My Brain Is Exploding Trying To Capture In A Title All The Connections I'm Thinking

This post got started by this tweet.

Administrative Theory & Praxis has announced a call for papers for a new special issue titled "Toward Prefigurative Public Administration"! Special issue editors are Dr. Jeannine Love (@JeannineMLove ) and Dr. Margaret Stout. Check out the call here: https://t.co/27YV0vbHaO

— PA Theory Network (@patheory) October 3, 2018

The PA Theory Network was the professional group that I felt most at home with in the world of academic public administration.  It was the only group that I knew of that rewarded folks who seriously challenged the accepted assumptions.

When I read this I wasn't quite sure what 'prefigurative public administration' was - I haven't kept up with the literature too well since I retired.  But it sounded worth going to the link in the tweet.  That got me to stuff like:

Call for Papers: Toward Prefigurative Public Administration
Special Issue Editors: Drs. Jeannine Love and Margaret Stout

"Contemporary public administration continues to struggle with how to address the deeply interdependent issues that comprise the “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 155) of sustainability—including social, political, economic, and environmental crises. Responses to this challenge have been shaped by ontological assumptions that drive strategies for knowledge production and understandings of “best” practices. As a result, ideas about effective governance have shifted over time; from government modeled on military style hierarchy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to business-oriented models and privatization in the late twentieth century, to collaborative network governance at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Within this latest turn, proponents of governance networks argue that coordinating responses to complex policy challenges across jurisdictional and sectoral borders can yield “collaborative advantage” over traditional governance approaches (Huxham, 2000). However, assessments of actual governance networks yield poor results. It has been argued that despite the rhetorical commitment to collaboration, these governance networks perpetuate the practices of hierarchy and competition (Stout & Love, 2019) and that new social movements more effectively function as collaborative networks (Love & Stout, 2018). This symposium therefore asks what public administration can learn from such sources."

Yes, jargon filled sentences like this are why I'm blogging rather than writing academic papers these days.  But, in the writers' defense, most of the readers of announcements like this understand this shorthand for more complicated ideas. If a carpenter had to describe a 'hammer' every time he needed to mention one, it would take forever.  In any case, I sensed that some of my own frustration with mainstream public administration was embedded in this call for paper proposals.  I could possibly write about stuff like this that calls for an entirely new way of thinking about the structure and purpose of governments.

So I scrolled down to see the bibliography.  The first on the list is:

Dixon, Chris. 2014. Another politics: Talking across today's transformative movements. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

OK, I thought, this is getting better.  Chris was a high school classmate of my daughter's.  He's one of the nicest, most thoughtful, respectful people I know.  And he's seriously dedicated to making a better world.

So, two of my worlds are coming together here.  In fact, Chris and J and I  had dinner, serendipitously, together at the Thai Kitchen this summer.  But I haven't actually read any of Chris' books or articles.  So, I looked up the book reference.  I can get it on Amazon.  But my sense is that's not where Chris would want me to buy it. If you read on you'll understand.  But I found a link to a paper that was probably the precursor to the book.  

So I've been reading it online, while watching the surf pound off the balcony.  (I did my bike ride this morning at 8am on a new route I discovered - it goes along a main highway, but it's more than a painted line on the side - it's separated by grass as well.  It allows me to ride my 30 minutes out without anything to slow me down, and it goes by the visitors center for the wildlife sanctuary I've been visiting. It's all connected.  A good ride.)

So Chris' paper is an attempt to map out the various anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist,  non-sectarian movements that are working for a world without oppression.  He's showing where they came from, where they overlap and where they have differences.

The terms - including anarchists, but not so much anti-authoritarian - all seem to identify what people are against (and he notes that) instead of what they are for.  I guess when someone is beating you, you are against being beaten first and foremost and you'll worry about what comes next when the beating stops.

Some of the movements he mentions that overlap include:
1.  Anarchism

2.  Global Resistance to Neoliberalism

3.  Prison Abolitionism

5.  Women of Color Feminism

All of these need explanation for the average person, including me, to grasp.  They aren't terms that our history books and dominant political system look kindly on.  That should tip people off right away that maybe there's something here.  So I should spell this out more.

