is of course the media. However, the study shows that the media must deal with some problems before they are ready to serve as discursive bridges, for instance the tendency to make the factual antagonisms subordinate to homogenizing emotional reporting. In addition, there seems to exist a need for the political institutions to move beyond the paradigm of the nation-state, and find other frameworks for the democratic processes, not least at the subnational level. Thus, instead of discussing either a global or a national citizenship one could, with Habermas (2001), reflect on a postnational citizenship relating to the reflexive transformation of national civic sovereignty into subnational and supranational citizenship.

HUGO CANCINO TRONCOSO y STEEN FRYBA CHRISTENSEN Universidad de Aalborg, Dinamarca Resumen: En este artículo nos proponemos discutir y analizarlas problemáticas y tópicos centrales de la presente edición temática de nuestra publicación, cuyo finalidad es colocar en el foco las tendencias de continuidad y también de ruptura de los fenómenos sociales, políticos, ideológicos y económicos de América Latina. Nuestro punto de partida es la irreversibilidad de los procesos de globalización después de más de una década de debates entre globalistas y antiglobalistas. En este contexto, insertamos el análisis de los actores sociales, étnicos políticos, en sus discursos y acciones en esta última década en cuyo momento final irrumpe la crisis financiera internacional que en deferentes modos e intensidades influye los países de América Latina. Palabras claves: globalización, modernidad, modernizaciones Summary: In this article we set out to discuss and analize the central issues and problematiques of the present thematic edition of our publication, whose aim is to focus on the tendencies of continuity but also of ruptures with regard to social, political, ideological and economic phenomena in Latin America. Our starting point is the irreversibility of the processes of globalization after more than a decade of debates between globalists and anti-globalists. In this context we place our analysis of the social, ethnic and political actors, both in terms of their discurses and actions in this last decade that has ended with the irruption of the international financial crisis which influences the Latin American countries in different ways and degrees. Key words: Globalization, modernity, modernization.

Drawing on experiences from a cross disciplinary research project entitled "Youth and the City, Skills, Knowledge and Social Reproduction", the paper explores ways of studying globalisation and schooling across national contexts focusing on secondary schools in Lusaka, Hanoi and Recife. I use the term eduscape to analyze the interconnectedness of schools, educational projects, values and processes across the World. The study provides example of how young people from different social, cultural and political contexts negotiate what appears as an almost similar educational project across the three cities. The schools in this study are inhabited by teachers and students who belong to different generations. Many of the teachers carry with them educational traditions that are rooted in a past where the role of schools as state institutions has been to mirror and reproduce the power structures of previous regimes. Democratization and liberal reforms have created profound changes within state institutions, and the prospects of both schools and education generally have changed accordingly. Young people who attend secondary schools are actors in an eduscape that they are continuously constructing by negotiating identities between the past, represented by teachers, parents, and inherited habits and routines, and the future, manifested in terms of the promises of progress and modernity that are attached to education. This study provides a picture of young people across national and cultural contexts who are in confusion over the aims and perspectives of education, since the rhetoric of promise and potential does not match the realities in which they live. Nonetheless it is remarkable to see how the rhetoric of promise and potential functions as point of departure for criticizing the lack of any real opportunities. Eduscapes are spaces for controlling and disciplining young people through processes of social segregation, but they are also spaces for criticism: Across the three sites raise young people raise criticisms not only of schools, but of society as such. In Recife the complaint is about 'pretending democracy', in Lusaka about the emptiness of the educational project - lack of quality and opportunities, and Hanoi about the contradictions embedded in the reforms and the turn towards the open market.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the EU vocational education and training policy process (The Copenhagen Process) from a critical perspective based on the policy analysis methodology, "What's the Problem Represented to Be?" (WPR) developed by Professor Carol Bacchi. The main research question "How can the European vocational education and training policy process - the Copenhagen Process - be understood from a WPR perspective? " is addressed in six articles which take apart the Copenhagen Process and deal with specific WPR questions and specific aspects of the Copenhagen Process: the construction of vocational education and training; changes in governmentality; the genealogy of EC vocational education and training policy; the technologies of Europeanization; and finally the discursive and institutional effects of the policy process in the Danish context. The thesis argues that the Copenhagen Process has legitimately extended vocational education and training policy formation to include the EU and its new institutional settings established through the Open Method of Coordination. Furthermore, vocational education and training is being reconfigured within a neoliberal Lifelong Learning discourse in which education and training in general is to contribute to the competitiveness of the EU in a global economy. Within this discourse, policy is de-politicized and naturalised as being neutral and evidence-based leading to the unreflective transfer of policies across countries.

