How public are America’s public schools? They may be tax funded and free, but the combination of market-based policies, exclusionary governance, insufficient funding, and structural inequities impair schools’ ability to prepare future citizens, workers, neighbors, and stewards of the planet. Gyurko offers a fresh look at the “publicness” of American education through historical accounts, scholarly research, first-hand reporting, and political analyses. Chapters on funding, governance, standards, accountability, and equity show what must be done to better identify and strengthen the shared aims of public schools. Novel insights explain how even controversial topics like charter schools, testing, teacher tenure, and the unions can be part of a broad “Publicization Project.” Champions of public education will find a compelling vision and achievable roadmap that moves the country beyond decades of privatization. Publicization is an essential introduction to major debates of past decades with a hopeful vision of what it means to be an educated American. Book Features: Speaks directly to political controversies affecting education including school choice, book banning, the “reading wars,” board elections, critical race theory, and teacher unions. Offers first-hand, never-before-reported accounts of high-profile efforts involving prominent political players including AFT president Randi Weingarten, former U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan, former NYC mayors Michael R. Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio and schools chancellor Joel I. Klein, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, former PBS correspondent John Merrow, KIPP cofounder David Levin, late philanthropist Eli Broad, small schools founder Deborah Meier, and historian and activist Diane Ravitch. Provides pragmatic recommendations that cross political divides including a fresh look at charter schools, the role of unions and collective bargaining, parent involvement in school decision-making, standardized testing, and equity-advancing reforms. Gathers the history of education ideas, thinkers, and past reforms to provide new generations of educators with a cogent summary of what has come before to inform what comes next.

Women’s existence in the digital world has been closely studied by scholars and attracted the attention of activists worldwide. Women, like men, early on saw the Internet as a potentially powerful and liberating tool that would help them find groups or communities with similar aims and interests. Today there is more awareness of the deleterious effects of unconstrained online speech such as online violence, ridicule, silencing, and threats against women. Women in the Digital World brings together the latest academic research on women online and includes chapters on political speech, gendered online violence, dealing with sexual assaults, marginalization of women politicians, and how women participate (or don’t) via online environments. The interdisciplinary research in this volume brings together communications studies, gender studies, sociology, politics, and computer science and is essential reading for those seeking to understand a growing field. The book should be of interest also for activists and NGOs who seek to deepen their knowledge on the place of females online. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society.

The world is full of traces of the past, ranging from things as different as monuments and factories to farms, eco-museums, landscapes, mountaineering and even woven-grass bridges. These traces must be protected and passed on to future generations. Communicational analysis shows that these traces have acquired the status of heritage by becoming communicative beings imbued with a new social life. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, granting this status was the prerogative of the state. New modes then emerged, increasingly involving social actors and the publicization of knowledge. Today, the heritage recognition of these traces also depends on interpretative schemes that circulate in society, notably through the media. Heritage Traces in the Making is aimed at anyone – researchers, professionals and students – who is interested in how heritage is created and how it evolves.

After two decades of dominating the public sector reform agenda, privatization is on the wane as states gradually reassert themselves in many formerly privatized sectors. The change of direction is a response to the realization that privatization is not working as intended, especially in public service sectors. This landmark volume brings together leading social scientists, including B. Guy Peters, Anthony Cheung and Jon Pierre, to systematically discuss the emerging patterns of the reassertion of the state in the delivery of essential public services. The state under these emerging arrangements assumes overall responsibility for and control over essential public service delivery, yet allows scope for market incentives and competition when they are known to work. The recent reforms thus display a more pragmatic and nuanced understanding of how markets work in public services . The first part of the book provides the theoretical context while the second provides sectoral studies of recent reforms in healthcare, education, transportation, electricity and water supply. It includes case studies from a range of countries: Brazil, China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, USA, Hong Kong and the UK. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Political Science, Public Administration, Public Policy, Geography, Political Economy, Sociology, and Urban Planning.

"In this important volume Norberto Bobbio examines some of the central themes of political theory and presents a systematic exposition of his views. With great astuteness and profound scholarship, Bobbio unfolds the elements for a general theory of politics. Bobbio's wide-ranging argument is focused on four themes: the distinction between the public and the private; the concept of civil society; differing conceptions of the state and differing ways of understanding the legitimacy of state power; and the relation between democracy and dictatorship. Bobbio's discussion draws on a wealth of theoretical and historical material, from Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke to Marx, Weber, Habermas and Foucault. By analysing the development of different languages of politics in relation to changing social and historical contexts, Bobbio deepens our understanding of the concepts we use to describe and evaluate modern political systems." --Descripción del editor.

This book offers a wealth of original empirical data on how online media shape EU contestation. Taking a public sphere perspective, the authors highlight the myths and truths about the nature of audience-driven online media content and show how public demands for legitimacy are at the heart of the much-analyzed politicization of European integration. What EU citizens most intensely debate online are the fundamental questions of what the European institutions stand for and how they can be held accountable. Drawing on innovative and rigorous analysis of online media ownership, journalistic content and online readers’ inputs, the authors piece together the components of the dynamic nature of EU contestation and the degree of convergence towards Euroscepticism across EU member states in the first years of the Eurocrisis. There is no doubt that EU citizens have strong opinions about the EU and interactive online media allow these opinions to come to the fore, to be challenged and amplified both within and beyond national public spheres. Yet, for all its potential to unite European publics, online EU contestation remains firmly anchored in offline news media frames, while citizens and journalists alike struggle to put forward a clear vision of the future EU polity.

During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999.