The politics of being sorry: the Greensboro truth process and efforts at restorative justice

This paper examines the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) to better understand the way the truth process in Greensboro, North Carolina intersects with conceptions of restorative justice and geographic understandings of the ‘right to the city.’ The GTRC was a grassroots truth process focused on a shooting of labor organizers in 1979 by Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party Members and the complicity of local officials in the violence. In 2006, the GTRC released its report to the citizens of Greensboro and its recommendations for the city touched off a contentious debate. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and archival research—I argue the GTRC process engages with notions of right to the city activism that challenges the right to the city literature to focus on broader discussions of racism, activism, and white privilege that emerges from critical race scholarship and contributes to the growth of robust, multiracial anticapitalist coalitions; an approach to scholarship on the right to the city that has broad academic purchase for social geography and urban political engagement in general.     

Constructing Homeland Security: An Anemic Policy Regime

This research addresses the strength of the homeland security policy regime that was constructed after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. We argue that homeland security provides a preeminent example of the challenges of developing policy regimes that focus policymaking on a common goal across diverse subsystems. All the ingredients for fashioning a powerful regime were in place after the terrorist attacks of September 2001—a common purpose, engaged stakeholders, and institutional redesign. But for a variety of reasons that we discuss, the results are far from cohesive. The lessons we draw are more general ones regarding factors that influence the strength of boundary‐spanning policy regimes.     

Communicating Science through the Performing Arts

Abstract

The author reviews over a decade of science and the arts programming he and his colleagues have produced and disseminated. The programs have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Physical Society, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and various foundations and corporations. The author gives detailed examples of using science and the arts to reach the public and students with respect to programming related to the play Copenhagen, the opera Doctor Atomic, the Science & the Arts Series, a major international conference on Communicating Science to the Public, and many other outreach efforts.     

Hegel and the Paradox of Democratic Education

This article explores Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a work on education that responds to two democratic ideals: the ideal of individual integrity, which demands that individuals come to know the principles that animate them of their own accord, and the ideal of collectivism, which demands that individuals be at home in a shared world. While the great political works of Plato and Rousseau fasten on one of these ideals at the expense of the other, I show that Hegel’s political philosophy accepts both. The result is what I call the paradox of democratic education. Hegel solves this paradox through a three-fold pedagogical strategy which speaks to the transformational possibilities of institutions as well as more directly to the needs of the “ironic consciousness.” This strategy reveals a Hegel who calls on us to strengthen our commitment to a democratic polity through a deeper conception of the requirements of democratic education.