Paperet er en diskussion af de to demokratimodeller, deliberativt og agonistisk. Det argumenteres at agonistisk demokrati overkommer en række grundlæggende vanskeligheder ved deliberativt demokrati. Men den måde som Chantal Mouffe har formuleret agonistisk demokrati på har en række problemer, særligt når det relateres til globalisering.

The expectations modern art has to fulfill are of various kind. Modern art is to be a seismograph of societal developments and thus sensitive to political and economic themes. Thus, Western (critical) contemporary art is in the dilemma to deal with and challenge capitalism in mostly bourgeois frameworks of musealized exhibitions, criticizing political leadership and social inequalities and presenting it largely to exactly the established classes. Here contemporary art's task lies in both the individual and arts self-reflection and self-critique. Creating awareness of individual and collective historical processes and being able to sense and experience societal antagonisms can be described as conscious making by the means of critical modern art. Taking in account that to learn (socio-historically) art and thus to be able to sense dissonances is a pre-condition to understand modern art the question arises: How to deal with contemporary art from foreign cultures and unfamiliar civilizations? How to understand Asian critical contemporary art with a Western sensual kind of sensing and understanding? It is the question of universality and uniqueness of modern art and/or the integrating power of Western capitalism and consumerism within the sphere of critical art. Is it possible to sense and understand Chinese or Japanese art with a Western education and different socio-historical and political-economical understanding? How to decipher and contextualize modern art without "cultural expertise"? This contribution deals with the contradictions between the (cultural) particular and the general serving as gatekeepers for sensing societal and historical grown antagonisms and sensing of cultural and social dissonances in modern art production. Is modern art by definition Western? By experiencing Asian modern art the purpose of this research is to find the particularities and the general of (Asian) critical modern art.

Territorial cohesion, broadly defined as the possibility for the population living in a territory to access services of general economic interest, is a relatively new concept, but which is increasingly gaining importance in the academic and policy-making spheres, especially in the European Union (EU). The objective of territorial cohesion, which builds on the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), is to help achieve a more balanced development by reducing existing disparities, avoiding territorial imbalances and by making sectoral policies, which have a spatial impact and regional policy more coherent. It also aims to improve territorial integration and encourage cooperation between regions. Territorial cohesion complements the notions of economic and social cohesion by translating the fundamental EU goal of a balanced competitiveness and sustainable development into a territorial setting. The concept of territorial cohesion attaches importance to the diversity of the European territory which is seen as a key competitive advantage, the preservation of the European social model, and the ability of the citizens of Europe's nations and regions to be able to continue to live within their historically produced territories and regions. This paper analyses the relationship between polycentric development and cohesion, describes the key EU policy steps on territorial cohesion and presents an index of territorial cohesion.

The Nordic Council of Ministers and the Government of Belgium organized a workshop on Operationalizing Equity in the 2015 Agreement on 24.-25.10.2013 in Stockholm, Sweden. The workshop aimed to focus on implementing equity in a practical way, rather than having abstract, theoretical discussions. The first day was devoted to academic presentation and follow-up discussions. The second day featured a roundtable discussion between negotiators under Chatham House Rules.

Why is it impossible to talk Swedish while queuing for a hamburger on a Friday night in Helsinki without getting into a fight, despite Swedish being an official language in Finland? The Queen of Denmark, the Government Minister, the Nobel Prize winner and the young editor-in-chief all have an intense relationship with language. In this book, they – along with a number of other people with a keen interest in language – talk about how language has shaped their lives, both private and professional. Language affects people – it engages and provokes. And power lies in language. Icelanders and Finns only have access to translated and interpreted material if they have not learned a Scandinavian language. Does the way we handle language in Nordic collaboration mean that we are creating a democratic deficit? How are we affected by tradition on the one hand and by the accelerating change brought about by globalisation on the other? Is it a question of generational boundaries? Would young people in Nordic countries rather speak English than Norwegian? These are some of the issues touched upon in this book. The author is a former journalist in the Swedish media world and has previously been Head of Communications at the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council.

China's "soft power" re-emergence in Southeast Asia Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt Associate Professor Research Center on Development and International Relations Aalborg University Email. jds@ihis.aau.dk ABSTRACT Globalization is rapidly changing the overall structure of the international division of labor with the shift of services and manufacturing from the old industrialized economies to the new emerging giants - the global office platform in India and the global factory floor in China. This dislocation in production, services and manufacturing signifies a challenge which might be more important, but nevertheless part and parcel of the inherent imbalances in the world economy. Until recently there has been much academic and layman attention on over-production, growing inequalities, the increasing North-South gap, the roaring conflicts over energy and raw materials including oil and water, turbulence and crisis in the international financial system, and not least the fact that the present phase of capitalism has led to jobless growth in the established core economies in Europe and the United States. The question for the international political economy is where and how do countries like India and China fit in? Keywords: Globalisation, Regionalism, Bilateralism, Diaspora, USA, China, Southeast Asia

