Wayward Feeling asks what contemporary audio-visual
culture and aesthetic activisms might tell us about the affective
afterlives of historical injustice in post-rainbow South
Africa.
Once primarily used in medical clinical trials, random assignment experimentation is now accepted among social scientists across a broad range of disciplines. The technique has been used in social ...experiments to evaluate a variety of programs, from microfinance and welfare reform to housing vouchers and teaching methods. How did randomized experiments move beyond medicine and into the social sciences, and can they be used effectively to evaluate complex social problems?Fighting for Reliable Evidenceprovides an absorbing historical account of the characters and controversies that have propelled the wider use of random assignment in social policy research over the past forty years.
Drawing from their extensive experience evaluating welfare reform programs, noted scholar practitioners Judith M. Gueron and Howard Rolston portray randomized experiments as a vital research tool to assess the impact of social policy. In a random assignment experiment, participants are sorted into either a treatment group that participates in a particular program, or a control group that does not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any subsequent differences between the groups can be attributed to the influence of the program or policy. The theory is elegant and persuasive, but many scholars worry that such an experiment is too difficult or expensive to implement in the real world. Can a control group be truly insulated from the treatment policy? Would staffers comply with the random allocation of participants? Would the findings matter?
Fighting for Reliable Evidencerecounts the experiments that helped answer these questions, starting with the income maintenance experiments and the Supported Work project in the 1960s and 1970s. Gueron and Rolston argue that a crucial turning point came during the 1980s, when Congress allowed states to experiment with welfare programs and foundations, states, and the federal government funded larger randomized trials to assess the impact of these reforms. As they trace these historical shifts, Gueron and Rolston discuss the ways that strategies for resolving theoretical and practical problems were developed, and they highlight the strict conditions required to execute a randomized experiment successfully. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of the potential and limitations of social experiments to advance empirical knowledge.
Weaving history, data analysis and personal experience,Fighting for Reliable Evidenceoffers valuable lessons for researchers, policymakers, funders, and informed citizens interested in isolating the effect of policy initiatives. It is an essential primer on welfare policy, causal inference, and experimental designs.
Commodity Activism Mukherjee, Roopali; Banet-Weiser, Sarah
02/2012, Letnik:
21
eBook
Buying (RED) products - from Gap T-shirts to Apple--to fight AIDS. Drinking a Caring Cup of coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf to support fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global ...warming. All these commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporary culture: the most common way we participate in social activism is by buying something. Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case studies of commodity activism. Drawing from television, film, consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove Real Beauty campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, and Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary. Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities, arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded commodity.
Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art ...practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of “political art” at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives.
Anthropological archaeology and other disciplines concerned with the formation of early complex societies are undergoing a theoretical shift stemming from the realization that the social evolution of ...complex societies was more varied and complex than imagined. Given the need for new directions in theory, the book proposes that anthropologists look to political science, especially the rational choice theory of collective action. Collective action theorists propose that state formation results from the strategic behavior of rational and self-interested actors who make up the polity, including a political elite and those outside the official structure of the state. The theory proposes that the form taken by a state will depend on the "bargaining power", of rulers and taxpayers. Where taxpayers have more resources with which to bargain, it is predicted that rulers will concede benefits to taxpayers and will agree to restrictions on their power. The authors subject collective action theory to a methodologically rigorous evaluation using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies. The results presented here indicate strong support for most elements of the theory, but some results, in particular those pertaining to the control of ruler behavior, suggest the possibility that there are contexts in which collective action may play out in ways not anticipated by the theory. While this type of theoretical modeling is commonly seen in political science research, this volume is unique in its approach from an anthropological and archaeological viewpoint.
