Jury Service as an Invitation to Citizenship: Assessing the Civic Value of Institutionalized Deliberation

When considering the merits of deliberative democracy, it is important to look into the experience of the American jury system. The jury has demonstrated the potential for citizen deliberation to play a central role in longstanding governmental institutions, but it has also played an unrecognized role in promoting civic engagement. Building on previous research demonstrating how jury service spurs increased electoral participation after jury service, we present results from a three-wave panel survey that show that a subjectively rewarding jury experience can spur broader civic engagement beyond voting. Given the value of the jury as both a model of deliberation and an engine of civic spirit, we consider the potential value of creating citizen juries to improve the initiative process, which currently lacks the citizen deliberation that is essential for any effective direct democratic processes.     

Performing the Lodge: Masonry, masculinity, and nineteenth-century North American moral geography

Geographies reinforce gender and facilitate gender performativity. In this study of nineteenth-century Masonry, we demonstrate the influence of Masonic Temples in the promotion and performance of ‘Masonic masculinity.’ Masonry, through its design and construction of interior space, its embedded material symbolism and especially the geography of Masonic ritual itself, inculcated morality in prospective and raised Master Masons. Masonic Temple architecture and décor typify Victorian moral environmentalism vis-à-vis the parlor, the Masonic Lodge a domesticated male space where significant numbers of bourgeois men (and women) acted out a particular and peculiar masculine moral geography.     

INAA of pre-contact basalt quarries on the Samoan Island of Tutuila: a preliminary baseline for an artifact-centered provenance study

This project presents a material-centered instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) characterization of 120 geologic samples selected from four fine-grained basalt quarries on the Samoan Island of Tutuila. Previous attempts at definitive differentiation of these Tutuilan quarries have utilized x-ray fluorescence (XRF). In this study, clear differentiation of each analyzed quarry was achieved using INAA. Biplots of canonical discriminant analysis (CDA) scores for the INAA data illustrate clear separation based on the variation in chemical composition between each quarry. The samples analyzed not only define quarry separation, but also provide the “core group” for a preliminary baseline necessary for future artifact-centered provenance studies. Inclusion of these “core group” samples in the baseline was confirmed by stepwise discriminant analysis. These findings suggest the ability to determine artifact quarry of origin on the island of Tutuila, which can elucidate the importance of individual Tutuilan quarries in the production, distribution and consumption of fine-grained basalt artifacts in Polynesia.     

Cultural diplomacy: beyond the national interest?

The field of cultural diplomacy, which looms large in present-day cultural policy and discourse, has been insufficiently analysed by the cultural disciplines. This special issue engages with the task of filling the gap. The present essay sets out the terms in which the authors have taken up this engagement, focusing principally on Australia and Asia. Distinguishing between cultural diplomacy that is essentially interest-driven governmental practice and cultural relations, which is ideals-driven and practiced largely by non-state actors, the authors pursue a twofold aim. First, to demystify the field, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; second, to better understand how actually-existing discourses of cultural diplomacy and/or cultural relations operate in different national contexts. The essay seeks in particular to scrutinize the current confusion surrounding cultural diplomacy and, in the context of the changing role of the nation-state, to explore its possibilities as an instrument for going beyond the national interest.     

Decentring the state: perspectives from the encounter between India and Australia

This introduction makes a case for assembling an archive of approaches taken individuals and groups independently of the state to rethink the nature of the Indo-Australian relationship. It situates the project in the scholarship of different knowledge formations – most of all international relations – about the future of the nation-state and the modern state system. Our contributors write from a postcolonial standpoint in support of minority knowledges, subordinated peoples and reform of the global system. It is argued that postcolonialism has a natural affinity with the everyday, although in practice the relationship is not so cut and dried. This essay concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which each essay contributes to the collective project.