INTERSECTIONAL POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: APPRECIATION FOR INTRAGROUP DIFFERENCES AND SOLIDARITY IN DIVERSE GROUPS

This article introduces an intersectional approach to political consciousness and presents data to demonstrate its importance for predicting solidarity in diverse social change organizations. Women activists ( N = 174) completed measures of political consciousness, diversity, and solidarity. As expected, women differed in the degree to which their political consciousness reflected intersectionality (sensitivity to intragroup differences arising from intersections of social identities, such as ethnicity with gender) and singularity (focus on intragroup similarities arising from a shared social identity, such as gender). Although high group diversity related to lower solidarity, the content of political consciousness moderated the negative association of diversity to solidarity. High diversity had a negative association with solidarity only when political consciousness reflected a high degree of singularity and a low degree of intersectionality. These findings challenge the common assumption that diversity undermines a group's ability to work together and suggest that, when appreciation of difference is an important aspect of an individual's identity, solidarity with a social change organization may be greater when group diversity is high rather than low.     

Theology and Politics in Contemporary Greece

This article examines the interaction between theology and politics in the case of the “theology of the 1960s,” a theological renewal movement that emerged in Greece in the 1960s, accompanied by the call for a “return to the Fathers.” The first part of the paper seeks to describe the position of the theology of the 1960s toward politics, while the second considered the position of politics after 1974 toward the theology of the 1960s. It concludes that there was a partial instrumentalization of the theology of the 1960s for tactical political ends. This was a missed opportunity leading to politics becoming devoid of all spiritual content, while theology lost its feedback from social experience and its penetration into society. The article concludes by making several suggestions for the tasks that lie ahead, including the need to cultivate a critical history of the political intervention and the social role of Orthodox theology, and to expand the issues that concern Orthodox theology, such as anthropology or cosmology, to embrace questions of the role of the meaning of history and progressive change in human society.     

The changing American family: For better or worse

This article deals with the viability of the American family. The family as a socio-biological phenomenon has existed throughout history. While it has frequently altered its constellation and membership it has preserved its basic function of the rearing and the socialization of the young. Since as other living organisms its survival depends on a certain balance between forces maintaining stability and others promoting change, the rapid changes occurring in the outside world have had profound effects on today's family. These technological and political changes have especially affected the power structure and the role distributions within the family (e.g., the women's movement, sexual revolution, greater egalitarianism) leaving it more vulnerable and unsettled, while at the same time opening new areas which it is hoped will lead to a new consciousness and growth.     

What Happens When We Unpack the Invisible Knapsack? Intersectional Political Consciousness and Inter-group Appraisals

How does consciousness of the intersection of white privilege with gender discrimination affect white women’s appraisals of Muslim women? White, female, non-Muslim undergraduates at a Scottish university (n?=?37) were primed with either singular or intersectional group consciousness via a measure of political attitudes before they completed an ostensibly unrelated study about impression formation. As predicted, participants primed with intersectional consciousness reported more accepting attitudes toward covering practices and formed more positive impressions of the Muslim woman, but this effect was moderated by participants’ political orientation. Results support an intersectional approach to conceptualizing political consciousness and suggest that the content of political consciousness is key to understanding appraisals of and responses to difference.     

Motivation for Collective Action: Group Consciousness as Mediator of Personality, life Experiences, and Women's Rights Activism

Prior research on political activism focused on direct predictors of collective action (e.g., life experiences), with little attention paid to what psychologically motivates individuals to act. The group consciousness literature provides an obvious psychological motive for activism, but ignores individual difference variables that differentiate people who develop group consciousness from those who do not. This article integrates the two literatures on activism and group consciousness, and presents a model whereby group consciousness mediates relationships between collective action and personality and life experiences. The general model was evaluated empirically by examining feminist consciousness and women's rights activism in two samples. Feminist consciousness was found to mediate relationships between activism and anumber of personality and life experience variables, including low authoritarianism, political salience, sexual oppression, and education about women's position in society. The possible extension of this model to other kinds of political activism is discussed.     

A Comedian and a Fascist Walk into Freud's Bar: On the Mass Character of Stand-Up Comedy

This article explores the psychoanalytic points of commonality between stand-up comedy shows and fascist rallies, arguing that both are concerned with the creation of a “mass” audience. The article explores the political significance of this analogy by arguing that while stand-up shows are not as regressive as fascist rallies, their “mass” character does run counter to any political aspirations they may have toward the end of critical consciousness raising.     

THE RETURN OF THE DEAD SOULS: THE GERMAN STUDENTS' MOVEMENT AND THE GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ

The intellectual history determined by the 1968 students' revolt sometimes appears as a ghost scene, emerging from the strong identification of the radical students with Jews and Judaism. This essay wishes to demonstrate the inner connection between the messianic political theology of the movement and the psychological effects of this over-identification, leading to a leftist anti-Semitism. While the revolutionary students saw themselves as the true successors of Jewish revolutionary messianism, they accused the real Jew, the one who settled in Israel, of being an imperialist traitor. The essay reconstructs the metamorphosis of these ghosts in a “phenomenology of the spirits” as a “Geistergeschichte” behind the official “Geistesgeschichte.” Against this pathological path the essay presents Jürgen Habermas's reflections on the ethics of memory as its best therapy.     