Transacting as Art, Design and Architecture: A Non-Commercial Market re-performs the original event #TransActing: A Market of Values as a printed text with the ambition of investing in the published ...word and image at least some of the original market’s depth and liveness. Holding fast to the experimental ethos of Critical Practice, this anthology does not shy away from risk when the aim is expanding the fields of art, design and architectural research. The authors’ distinct but also overlapping forms (practical, poetic, analytical, etc.) track with the plurality of voices the processes that have nurtured the cluster as it has worked internationally for more than a decade to produce unique projects.The book opens with contributions that reflect on TransActing as collaborative practice-based research. The introduction contextualizes this popup market within London’s long history of local marketplaces. Cued by emerging government policy on market sustainability, the tripartite of place, people and prosperity helps to frame TransActing. Taking a different approach, a partial self-portrait of Critical Practice traces TransActing’s becoming over more than a decade of activity and five years of research on value. This is followed by an account of the market’s physical infrastructure: the prototyping of bespoke stalls which were built from recycled materials, an approach inspired by an early example of open-source furniture design. This comes to life in the next section: polyphonic observations on the stalls in use and the market more generally. The stallholders’ reflections capture the experience of those directly involved and are richly illustrated with images of or related to their stalls. The second part of Transacting as Art, Design and Architecture is composed of commissioned texts to contextualise the market by weaving together references from various fields. These include celebrating the value system of TransActing, especially its critique econometrics. Closely connected to the latter, which was occasioned by Critical Practice’s tenth anniversary, is the subsequent paper's consideration of invisible, feminized labour, which is as undervalued as it is indispensable to cultural production. Taking a slightly different tack is the use of architectural theory (past and present) to trace the transforming nature of the public market, especially as an arena of consumerism. This is followed by an account that looks at the experience of TransActing from the perspective of its local currency. This story is followed by a conversation on the art market and/or the markets of art. This brings the reader to a manifesto-like text that calls for solidarity through publishing, understood as the co-production of meaning through a distributed social process. The penultimate contribution to this collection considers TransActing as a built environment with reference to the market’s shelters and platforms. Finally, a glossary rounds off and opens up the publication as a resource. This compilation of key terms adds nuance to the language used throughout this publication to indicate its resonance in the discourse of Critical Practice.The collection aims to prioritize practice-based insights as an alternative to knowledge-based ones. In this way the book aims to be a refreshing take, one that moves art-research discussions beyond the creation of knowledge. As such, this book will appeal to all those involved in the ‘research turn’ in contemporary cultural production, including those working in institutions and organizations, especially ones with strong community engagement programmes, as well as independent practitioners working in social and socially engaged practice.Primary readership will be practitioners of art, design, curating and architecture and students studying in these fields. The secondary audience will include cultural producers, theorists, educators and others who are interested in how art and other forms of creative practice can challenge the ‘usual’ financial circuits of value and open up alternatives.
Value for Money Phillips, Patricia Pulliam; Phillips, Jack J; Paone, Gina ...
2019, 2019.
eBook
In a step-by-step process, the book shows how to measure the success of projects and programs, how to forecast the value of the project, and how to collect data during and after project ...implementation. --
This paper reports on a two-year study that explored teachers' pedagogical approaches when implementing an active citizenship curriculum initiative in New Zealand. Our aim was to identify pedagogies ...which afforded potential for critical and transformative citizenship learning. We define critical and transformative social action through a fusion of critical pedagogy and Dewey's notion of democratic education. Data included teachers' classroom-based research as well as classroom observations and interviews with students. Our study suggested that citizenship learning through both affective and cognitive domains can provide for deeper opportunities for students to experience critical and transformative democratic engagement.
•Active citizenship requires learning across both affective and cognitive domains.•Critical pedagogy and Deweyan theory underpins critical, transformative citizenship.•Teacher expertise is required for deep learning in active citizenship education.
Managers of workforce training programs are often unable to afford costly, full-fledged experimental or nonexperimental evaluations to determine their programs’ impacts. Therefore, many rely on the ...survey responses of program participants to gauge program impacts. Smith, Whalley, and Wilcox present the first attempt to assess such measures despite their already widespread use in program evaluations. They develop a multidisciplinary framework for addressing the issue and apply it to three case studies: the National Job Training Partnership Act Study, the U.S. National Supported Work Demonstration, and the Connecticut Jobs First Program. Each of these studies were subjected to experimental evaluations that included a survey-based participant evaluation measure. The authors apply econometric methods specifically developed to obtain estimates of program impacts among individuals in the studies and then compare these estimates with survey-based participant evaluation measures to obtain an assessment of the surveys’ efficacy. The authors also discuss how their findings fit into the broader literatures in economics, psychology, and survey research.
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