He says, in part, about Anarchism (clearly talking about the modern version):

"The first strand begins in the anarchism of the 1990s. The mostly young people involved in this anarchist politics and activism were connected through a series of predominantly white and middle-class subcultural scenes, often rooted in punk rock, across the U.S. and Canada. They set up local Food Not Bombs groups,10 learned direct action skills through militant queer organizing and radical environmentalist campaigns, supported U.S. political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, worked to inject art and imagination into activism, organized anarchist convergences and conferences across North America, and developed a network of anarchist bookstores and political spaces known as infoshops."

Then, Global Resistance to Neoliberalism.

A second strand has its origins in the international revolt against neoliberalism, especially growing from the global South. Building on legacies of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, this started in the 1980s with widespread popular mobilizations against austerity measures mandated by the International Monetary Fund. By the early 1990s, meetings of neoliberal institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) faced massive protests from Bangalore to Berlin.13 And then, on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation stepped onto the world stage by seizing seven cities in Chiapas. “Ya Basta!” (“Enough!”), they said in opposition to the Mexican government and neoliberalism.

Anarchism in the Global Justice Movement  [The formatting of this paper seems to slip an extra strand in here, but clearly this is part of Global Resistance.  If my severe abbreviation here is problematic for you, the link to the whole paper is above, and here.  And perhaps get a copy of the book, which I'm sure is an improved version of all this.]

"Through the global justice movement, thousands of people participated in anti-authoritarian approaches and politics. At the same time, this cycle of struggle provided opportunities for anarchist and anarchist-influenced activists to wrestle with their own limitations in the context of a growing movement. Longtime radical and writer Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez raised some of these with her widely circulated essay “Where was the color in Seattle?”19 This critical intervention and subsequent ones fostered widespread discussion. While the conversations were most visible around the racial composition of summit mobilizations, they opened up a range of crucial issues: the relation between global justice mobilizing and community-based organizing; the question of building strategic and effective broad-based radical movements in Canada and the U.S. linked to other movements across the globe; and how to confront hierarchies of race, gender, class, age, and experience as they were being reproduced in movement spaces."

Prison Abolitionism - finally a term that most people can, I think, understand.  But I suspect many would  exclaim, "but we need prisons."

"A third* crucial strand leading into the anti-authoritarian current has its origins in popular struggles against policing and prisons, especially in communities of color.
In 1998, the radical edge of this movement came together at an ambitious conference in Berkeley, California called Critical Resistance (CR), out of which developed an organization of the same name. Since then, individuals and groups affiliated with and inspired by CR have played a vital role in the movement against the PIC, whether through CR chapters in places such as Oakland or New Orleans or organizations such as the Prisoners Justice Action Committee in Toronto.27
Many abolitionists also have begun to explore alternatives to state-based strategies for dealing with violence in communities and interpersonal relationships. This approach has opened small but significant spaces for organizations and communities to experiment with ways of reducing harm and resolving conflict."

#BlackLivesMatter would fit as one of the groups he's talking about.

[See the book White Rage by Carol Anderson for much more detail on how the prison system has extended slavery for blacks in the US up to today.]

*[The way the paper was formatted, I got this as the fourth strand, but I suspect the extra one was either number 1 (Anarchism) or 3 Anarchism and the Global Justice Movement.  I'm sure this was all worked out in the book.]

5.  Women of Color Feminism

"Both the anti-capitalist current in the global justice movement and prison abolitionism draw upon and connect with a fourth strand, which is usually known as anti-racist feminism or women of color feminism. This sort of feminist politics has roots in earlier struggles, but it bloomed in the liberation movements of the 1960s and came into its own more fully in the 1970s and 1980s. And although this politics took many routes, they all started in a similar place: radical women of color, many of them lesbians, criticizing the limitations of existing movements to account for their experiences of oppression. Coming together in groups, conferences, publishing collectives, and
social scenes, these activists began creating shared politics grounded in their lives and struggles. Through these collaborations, they also constructed the category “women of color” as a new radical political identity."

