Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy

Abstract:  The corporatization of organics has been critiqued for the concentration of ownership, as well as the ecological consequences of the long distances commodities travel between field and table. These critiques suggest a competing vision of food democracy which strives to organize the production and consumption of food at a proximate geographic scale while increasing opportunities for democratically managed cooperation between producers and consumers. This paper examines how the corporate-organic foodscape has interacted and evolved alongside competing counter movements of food democracy. Using discourse and content analysis, we examine how corporate organics incorporate messages of locally scaled food production, humble origins, and a commitment to family farms and employees, and explore some of the complexity of the corporate-organic foodscape. This paper contributes to the understanding of commodity fetishism in the corporate-organic foodscape, and speaks more generally to the need for sophisticated understandings of the complex relationship between social movement innovation and market adaptation.     

浅析十七届四中全会对党内民主建设的创新

中共十七届四中全会关于党内民主建设提出了很多新思想、新观点,主要有：党内民主是党的生命,集中统一是党的力量保证;在党内民主建设中要坚持和完善党的领导制度;以保障党员民主权利为根本,以加强党内基层民主建设为基础;完善党代表大会制度和党内选举制度;完善党内民主决策机制等。     

建国60年来党内民主发展的历程、经验及前瞻

发展党内民主不仅是党的建设的重要内容,而且是国家民主政治建设的路径选择。本文以党章的修改为历史视角,研究从其中折射出的新中国成立60年以来党内民主科学发展的历史进程,进而总结了党内民主实现科学发展的基本经验,并以此历史经验为理论依据,试对党内民主的未来发展走向做出学理性的前瞻。     

从西方化到本土化:英国的殖民统治与马来西亚的政治发展

马来西亚是政治发展较为成功的发展中国家。马来西亚政治发展的成功,在很大程度上是由于对殖民时期的政治遗产进行了适当的本土化改造,使民主与权威同时为政治稳定提供支撑,形成了介于民主与权威之问的政治体制。马来西亚政治发展的经验说明,发展中国家只有根据本国国情对继承而来的政治遗产进行本土化的改造,才能建立适合本国社会与历史特点的稳定的政治体制。西方的政治发展模式并不是普适性的真理,发展中国家在探寻政治发展道路过程中也可以形成自己的政治发展模式,从而使人类文明的发展变得更加丰富多彩。     

Australia’s Detention Centre and the Erosion of Democracy in Nauru

Since 2013, the Nauru government has undermined democracy by reducing the independence of the judiciary, treating opposition MPs as potential traitors, curbing freedom of speech and restricting visits by variously defined groups of people who include journalists, Australians and New Zealanders. New Zealand responded by suspending its aid to Nauru’s justice and border control department. Australia, by contrast, has said little. The Nauru government would not have acted so boldly in curbing civil freedoms and weakening the rule of law if Australia had been less dependent on its goodwill to act as host for Australia’s Regional Processing Centre, which houses asylum seekers who have attempted to reach Australia by boat. Australia’s reliance on Nauru – driven by urgent domestic political considerations – has fostered an atmosphere where the principles of good governance can be flouted with little fear of significant criticism from Canberra.     

Contesting Neoliberal Urbanism in Glasgow's Community Gardens: The Practice of DIY Citizenship

In this journal, it has been suggested that citizens practising community gardening “can become complicit in the construction of neoliberal hegemony”. Such hegemony is maintained, it is argued, through the day‐to‐day work of neoliberal citizen‐subjects, which “alleviates the state from service provision”. In this paper we acknowledge that community gardens are vulnerable to neoliberal cooptation. But, even where neoliberal practices are evidenced, such practices do not define or foreclose other socio‐political subjectivities at work in the gardens. We contend that community gardens in Glasgow cultivate collective practices that offer us a glimpse of what a progressively transformative polity can achieve. Enabled by an interlocking process of community and spatial production, this form of citizen participation encourages us to reconsider our relationships with one another, our environment and what constitutes effective political practice. Inspired by a range of writings on citizenship formation we term this “Do‐It‐Yourself” (DIY) Citizenship.     

Machiavelli’s Philosophical Anthropology

This article seeks to address a tension in contemporary scholarship regarding Machiavelli’s view of human nature. While it is common for readers to identify Machiavelli’s rejection of any foundational law that determines the structure of the world, it is just as common for them to abstract human nature from this world and thereby to posit a fixed human essence. Machiavelli is thus seen as an anti-essentialist when it comes to external nature and as an essentialist when it comes to internal human nature. I will attempt to demonstrate, however, that for Machiavelli these two interpretations are integrated into an overall ontology of being that rejects all forms of essentialist thinking, including all positive models of human nature. Machiavelli’s rejection of a fixed or positive human essence will be demonstrated by analyzing his account of the openness of human being to change and alteration by socialization, and his account of the multiplicity of forms of human doing and being. I argue that Machiavelli’s rejection of a fixed essence underlies his affirmation of a negative essence—the specifically human desire for value-formation and the perpetual recreation of the world and, by extension, of the self. An appreciation of this affirmation, furthermore, has important consequences for how we think about Machiavelli’s preferred form of republican institutionalization.     

Are Canadians Stealth Democrats? An American Idea Comes North

In an influential 2002 study, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse make the provocative argument that high numbers of Americans seek “stealth democracy,” that is, processes that discover the will of the people without requiring substantial citizen effort. This article applies the concept in a Canadian province and argues that the stealth democracy measure represents an ambiguous amalgam of attitudes that are only loosely related to one another, and which do not appear to represent a single, underlying concept. We draw on 2011 Saskatchewan Election Study data and find that Saskatchewan responses to the stealth democracy items generally parallel the responses gathered in previous studies conducted in the United States, Finland, Britain, and Australia. We move beyond these studies by examining the components of the stealth democracy index. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of stealth democracy be rebuilt to better distinguish among attitudes toward democracy, politics, and governing.