Playing the fool: Activists' performances of emotion in policy making spaces

This paper draws upon dramaturgical concepts from performance studies scholarship to examine how situated performance and context enmesh with the emotional content of the practices of policy making. Drawing on sociological dramaturgical perspectives, the cultural and literary criticism that inspired them, and in particular Bahktin's concepts of the grotesque and heteroglossia, I investigate the subversive use of humour in policy work as a way of revealing “emotional knowledge” about the issues under discussion. First I set out the way “emotion” was understood by participants in an NGO's programme of policy activities as a mode of knowing the world, and how emotion and rationality were embodied in the forums by activists and civil servants respectively. I take as a case study activists “playing the Fool” within a programme of policy work in which I conducted ethnographic research. These performances, once set within a mise-en-scène that includes furniture, smells, lighting and the physicality of the people involved, create complex, unsettling and intersecting networks of meaning about power and knowledge in policy work. I argue that such a dramaturgical approach to interpreting the work of making policy challenges scholars to accurately represent the multiplicity of meanings of “emotion” at play in any context.     

Sustainable transportation in Argentina: Values,beliefs, norms and car use reduction

Most Latin American countries face important environmental and societal problems associated with an increase in car traffic, and only recently, transport policies aimed at reducing these harmful consequences of car use have begun to be discussed and put on the public agenda of these countries. Surprisingly, little is known about the factors influencing the acceptability of transport policies and intentions to reduce car use in Latin America, as studies on acceptability of transport policies have typically been conducted in Europe. Previous evidence from European samples – where reducing car used had been widely discussed – showed that the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory of environmentalism was an adequate theoretical framework to predict the acceptability of a transport pricing policy, as well as the intention to reduce car use when this policy would be implemented. But can these results be generalised to non-European samples? In this paper, we report results of a questionnaire study among 160 participants from Buenos Aires, Argentina, aimed to test the VBN theory. We found that the VBN theory was indeed also successful in explaining policy acceptability and intention to reduce car use in Argentina. In addition, we found support for the causal structure of the variables in VBN theory. Interestingly, biospheric and hedonic values were also directly and significantly related to feelings of moral obligation when intermediate variables were controlled for. These results suggest that normative considerations, activated by values, indeed predict policy acceptability and the intention to reduce car use in Argentina and that these considerations should be taken into account to increase the acceptability of policies aimed at reducing car use.     

The correlates of religion and state: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This volume examines the Religion and State Round 3 (RAS3) dataset which includes information of State Religion Policy (SRP) for 183 countries and self-governing territories between 1990 and 2014. This collection includes a general discussion of the dataset but most of the contributions take these data and use them to analyse the intersections between SRP and a wide range of phenomena including civil wars, terrorism, international conflict, attitudes towards religion and state, constitutional promises of religious freedom, and religious mobilisation. While this volume constitutes the formal primary presentation and analysis of the RAS3 dataset, it is intended to be the beginning of an ongoing discussion.