The Performative State

The Performative State PDF Author: Iza Yue Ding
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501760386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion surveys. She demonstrates in vivid detail how China's environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the physical environment. They assuage public outrage by appearing responsive, benevolent, and humble. But performative governance is hard work. Environmental bureaucrats paradoxically work themselves to exhaustion even when they cannot effectively implement environmental policies. Instead of achieving "performance legitimacy" by delivering material improvements, the state can shape public opinion through the theatrical performance of goodwill and sincere effort. The Performative State also explains when performative governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam and the United States show that all states, democratic and authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance.

The Performative State

The Performative State PDF Author: Iza Yue Ding
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501760386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion surveys. She demonstrates in vivid detail how China's environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the physical environment. They assuage public outrage by appearing responsive, benevolent, and humble. But performative governance is hard work. Environmental bureaucrats paradoxically work themselves to exhaustion even when they cannot effectively implement environmental policies. Instead of achieving "performance legitimacy" by delivering material improvements, the state can shape public opinion through the theatrical performance of goodwill and sincere effort. The Performative State also explains when performative governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam and the United States show that all states, democratic and authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance.

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067449556X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, she extends her theory of performativity to show why precarity—destruction of the conditions of livability—is a galvanizing force and theme in today’s highly visible protests.

Performative Democracy

Performative Democracy PDF Author: Elzbieta Matynia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317254341
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
fresh appreciation of the events of 1989 as we approach their 20th anniversary in 2009 Performative Democracy explores a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens. Written by one who experienced an emerging public sphere within Communist Poland, the book seeks to identify the conditions for performativity-performing politics--in public life. It examines a broad spectrum of cultural, social, and political initiatives that facilitated the non-violent transformation of an autocratic environment into a democratic one. Examples of performativity range from experimental student theater, through the engaged political thinking of dissident Adam Michnik, the alternative culture, and the Solidarity movement, to the drama of the Round Table Talks (and their striking parallels in South Africa), and finally, the post-1989 efforts of feminist groups and women artists to defend the recently won right of free public discourse. The book argues that performative democracy, with its improvisational mode and imaginative solutions, deserves a legitimate place in our broader reflections on democracy. Matynia describes how two apparent miracles of recent history-that communism in Poland was brought down without violence and that apartheid in South Africa was ended without a bloodbath-were the results of hard work and a new approach to change that she calls "performative democracy." Matynia reveals amazing parallels between the drama of Poland's Round Table Talks in 1989 and the Truth Commissions in South Africa in 1994. Matynia describes how experimental student theater groups, though subsidized by a totalitarian regime afraid of any authentic public life, created little pockets of public space for free and meaningful expression that were augmented by uncensored underground publishing and further expanded by the Solidarity movement into a democratic society within the totalitarian state. Matynia describes in a personal way how in the 1970s student theater groups planted the seeds of an authentic public sphere, how underground publishers nurtured freedom of expression and social criticism, and how, after democratic elections, women artists in the 1990s fought to sustain the newly won right to free public discourse. Matynia traces in vivid human terms the democratic aspirations and practices that led to democratic change in Poland but went largely unnoticed by western media and policymakers.

State Formation in China and Taiwan

State Formation in China and Taiwan PDF Author: Julia C. Strauss
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108476864
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
An ambitious comparative study of regime consolidation in the 'revolutionary' People's Republic of China and 'conservative' Taiwan in the early 1950s.

Performative Criticism

Performative Criticism PDF Author: Gerry Brenner
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791459447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Genre-bending experiments that appropriate, impersonate, and speak through already-created literary characters in order to offer fresh interpretations of well-known literary works.

Deliberative Acts

Deliberative Acts PDF Author: Arabella Lyon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271069945
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The twenty-first century is characterized by the global circulation of cultures, norms, representations, discourses, and human rights claims; the arising conflicts require innovative understandings of decision making. Deliberative Acts develops a new, cogent theory of performative deliberation. Rather than conceiving deliberation within the familiar frameworks of persuasion, identification, or procedural democracy, it privileges speech acts and bodily enactments that constitute deliberation itself, reorienting deliberative theory toward the initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors are positioned in relationship to each other and so may begin to construct a new lifeworld. By approaching human rights not as norms or laws, but as deliberative acts, Lyon conceives rights as relationships among people and as ongoing political and historical projects developing communal norms through global and cross-cultural interactions.

Theatrical Jazz

Theatrical Jazz PDF Author: Omi Osun Joni L. Jones
Publisher: Black Performance and Cultural
ISBN: 9780814252079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first full-length study of the theatrical jazz aesthetic, that draws on the jazz principles of ensemble--the break, the bridge, and the blue note.

Earthly Goods

Earthly Goods PDF Author: Fen Osler Hampson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801483622
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Ten essays from a series of workshops in 1992 and 1993 and a conference, probably at Cornell University in 1993, tackle difficult issues raised in making environmental policy when social justice concerns are taken seriously. They cover alternative frameworks for evaluating social justice, the role of states and substate actors in the international politics of the environment, the role of science in framing the debate on global environmental change and its use by various actors, and international negotiations. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space

Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space PDF Author: Michael R. Glass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136208097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Theories of performativity have garnered considerable attention within the social sciences and humanities over the past two decades. At the same time, there has also been a growing recognition that the social production of space is fundamental to assertions of political authority and the practices of everyday life. However, comparatively little scholarship has explored the full implications that arise from the confluence of these two streams of social and political thought. This is the first book-length, edited collection devoted explicitly to showcasing geographical scholarship on the spatial politics of performativity. It offers a timely intervention within the field of critical human geography by exploring the performativity of political spaces and the spatiality of performative politics. Through a series of geographical case studies, the contributors to this volume consider the ways in which a performative conception of the "political" might reshape our understanding of sovereignty, political subjectification, and the production of social space. Marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of Judith Butler’s classic, Bodies That Matter (1993), this edited volume brings together a range of contemporary geographical works that draw exciting new connections between performativity, space, and politics.

Performative Experience Design

Performative Experience Design PDF Author: Jocelyn Spence
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319283952
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book presents a novel framework for understanding and designing performative experiences with digital technologies. It introduces readers to performance theory and practice in the context of HCI and gives a practical and holistic approach for understanding complex interactions with digital technologies at the far end of third-wave HCI. The author presents a step-by-step explanation of the Performative Experience Design methodology, along with a detailed case study of the design process as it was applied to co-located digital photo sharing. Finally, the text offers guidelines for design and a vision of how PED can contribute to an ethical, critical, exploratory, and humane understanding of the ways that we engage meaningfully with digital technology. Researchers, students and practitioners working in this important and evolving field will find this state-of-the-art book a valuable addition to their reading.