Scholarly Works, Institute for Policy and Governance
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- Conversations in Community Change: Voices from the Field(Virginia Tech Publishing, 2021-03-30)The Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance launched an experiment in 2011 called the Community Voices initiative. Community Voices was a student-led group devoted to bringing graduate students and faculty from diverse backgrounds into thoughtful dialogue with leaders who have devoted their professional lives to spurring or assisting with community change. This book is the product of those conversations. Conversations in Community Change features 12 interviews conducted by members of Community Voices, since renamed the Community Change Collaborative (CCC). The interviewees are leaders who have worked in many different contexts across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors to instigate meaningful change (democratic social, political and economic) in their communities. The animating idea behind these interviews is that those in search of peaceful democratic social change, especially amidst ongoing economic and social dislocation, have much to learn from one another within the United States and internationally, and at all levels of governance. Among the topics and initiatives discussed in the book: - Efforts to secure civil and human rights for groups that have historically experienced discrimination, - How food system pioneers are seeking to make alternatives to the present corporate-dominated food production framework real for growers and consumers alike, - How the arts can open up new public and private spaces to permit reconsideration of otherwise dominant assumptions and thinking, - The social exigencies created by capitalism’s constant economic dislocation and roiling, Ultimately, readers will come away from the book with a fuller appreciation for the complexities of democratic change—and the need for modesty, patience, and perseverance among those who would seek to lead or encourage such efforts.
- Fragile Foundations and Enduring Challenges: Essays on Democratic Politics and GovernanceStephenson, Max O. Jr. (VT Publishing, 2019-05-22)In this volume of timely essays, Max O. Stephenson Jr. offers unique insight into the state of politics and policymaking in the United States. Covering the period 2010-2018, his essays chronicle a growing crisis in American governance with many of the nation’s professed values and principles increasingly under attack—including the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the ability of a share of its citizens otherwise eligible to vote to exercise their right to do so. But Stephenson does more than sound a warning cry. He urges all Americans to reclaim self-governance and democracy by embracing the central values and core purposes underpinning the United States. Max O. Stephenson Jr. is Professor of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech where he also directs the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (VTIPG).
- Maré de Dentro: Arte, Cultura e Política no Rio de Janeiro(Virginia Tech Publishing, 2021-09-27)O Complexo da Maré, localizado na Zona Norte do Rio de Janeiro e com cerca de 140 mil moradores, é o maior aglomerado de favelas do Brasil. Como este livro demonstra, as 16 comunidades que compõem a Maré são vibrantes e diversas, apesar de serem frequentemente representadas de maneira pejorativa. Maré de Dentro: Arte, Cultura e Política no Rio de Janeiro acompanha a exibição de mesmo nome, criada por um time internacional de acadêmicos, organizadores comunitários e artistas brasileiros e estadunidenses. Por meio de retratos de família, fotografias de rua, documentários e textos, a exibição documenta as vidas dos moradores da Maré. Este livro apresenta uma seleção das fotografias que fazem parte do acervo da exibição, tiradas pelo fotojornalista Antonello Veneri em colaboração com Henrique Gomes, produtor cultural, morador e organizador comunitário da Maré, entre 2013 e 2019, quando o Rio de Janeiro sediou a Copa do Mundo de 2014 e os Jogos Olímpicos de 2016. As fotografias, intimistas e profundamente humanas, evidenciam a diversidade e resiliência das comunidades da Maré e expõem os entraves que seus moradores confrontam no seu dia a dia, rompendo, deste modo, com as narrativas que os estigmatizam. Os ensaios incluídos neste volume, escritos pelos criadores, curadores e colaboradores deste projeto, contextualizam as fotografias. O texto de Andreza Jorge, moradora e pesquisadora da Maré, por exemplo, levanta uma pergunta fundamental: o que faz da Maré de Dentro uma exibição tão comovente para tantas pessoas de diferentes partes do mundo? Parte da resposta reside no poder da arte de nos fazer reconsiderar imaginários e estruturas dominantes e, com isso, abraçar estratégias políticas e culturais que promovam a construção de uma sociedade verdadeiramente igualitária e democrática.
- Maré from the Inside: Art, Culture and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil(Virginia Tech Publishing, 2021-04-15)Complexo da Maré is a group of 16 contiguous favelas and housing projects in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro. Home to an estimated 140,000 individuals, Maré is Brazil's largest agglomeration of favelas. Often depicted in a negative light, these favelas are in fact vibrant and diverse communities, as revealed in this remarkable book. Maré from the Inside: Art, Culture and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is a companion to the exhibition of the same name (Portuguese: Maré de Dentro), which was developed by an international team of Brazilian and US academics, activists and artists. The exhibition documents the lives of residents of Complexo da Maré through family portraits, street photographs, documentary films and written works. Featured in this book is a selection of the exhibition's photographs by Italian photojournalist Antonello Veneri, who worked closely with Maré resident and activist Henrique Gomes over the period from 2013 to 2019, during which Rio was home to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. These photographs, simultaneously personal and deeply humane, counter long-standing and powerful stigmatizing narratives, demonstrating instead the diversity and resilience of these communities and exposing the barriers residents confront in their everyday lives. Providing context to the photographs are essays by the exhibition's creators, curators and collaborators, including Maré resident and scholar Andreza Jorge, who asks what it is about the Maré de Dentro exhibition that has made it so compelling for so many people from very different parts of the world. The answer lies in the power of art to make us rethink prevailing social frames and, in turn, embrace fresh political and cultural strategies for integrating previously marginalized communities more fully into political and social life.
- Re: Reflections and explorations : Essays on politics, public policy, and governanceStephenson, 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.
- RE: Reflections and Explorations: A Forum for Deliberative DialogueStephenson, 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.