Chris takes these strands and then goes on to write about what they all have in common:

1.  refusing exploitation and oppression,
2.  developing new social relations,
3. linking struggles and visions, and
4. grassroots nonhierarchical organizing

He says that what they are all striving for is "another politics" which he describes

"One useful way to understand another politics, it seems to me, is as an emerging political pole within anarchism and the left more broadly. A growing set of anti-authoritarians are staking out this pole through work significantly based in the four principles I laid out above. With these politics and related practices, this pole draws many activists and organizers who are fed up with the problems and limitations of much contemporary anarchism in North America and yet remain committed to the best of the anarchist tradition: a far-reaching critique of domination, a dedication
to prefigurative politics, a commitment to building popular power, and an unbending belief in people’s capacity to create a world where we can all live with dignity, joy, and justice."

And he raises a number of questions anarchists face.  (Go read the paper for those.)

It occurred to me that if someone wants to understand what is happening in the US Senate today, I'd argue it is a clash between the capitalist, authoritarians - represented by McConnell, Trump, Kavanaugh, etc.  versus the people who are left out of power - the poor, people of color, lgbtq, immigrants.  

Chris talks about the various movements doing grass roots recruitment among ordinary citizens  caught up in these struggles, but don't see how it is structured or what they can do about it.  And I couldn't help thinking that these many organizations involved in these movements also need to be reaching out to the Trump supporters who are also victims of the capitalist and authoritarian systems.  But the Right has captured them with false narratives about race, immigrants, foreign workers, and fear of losing 'their' power.  

I'd say what Chris is doing in this paper is trying to look past the point when the beating stops and what we do then.  And as I think about public administration and how all this works into an alternative way of achieving those common goods that we need to work collectively to achieve, there are still lots of questions.  

But yes, the Founding Fathers were fighting injustice and authoritarian rule, but their vision of who deserved justice and equality before the law were restricted by the social values of their day.  

Normally, I'd let this sit overnight, but I could rework this over an over again.  So, please excuse any sloppiness you see.  But you can point it out and I'll try to make repairs.  Thanks.

And, anyone who got this far, if you have a better title fire away.  

Sunday Morning Mind Stretching

The PATNet conference goes on.  Things end this afternoon and we'll be able to get out into the beautiful San Francisco sunshine.  But meanwhile people are still earnestly discussing how to think about public administration.  

Panel: “Self-Other Relations and Utopian Transformations”


“Progressives’ Utopia: Know Thy Enemy as Yourself”

Amy Gould, The Evergreen State College

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu stated “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle” (ch. 3). In the 21st century Progressives aretheir own worst enemy. From the Reconstruction era to present day, Progressives create archetypes of utopian governance through bureaucratic systems of dependency on strangers rather than directed cooperation within communities of trust. Using historical and present day examples, the paper will support these arguments through theoretical comparisons of David Farmer’s To Kill the King, Mark Levin’s Ameritopia, and Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers. The imagination of Progressives is the site of the struggle for utopian governance.


“Accountability as an Instrument of Power: Lessons from the Louisiana BTOP”
Roy L. Heidelberg, Louisiana State University
Accountability is an essential part of the effort to construct a better world for a diverse community governed by many sovereigns. Democracy was rejected in one of the earliest

commentaries on a utopia in favor of a benevolent dictator in Republic, yet it persists today as the preferred form of governance in many societies, especially the West. To achieve a democracy requires the institution of meta-rules that guide decision making in order to guarantee answerability to the many-headed sovereign and peaceful resolution of conflict. But can we go too far in our intentional designs through accountability? In this case study I argue that the very system of controls intended to ensure answerability to the sovereign provides the edifice for obscuring actions from the sovereign. Instead of promoting transparency, a system of procedural accountability offers actors entrusted by the public the instruments to conceal their actions and intents rather than reveal them."




