Radical Democracy addresses the loss of faith in conventional party politics and argues for new ways of thinking about diversity, liberty and civic responsibility. The cultural and social theorists in Radical Democracy broaden the discussion beyond the conventional and conservative rhetoric by investigating the applicability of radical democracy in the United States. Issues debated include whether democracy is primarily a form of decision making or an instrument of popular empowerment; and whether democracy constitutes an abstract ideal or an achievable goal.

This book uses an ethnographic study of one gay community's responses to AIDS to illustrate a radical democratic understanding of citizenship in contemporary society. Analyzing specific forms of AIDS organizing and activism in Vancouver, British Columbia from ACT UP to visiting buddy programs Brown explores the alternative spaces of political action that have formed in locations where state, civil society, and family overlap. Instead of the traditional view of citizenship as a formal, unchanging relationship between individual and state, he proposes that citizenship is more productively discerned in everyday acts and in the actual places where we live our lives. An important contribution to queer theory and theories of radical democracy, the book brings abstract concepts down to earth with its nuanced portrait of the survival strategies of a community under siege. Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Awards

The themes of citizenship and community are today at the center of a fierce debate as both left and right try to mobilize them for their cause. For the left such notions are crucial in all the current attempts to redefine political struggle through extending and deepening democracy. But, argue the contributors to this volume, these concepts need to be made compatible with the pluralism that marks modern democracy. Rather than reject the liberal tradition, they argue, the aim should be to radicalize it. These essays set out to examine what types of "citizen" and "community" might be required by such a radical and plural democracy. From a range of disciplines and a fruitful diversity of theoretical perspectives, the contributors help us to address the following challenge: how to defend the greatest possible pluralism without destroying the very framework of the democratic political community. Despite their differences, a vision emerges from these essays which is sharply at odds both with the universalistic and rationalistic conception to be found in the work of Habermas, and with postmodern celebrations of absolute heterogeneity. For this book is an exploration of politics—of a politics where power, conflict and antagonism will always play a central role.

Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, defines, illustrates, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Featuring contributions from distinguished political scientists working in this field, this volume addresses canonical theorists and contemporary environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial volume focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry, engaging both traditions of political thought and the academy. In the second section, the handbook explores conceptualizations of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries within our environments. A third section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists—including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, and flourishing—and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for on-going environmental action and change.

Radical Conversion utilizes both analytic and normative philosophic/theoretical frameworks to study the relationship between Christian-Catholic conceptualizations of politics, citizenship, faith, and religion as viewed through a quasi-theological lens. The work is situated in the context of the American liberal tradition and in conversation and debate with the public philosophy that attempts to sustain it and provide a rationale for its perpetuation. In a single sentence, the book's thesis is that for America to fully realize its authentic and unique moral and political mission and secure it into the future, it will need to become both more Catholic and more catholic. Concordantly, that mission, properly understood, is nothing less than the recognition and protection of the idea of the sacredness of every individual human person and their right to flourish and realize the fullness of their particular vocation as a child of God.

Contemporary Europe – ridden by social, political and economic crises, overlaid onto colonial and imperial trajectories, and shaken by the shockwaves generated by Brexit and wide scale human displacement – has become a space in which citizenship and belonging are contested, disrupted, performed and produced anew. Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenshipexplores the contribution of migrant and refugee artists to the performance and production of radical democratic citizenship in Europe. It foregrounds the insights of artists and cultural actors with diverse experiences of migration and displacement to fractious public debates about citizenship and belonging. It explores how migrant and refugee artists have audaciously inserted themselves into, and are pushing the boundaries of these debates, challenging and unhinging dominant interpretations of the parameters of European citizenship and belonging. Part I of this edited volume is comprised of a series of short provocations by artists spanning and intermixing a range of art forms and methodologies including live art, visual art and public installation, community and site-specific durational work, or the combination of writing, auto-ethnography and media activism. The second Part comprises longer, more sustained engagements by visual and live art practitioners, dramaturges, curators and academics. These chapters focus on performative, participatory, auto-biographical and auto-ethnographic artistic processes and practices. Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship highlights the critical interventions by artists who have experienced firsthand the everyday realities of displacement, focusing on how their diverse practices offer incisive challenges to existing regimes of citizenship and democracy.