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Keynote speakers and Round Table Discussion08/07/15 : 10:30-12:00 Vincent Dubois : What do public policies do to their publics ? The impact policies have on people cannot be reduced neither to changes in their environment, nor to the provision of a service. As Everett Hughes famously put it, doing something for someone is always also doing something to someone. The question is therefore what public policies do to the individuals who form their publics. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, I will explore how and with which limits the enforcement of social norms through public policies can affect the representations, the dispositions and the attitudes of the persons subjected to it, in addition to possible changes in their status. Examples will be taken mainly from my research on cultural policy and social welfare. His research focuses on the sociology and political culture, language policies, the public treatment of poverty and more generally on the public action sociology. He is currently working on welfare recipients control policies. Round Table Discussion : Magic and magicians in policy-making With Frank FISCHER (Rutgers University), Daniel GAXIE (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Theodore M. PORTER (UCLA) and Emery ROE (UC Berkeley) Such a provocative roundtable, entitled “magic and magicians of public policy”, is evidently rooted in the Weberian concept of enchantment and disenchantment of the world. The bottom line is to discuss whether all kind of magics have disappeared from legal-rational societies and/or from policy-making. Anthropologists studying African, South-East Asian and Latin-American Indian politics have regularly stated to what extent “traditional” discourses and practices on witchcraft (white magic) and sorcery (black magic) have shown surprisingly resilient in the face of “modernity”. The relationships between “magic” and “modernity” are extremely complex, refer to hybridation and are clear manifestations of the re-enchantment of “modernity” (Geschiere 1997). As such, in Post-colonial Africa, it is common to analyse the explosion of new forms of wealth amidst utter poverty through the lenses of sorcery and witchraft. Magic is often a proxy for capitalist exploitation, since the rapidity in which certain businessmen accumulate enormous amounts of economic capital is often explained by their abilities to resort to occult forces and to the traffic of zombies (Fisiy and Geschiere 1991). In Post-Apartheid rural South Africa, the living dead remains a popular figure to refer to the immigrant, the “non standard” worker, which is held responsible for the unemployment and economic crisis. Zombies are not held as fantastic fables but are generally taken for granted in respectable local newspapers, in labour disputes, in popular culture (documentaries, theatrical productions, songs) and even in provincial commissions of inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murder. The repetition of discourses vis-à-vis the rise of the living deads and the Zombie makers which exploit them, make the threat of the spectral workforce all too concrete (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). Are western capitalist democracies immune to such practices and discourses? Various pieces of evidence show that it is obviously not the case. A significant amount of so-called rational concepts and ideas are deeply rooted in invisible forces. Think about Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is meant to drive market forces; about the (non-popperian) concept of charisma that is frequently used in politics but very rarely demonstrated ; or the relevance of opinion polls for decision-makers where opinion analysts are turned into modern haruspices who drive “opinion-responsive government”. Political science itself is often embedded in what Bernard Lacroix calls the “animist tradition” (Lacroix 1984) where scholars grant existence to legal or scientific fictions: the State does this; the market is receptive to such and such incentives ; there is a social demand for such projects, and so on. A set of questions can help structuring the roundtable: 1. Who can be held as magicians, sorcerers and witches in allegedly rational society? Are we not facing magic when policy designers and reformers claim they can solve problems rationally, when they offer new problematisations to old problems, new “paradigms” (Hall 1993), “causal stories” (Stone 2001) or “narratives” (Roe 1994). They may bring new reasons to believe in the way the State and administrations can make a difference, they may boost the illusio and libido of disenchanted civil servants and citizens (Gaxie 1999: 9). To what extent can experts be held as magicians for policy-makers who are in need for “miracle solutions”, notably in critical junctures (Fischer 1990)? 2. In a similar vein, to what extent are politicians and their partners sincere/cynical when they claim “yes we can”, “le changement, c’est maintenant” or “Podemos”, although policy analysis has now shown for decades that the policy process was not only a “policy mess” but also locked in path dependent processes? Are we meant to be left disenchanted or do we have to redefine or better conceptualise the nature of truth? What is the status of truth for decision-makers: a fake illusion? A dirty manipulative trick designed to convince gullible masses? Or a myth in the Antique sense of the term (Veyne 1988)? 3. In this respect, the contributions of policy analysts and scholars should be taken into account since they are very close to – and sometimes embedded in – the field they are meant to study. Through their articles, books, reports, do academics contribute to re-arrange, to put in words and scientific order what is usually a policy mess? 4. To open up the debate even further, one can wonder about language as a political resource, since it is a mean to construct beliefs about the significance of events, of problems, of crises, of policy changes, and of leaders, in order to legitimise certain courses of action, threaten or reassure people so as to encourage them to be supportive or to remain quiescent. As we know, the symbolic dimension is a crucial component of public policy, but who are the sorcerers of language and numbers (Porter 1995)? Frank Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Politics and Global Affairs at Rutgers University (the State University of New Jersey in the United States). He teaches environmental politics and policy, public policy analysis, U.S. politics and foreign policy, economic policymaking. He is also a senior faculty fellow at the University of Kassel in Germany. He is currently KIVA Gastprofessor at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the Department of Political Science. Daniel Gaxie is professor of Political Science at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). His many works and publications dealing with various aspects of political systems (political participation, political indifference, voting, elections, politicization, surveys, methodology and epistemology of the social sciences, opinions and political attitudes the political and administrative institutions ...). Founder of the Standing Group on Political Sociology of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), he is particularly committed in recent years to study the attitudes towards Europe by publishing L'Europe des Européens. Enquête comparative sur les perceptions de l'Europe, Paris, Economica, 2010, co-directed with Nicolas Hubé, Marines Lassalle, Jay Rowell, translated into German (Das Europa der Europäer. Über die Wahrnehmungen eines politischen Raums, Bielefeld, 2011) and English (Perceptions of Europe. A comparative sociology of European attitudes, Essex, ECPR Press, 2011).
Nina Eliasoph : What is Empowerment ? -Promote civic engagement: equality, openness, reasonableness The point is both to show how these missions typically conflict (by drawing on my own and others’ work), and to figure out what the universe of organizations that share these characteristics is. This second endeavor is not simple, since some, but not all, of the following types of organizations can be empowerment projects: non-governmental organizations, municipal participatory budget projects, economic development projects, social service agencies, social enterprises, or humanitarian aid projects.
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