“Taking Things Seriously in Public Administration: Beyond the Human-Object Dichotomy”
Thomas J. Catlaw, Arizona State University (Thomas.Catlaw@asu.edu)
Thomas M. Holland Arizona State University (Thomas.Holland@asu.edu)

Thomas Holland

Does public administration think about things? This paper argues that public administration’s positivists and constructivists hold objects in generally low regard. Positivists do think much about things at all and constructivists love to police the divide between humans and things, always nervous about reification (thingification). But does it really have to be so bad to be a thing? The point of view in explored in paper is that all objects—computers, animals, plants, buildings, mountains, and languages—exist and that there is no normative hierarchy among them. To this end, we explore developments in contemporary philosophy that seek to develop a “flat ontology”  (Delanda, 2002, 2006) or a

Thomas Catlaw

“democracy of objects” (Bryant, 2011). We then to see how these ideas can help public administration reframe some tradition problems, like agency. Consistent with developments in contemporary philosophy, we call our position speculative realism (Bryant, Srnicek, & Harman, 2011) insofar as it wantonly speculative and metaphysical in its effort to consider the existence of real things and to consider them as real—not just artifacts of human consciousness, construction, and language.






Sarah Surak, "Utopian Visions of Waste/Reimagining a Closed Loop Economy."  [Sarah was added to this panel and I couldn't find an abstract and I would presume to try to write my own.]



Moderator/Discussant
Larry Luton (on the right of the top photo)

Bond Swaps and Occupy Oakland

Two really good talks over lunch going on now at the PATNet conference.

Journalist (and Sociology PhD) Darwin Bond-Graham talked about how during the Occupy time, they managed to politicize public finance by unraveling the complex mechanisms of bond swaps that had Oakland paying Goldman Sachs a billion dollars (sorry I wasn't taking notes, so I may be a bit off here).  He also related how a 1998 bond covered police and fire pensions - and most of the retired police were white and had moved out of Oakland - to the Sierra foothills, Hawaii, etc.  And the relationship between $1billion owed to the pension fund that had to come from the present, basically diverse Oakland population paying to cover the losses on the pension fund.  Here's an article he wrote that gives a lot more details.

And here's a link to his blog that has a lot more stories.

Now Laleh Behbehanian, a graduate sociology student at UC Berkeley is now talking about the experience of Occupy Oakland - how it was organized and run.  About some of the philosophical underpinnings - like taking back public space for the people.  How they used General Assemblies to decide on how and what to do. 

Rather than my trying to capture this I'm going to post a video I've found on Youtube featuring Laleh.

Dystopias - Three Presentations On Conspiracies In US And Lack of Academic Coverage of Them

Here's the panel I'm at this morning.  (Yeah I'm here at 8am - that's 7am Alaska time)

(l-r)Thorne, Good, Wilson, DeHaven-Smith (head), Witt

I've decided the best I can do is give you the abstracts and some pictures.  So here you go. 

Concurrent Session III, Session #1
Saturday June 1, 2013
8:00 am

Panel: "Between Rocks and Hard Places, Dystopias and Utopias: Of Cold War, Camelot, and Beyond”
Cold War hysteria made John F. Kennedy's peace overtures to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev—first in Cuba, then Indochina—into the dystopian nightmares of the military industrial complex (MIC) and its allies. The usage of Kennedy’s assassination to render salient and vivid the MIC’s preferred narrative of an evil other poised against a forever virtuous America, a "City on the Hill", links the deaths of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and scores of others. We know from the Church Commission hearings the extent to which civil rights activism was tarred with communist hysteria by the machinations of the FBI and its COINTELPRO units. Presumptive dystopian vistas fabricated by state secrecy, counter-insurgent propaganda (the "conspiracy theory" and “red scare” memes) and media manipulation form a clear and coherent pattern of elite usurpation of government authority in U.S. history over the past several decades. Today war mongering and profiteering culminate with the dystopian nightmare of a forever militarized US devoted to Orwellian contradictions, teetering perilously towards the very real nightmare vista William Sloane Coffin limned succinctly: "Hell is truth seen too late." This panel assembles papers that key into topical areas #1 and #2 of this year’s PATNet conference call, examining direct and indirect political and administrative consequences of President Kennedy’s assassination and the legacy of permanent war zeitgeist now inscribed throughout U.S. governing institutions.