Race,Power, and Privilege

This article identifies some of the developing context of interfaith relations within the ecumenical movement in the United Kingdom, where there has been a seismic shift in the national political debate that is now dominated by the decision, following a referendum, to leave the European Union. It argues that interfaith relations has lost much of its radical focus upon justice and become focused upon initiatives of social cohesion, mutual understanding, and celebration of difference, rather than addressing some of the deeper issues of justice and racism and the consequences of Britain’s colonial history, much of which has re‐emerged as a result of Brexit. This is of critical importance given the rise in hate crime, particularly anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia.     

Is this a good time? Political activism and other in the temenos

This paper discusses raciality and Africanist culture as elements of the analytical clinical experience. The history of American Jungian psychology, and its relationship with the African diaspora, is reviewed with a perspective that seeks to deepen understanding of racism as an aspect of psychoanalytical institutional life. An attempt to separate political activism from the clinical setting is explored with consideration of the necessary intertwining relationship between socialization, racial identity and racism. Diversity and inclusion are becoming cultural signature markers of clinical work with individuals who have oftentimes, within the psychoanalytical clinical setting, been described due to ethnicity, as other. Political activism such as the Black Lives Matter movement stretches consciousness towards an insistence that blackness matters, skin colour matters and the lives of Africanist individuals matter. This paper reflects on cultural racial identity, the influence of politics on the individual, and the effects of these on the analytical relationship.     

LOVE,JUSTICE, AND SOCIAL ESCHATOLOGY

In this paper, we explore the ontological and theological ground of political institutions in order to then reflect upon the eschatological calling of society. The paper builds on Tillich's ontological insight that love does not simply transcend justice, but that it permeates and drives justice, that justice gives form to love's reunion of the separated. This relation between love and justice is at play in political institutions: these unite human beings under forms of justice that must be transformed ever anew if they are not to lose touch with the dynamic power of love and freeze into increasingly unjust juridicalism. The modern history of Western civilisation bears witness to this ontological tension, and the phenomenon of globalisation is yet another instance of human society's mystical calling. Thus, love heads the dynamic movement that transforms political institutions ever anew. Yet society as a whole must become conscious of its ontology for humanity to truly reach its eschatological potential, and this will require both that theology recovers its ground and that political theory thinks theologically.     

Consciousness and the self

With his notion of absolute consciousness, Sartre tries to rethink the relation between consciousness and the self. What is the origin of subjectivity in relation to a consciousness that is characterized as impersonal and as a radical lucidity? In this article, I attempt to question that origin and the nature as such of the subject in its relation to a consciousness that in its essence is not yet subjective. On the contrary, it is characterized by a selfpresence that is so radical that it threatens every form of self‐knowledge.     

Preemptive War, Americanism, and Anti-Americanism

Abstract: The war against Iraq unleashed in March 2003 spawned an attempt to silence the protest movement by accusing it of anti‐Americanism. This essay argues that the theory according to which right‐wing anti‐Americanism and left‐wing anti‐Americanism coincide is a myth. A new issue appears now, a paradox that characterizes the United States, where democracy developed within the white community concomitantly with the enslavement of blacks and the deportation of American Indians. In the American “Herrenvolk democracy,” a line of demarcation between whites and people of color fosters the development of relations based on equality within the white community. Furthermore, U.S. history is marked by the fundamentalist tendency to transform the Judeo‐Christian tradition into a sort of national religion that consecrates the exceptionalism of the American people and the sacred mission with which they are entrusted (“Manifest Destiny”). Europe is unable thoroughly to comprehend the American mixture of religious and moral fervor, on the one hand, and overt pursuit of political, economic, and military world domination, on the other. But it is this mixture, or rather this explosive combination, this peculiar fundamentalism, that constitutes the greatest threat to world peace today.     

Social Representations of History and the Legitimation of Social Inequality: The Causes and Consequences of Historical Negation1

The stories of history tend to favor dominant groups. Two longitudinal studies indicated that ideologies negating historical injustice experienced by Māori (the indigenous peoples of New Zealand) predicted increased opposition toward social policies promoting material reparation among New Zealand European undergraduates. Historical negation was, in turn, predicted by right‐wing authoritarianism (Study 2). These findings suggest that the authoritarian motivation to protect the positive history of the in‐group causes New Zealand Europeans to actively position historical injustices performed by earlier colonial generations as irrelevant. Positioning history in this fashion has important consequences for the mobilization of political attitudes and, in particular, opposition toward social and political policies relating to the distribution of resources and status within society.     

Self‐affirmation,political value congruence,and support for refugees

This research tested the potential for self‐affirmation on left‐ and right‐wing political values to increase behavioral intentions to provide help and assistance to refugees. We present a pilot study defining left‐ and right‐wing values, and a main study in which participants completed either a self‐affirmation task, a group‐affirmation task, or participated in a control condition on values that were either congruent or incongruent with their own political views. Results show that left‐wing oriented participants showed more supportive intentions in the self‐affirmation condition compared to the group‐affirmation and control conditions, independent of values congruency. In contrast, right‐wing participants showed more supportive intentions in the self‐affirmation condition, but only when they affirmed on values that were congruent with their own political views.     