Cosmopolitan Narratives: Documentary Perspectives on Afghanistan Cosmopolitanism is a concept discussed in relation to globalization in contemporary societies by sociologists, anthropologists and media scholars (Beck 2006, Delanty 2006, Appadurai 1996). The concept indicates the dialectic between universal dimensions of human life and cultural differences in a more and more mediatized global media culture. How do individuals and groups imagine each other in this new, global media culture, in what Appadurai (1996) has called a new post-national political world with an emerging diasporic public sphere? Belonging to a nation, a culture is of course still a very central thing. We still experience the world from where we are, we view others through a lens of imaginary (Anderson 1983) and real belonging somewhere. The distant 'other' can still for many be rather distant, and certainly more distant than those close others in our everyday life. But the media play an increasingly strong and important role in developing a cosmopolitan imaginary through narratives that bring us closer to the various distant, global others. Through migration those earlier distant others are also more and more mixed in our daily lives and more cosmopolitan and multicultural societies (Bondebjerg 2014). News play a role here, but more important are documentary film and television, because such narratives of reality can unfold global aspects of everyday life and social realities in a much stronger way. In this paper I develop the concept of global narratives in documentary in a sociological and cultural theoretical sense. Following that I look at how life in Afghanistan has been described both by documentary filmmakers with a European background (for instance Havana Markings Afghan Star and Phil Grabsky in The Boy Mir) and filmmakers with a background in Afghanistan (for instance Nagieb Khaja My Afghanistan).

The purpose of this pilot project is to investigate the relationship between the implementation of classification and labelling of chemical substances and their use. The system that has been examined is the EU legislation for classification and labelling of chemical substances and mixtures. The focus lies on substances with harmonised classification at European Union (EU) Community level as dangerous for the environment which by themselves or in a mixture above a certain concentration limit lead to classification and labelling with the symbol "Fish and tree" and the indication of danger Dangerous for the environment (N). Other effects were also included to some extent. EU Environmental hazard classification has been conducted since the mid 1990s and from the early first decade of the 21st century for chemical substances and mixtures. Now, almost 20 years after the first criteria were implemented it is interesting to look back and see whether this classification has had an impact on the use of these substances.

This paper explores the issue of hegemony under transnational capitalism. It conceptualizes how transnational accumulation and supraterritorial space has altered capitalism in general and its hegemony in particular. It aims to provide a framework of understanding and analyzing the way globalization has reshaped the terrain and parameters of social, economic and political relations both at the national and the global levels, and exerted pressure on the resilient and hegemonic capacities of capitalism. It proposes to examine the ways social relations of domination, subordination and organic interplay are produced, maintained, decomposed and delinked while continuously undergoing transformations. Inspired by the Gramscian and Polanyian theoretical and analytical categories, the paper analyses the fading "organic" linkage between state, market and civil society under transnational capitalism. It concludes that transnational capitalism is creating serious dual contradictions: the crisis of both hegemony and counter-hegemony. Transnational capitalism is not able to create a "transnational hegemony" similar to that under nation-state capitalism, nor is it able to foster a transnational consensual power of civil society and organic counter-hegemony social forces. Rather, transnational capitalism is producing the opposite result: reducing the legitimacy of capitalism's hegemony and limiting its resilient capacities while creating non-organic counterhegemonic movements in various forms and directions including fundamentalism and terrorism.

Ports and port cities have been separated throughout the years as a result of global dynamics like increase in scale. This can be noticed all over the world but variation can be seen in the way these dynamics have been absorbed. This thesis researches the way the port cities Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg have been dealing with these develoopments. Characteristics of various political economic systems have been distinguised as a possible explanation for the differences in outcome.

Over the last decade piracy has become a source of constant debate. While copyright organisations describe piracy as simple theft, others regard it as a legitimate form of cultural consumption in a digital environment. Piracy is, however, not a phenomenon unique to digital media of the 21st century. This article takes the history of copyright and piracy as a starting point for a discussion about piracy as a cultural and political phenomenon that goes beyond the contemporary preoccupation with particular piratical practices such as file sharing. It seeks to show how copyright and piracy are integrated aspects of modern society, equally situated in the urban, social space of the modern city and the global, geopolitical landscape of colonialism in the past and the present. One might call it a study of how piracy is constituted in space over time. The article sets out with a short overview of the colonial heritage of copyright, followed by a discussion of the re-contextualisation of copyright within the structures of international trade relations in the 1990s, moving on to discuss how this positioned piracy within a postcolonial order of power. It concludes with a brief discussion of how piracy has become an integrated part of everyday life in contemporary, postcolonial cities and how this development reflects piracy's role in the process of late capitalist globalisation.