Convener: Matthew Witt, University of LaVerne

“The Dystopian Turn in America’s Political Lexicon after the Assassination of President Kennedy”
Lance deHaven-Smith, Florida State University (dehavensmith@earthlink.net)
The assassination of President Kennedy is widely considered to have marked a turning point in American politics and civic culture.  Almost immediately after the assassination, the Kennedy years were described in utopian terms as “Camelot.”   This label was associated with youth, prosperity, progress, and grandeur, and this is how the “Kennedy Era,” as it is now called, continues to be viewed. Eventually looking back, Americans viewed themselves as having lost pride and faith in the nation’s political class, its optimism about the nation’s future, and its trust in government. As scores of polls indicate,

certainly trust in government declined, and suspicions about government conspiracies proliferated.  But how did the president’s assassination cause the civic culture to take this dystopian turn?  Why did the government’s efforts to discredit JFK-assassination conspiracy theories fail? How should government respond to these suspicions today, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches and refocuses attention on the crime?  What are the implications for government action in the future when suspicious political crimes and tragedies occur?  This paper will analyze data from Google Labs’ “n-gram” database to track changes in the American political lexicon in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy. The n-gram database is a set of searchable datasets containing 500 billion words and phrases from 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008.  Google’s “n-gram viewer” offers a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of civic culture in response to major events and official accounts.
 
“Dystopian Crucible:  The Kennedy Assassinations and the Fate of “American Liberalism”
Aaron Good, Temple University
Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this paper reexamines the consequences of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers.  It finds that rather than being stochastic and ultimately insignificant phenomena, the assassinations were pivotal events with enormous structural effects on American politics in the decades since. Questions examined include the

following: How did the pragmatic ‘eutopian’ project of American liberalism essentially vanish from the American political landscape?  What events were most responsible for the breakdown of the liberal Bretton-Woods international economic order?  Was there a crucible that eventually gave rise to the project for neoliberal globalization, a project that has assumed an increasingly dystopian cast?  How did America’s postwar position as vaguely benevolent global capitalist hegemon deteriorate to the extent that it is now the financially strained, militarily overstretched, neoliberal hegemon that we see today? 



Dystopian Spectacle and the False Flag Mechanism: Dallas, The Gulf of Tonkin, and Watergate
Eric Wilson, Monash University
Abstract: As David Kaiser has recently demonstrated in his magisterial The Road to Dallas: the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2008), the stage-managing of self-induced political crises and states of emergency—the ‘false flag’—became part of the standard operational procedure of the US ‘dual state’ over the course of the Cold War. Discussing Operation Northwoods and its uncanny resemblance to the ‘Cuban angle’ of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Dallas, Kaiser reveals how the Kennedy assassination, even if it were the handiwork of a ‘lone gunman’, can be cognitively situated into the wider networks of parapolitical relationships of the dual state. Whatever the truth of Dallas, the ‘false flag’ was successfully deployed in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis of August 1964, leading to direct and

full-scale US military intervention throughout the entirety of Indo-China. The parapolitical continuity between Dallas and Watergate is given additional plausibility by interpreting the constitutional crisis of the Nixon presidency as a parapolitical attempt to undermine, or at least retaliate against, post-Vietnam peace settlement and detente. The notorious ‘third-rate burglary’ may itself have been a highly singular form of the false flag, signifying the complete undermining of the public liberal state by the shadow deep state. This paper outlines a ‘minimalist’ theory of a conspiracy to assassinate the President; that is, in order for a ‘conspiracy’ to be made out on the basis of the historical record before us, what conditions must have been fulfilled and what is the absolute minimum that must be true? A ‘minimalist’ theory would involve two necessary suppositions: (i) that the murder of Kennedy was a ‘false flag’ operation (the artificial creation of a ‘state of exception’ by the covert agencies of the State to further a foreign policy objective—in this case, the invasion of Cuba); and (ii) that the epicenter of the operation was within the disparate and myriad ‘parapolitical’ networks of Cold War New Orleans (CIA, DIA, NI, Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban networks).