The Suppression and Justification of Prejudice as a Function of Political Orientation

Politically conservative (versus liberal) individuals generally report more prejudice towards various low‐status out‐groups. Three studies examined whether prejudice suppression factors—specifically, internal and external motivation to suppress (IMS and EMS, respectively) prejudice—can help explain the relationship between political orientation and prejudice. Study 1 showed that IMS and EMS partially mediated the relationship between political orientation and affective prejudice towards Arabs. Study 2 demonstrated that when justification [right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation] and suppression (IMS and EMS) factors are simultaneously tested as mediators, only RWA partially mediated the relationship between political orientation and prejudice towards deviant (e.g. gay men) out‐groups, whereas RWA and IMS fully mediated the relationship between political orientation and prejudice towards derogated out‐groups (e.g. Blacks). Intriguingly, IMS rendered social dominance orientation effects non‐significant for derogated out‐groups. Study 3 showed that anticipating an out‐group interaction (with a Black or lesbian confederate) diminished the mediational contribution of IMS in the political orientation–prejudice relationship because of increased IMS among participants; yet the increases in IMS did not completely eliminate differences in prejudice as a function of political orientation. Ultimately, these three studies demonstrate that suppression (in addition to justification) factors do help explain the relationship between political orientation and prejudice. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology.     

On historical consciousness: A pilot investigation

Philosophers of history posit a class of concepts known as colligatory concepts that contribute to historical consciousness and that refer specifically to historical events. Although analysis has identified colligatory concepts in historical discourse, these concepts have not yet been investigated empirically. We present a new methodology for studying these concepts and historical consciousness more broadly, as well as pilot data supporting the methodology. Our aim in the pilot study was to establish whether colligatory concepts are processed differently from control concepts when subjects are asked to judge historical statements. We compared judgments of colligatory concepts in healthy participants and in a patient group with impaired working memory cognitive processing capacity. Forty healthy, college-educated participants and 25 patients with Parkinson's disease were asked to rate narrative sentences containing historical content and an equal number of identically constructed narrative sentences of equal length but devoid of historical content. All participants rated their pre-test interest in history as relatively low (mean 5 out of 7). Though no group differences emerged, historical sentences were judged by both groups (total N = 65) to be significantly different from non-historical sentences across dimensions of interestingness, meaningfulness, likeability, complexity, thought provoking-ness, and truth content. Interestingly, historical sentences were judged to be truer than control sentences even though participants were not interested in and presumably knew little about history. The neurocognitive system appears to process sentences with historical content separately from sentences without historical content. The methodology described here appears to be a valid approach for study of processing of historical content of sentences.     

Just How Correct is Political Correctness? A Critique of the Opposition's Arguments

I begin by examining three factors which enable the term political correctness (hereafter PC) itself to feed into the hands of its opponents: namely, the trivialization of the actual issues which are attributed to PC, the villainization of those involved in the PC movement, and the conferring of a sense of legitimacy on the opposition movement.The bulk of the paper provides a detailed summary and critique of every single articulated Canadian position I encountered against such PC measures as fair language policies. I have distinguished between arguments directed at the ideological content and the methodology of PC. Arguments directed at the ideological content are divided into the threat to freedom of expression argument, the threat to academic freedom argument, and the degeneration into triviality argument; arguments directed at the methdology are divided into the argument that PC commits the very evils that it addresses and the argument that PC uses unjust means to get its way.The paper ends by claiming that if PC means minimizing sexual and racial harrassment, discourgaing homophobic, racist, and sexist discourse within educational settings, and curtailing policies which victimize oppressed groups, then political correctness is not merely correct, but morally obligatory as well.     

Communion and Liberation: a Catholic movement in a multilevel governance perspective

In this article we focus on how changes in political structure influence religion. Communion and Liberation (CL) is widely known in Italy as a very important Catholic movement whose political power has been significantly increasing in the last 15 years. It is an example of a movement deeply rooted at the local level, where its activities range from grassroots meetings to business activities and service provision. In the sociological literature, CL has been studied either by focusing on its political ideology, or as a religious movement. Introducing a specific focus on the political system allows us to highlight the close relationships between the recent changes in the Italian political system and the reasons for the local success of CL. Indeed, it has been a process of mutual adaptation and influence. The political success of a Catholic movement in a Western democracy is relevant to understanding the changing role of religion in the political arena. Christian movements can play a role of substitution for traditional political movements in countries where traditional parties have become particularly weak and not capable of inspiring enthusiasm among citizens. But the story of CL in Lombardy suggests also that something is changing in the relationship between national and local politics. CL is able to play on different territorial horizons by using local, regional and national political spheres to promote its policies, mainly in the welfare sector. This is an important signal of a capacity both to adapt to a changing political system and to influence these changes. In this paper we focus on the relationships between CL and Italian politics in the Second Republic (1993 to the present day) by analysing CL representation of its political role as well as by pointing out the political opportunity structure in which its success has taken place.