Institute for Policy and Governance, School of Public and International Affairs

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Browsing Institute for Policy and Governance, School of Public and International Affairs by Subject "Education, Higher"

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    Re: Reflections and explorations : Essays on politics, public policy, and governance
    Stephenson, Max O. Jr.; Kirakosyan, Lyusyena (Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance, 2015)
    We have organized the essays that follow in this volume into nine themes or broad topical foci based on the subjects our RE: Reflections and Explorations authors selected for their efforts during 2013-2014. A brief overview of our contributors’ organizing issues follows. Part 1 contains six essays that address the role(s) of the academy in society. Part 2 offers six essays that address questions central to the relationships among art, culture and politics. Part 3’s five essays treat issues linked to community building. Part 4 includes five essays that explore the challenges of public leadership at multiple scales and in a variety of contexts. Part 5’s eight essays examine a variety of concerns central to the characteristics and fundamentals of democratic citizenship and ethics. Part 6 consists of six essays that explore different dimensions of international politics. Part 7 of the volume comprises seven essays that directly or indirectly illuminate alternate facets of local and international development dynamics. Part 8 includes six essays that together analyze several manifestations or implications of neoliberalism, the current dominant public imaginary or frame in American and indeed, Western, politics. Part 9’s seven essays each afford readers alternate lenses into the dynamics and vicissitudes of change processes, as conceptualized at alternate analytical levels. The 56 essays together address a variety of concerns central to democratic politics and self-governance. The topics are as varied as our contributor’s substantive interests and perspectives, and that diversity yields a complex array of analytical insights. We hope you enjoy reading this richly textured collection as much as we have enjoyed assembling it.
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    RE: Reflections and Explorations: A Forum for Deliberative Dialogue
    Stephenson, Max O. Jr.; Kirakosyan, Lyusyena (Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance in association with VT Publishing, 2017)
    The essays in this volume treat dimensions of broader trends at all scales of analysis, examining the elemental issue of democratic agency and obstacles to its exercise, the difficulties inherent for self-governance in inter-governmental cooperation and in racial, ethnic and religious diversity and the antagonisms resulting from rapid widespread economic, social and technological shifts. These articles also investigate the dynamics of political change and movements in a time when the prevailing social imaginary makes such action, always difficult, especially tough to achieve. While we have divided the essays into seven sections, as they address a variety of topical concerns at discrete levels of analysis, all may be said to treat in one form or another the consequences for Western liberalism of its embrace of neoliberalism’s elevation of capitalism to a governing role and its view of freedom as atomistic individualism. Adherents have embraced this perspective without acknowledging the daily reality that human beings live in families and societies and that freedom will never be sustained by the pursuit of material goods alone.