Moderator: Kym Thorne, University of South Australia

Really, there are women at this conference, they play a big role, but I'm afraid the two panels I've covered so far are just men. 
There was another paper scheduled, but the presenter didn't make it.  Judging from the name, I'm guessing missing the presenter is a woman.

“Dystopian Denial: How Failure in Public Discourse Fuels the Drug-Security Relationship” 
Laurie Manwell, University of Guelph
Utopia” is inextricably linked with Western hegemony and violence and cannot be productively rehabilitated unless the denial of a dystopian reality is destroyed. Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Western "drug-security relationship" has fueled America’s economic and military influence over the rest of the world--notoriously revealed by the Iran-Contra scandal. Collective denial of such “deep state events” (global criminal syndicates) is a way to control information related to drug trafficking, human security, and war policy. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) now emphasizes research “based on a public health and human rights approach,” including “drug prevention, treatment and rehabilitation efforts focused on decreasing vulnerability among at-risk groups, including women, youth, prisoners, people who have been trafficked and people living with HIV/AIDS” (UNODC, 2010, p. 43). Yet collective denial of the “the twin forces of sanctioned violence and drugs” has permitted the metastasis of the “deep state” of which there will be no recompense until “these interactions are publicly exposed and debated” (Scott, 2010, p. 16). If not, we face the looming prospect of “the dystopic future toward which the United States is inexorably heading[…]when ordinary people are threatened with imprisonment for petty offenses while they see elites illegally spying, invading, torturing, and plundering with nearly total impunity” (Greenwald, 2011, p. 273-4). This paper examines the role government and public administration can and should play to subvert contemporary utopian imaginings founded on misleading campaigns linking drugs and violence.

Blogging PATNet Not Like Blogging Other Events

(l-r) Howe, Bevir, Catlaw, Stanisevski

PATNet is the Public Administration Theory Network.  It's the faculty of public administration who have more of an abstract/philosophical bent.  Someone asked if I was blogging the conference.  I thought about it.  This is a conference that always pushes my brain beyond the point where I usually stop.  It's hard work.  The panels I've been to took all my attention to catch 70 or 80% of what was being said.  I need too much time to let this stuff settle to write intelligently about things as it happens.  Plus, I need the breaks to talk with folks.

Right now the head of the Asia Foundation is talking about their work in Asia, which is relatively easy to listen to as I type.  For now though I want to just let you know about the previous session.  I got enough of my blogger mode going to take some pictures and I can tell you the paper titles.

This is the conference that kept me sane and intellectually challenged over the years.  The people here pulled me into the larger issues that underlay the everyday things.  I realize the titles in this panel are particularly abstract.  But these are important intellectual challenges that push the boundaries of what I know and force me to question what I know.  This conference is probably the basic source of the title of this blog. 

Concurrent Session II, Session #2
Friday May 31, 2013
1:00 pm

Panel: “Utopias, Pluralisms, and Modes of Inquiry”

“Interpreting Governance: On Dystopian and Utopian Modes of Knowing”
Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley
This paper explores the relationship between forms of knowledge and utopian and dystopian visions. I offer a dystopian view of formal and technocratic knowledge: such knowledge erodes democracy and leads to policy failure, for it privileges experts and ignores the creativity of human agents. Thereafter I turn to the type of knowledge needed to sustain a humanist democracy and the scholarly and political practices associated with such knowledge. I emphasize the importance of an interpretive social science that allows properly for intentionality, historicism, and reflexivity. This interpretivism entails a more decentred approach to public administration – and approach I illustrate by considering work on policy networks and governance. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing the implications of the argument for policymaking: practitioners should adopt: an eclectic approach to data, a suspicion of formal models and frameworks, and a greater role for storytelling.

“Ontology Beyond Typology: Pluralism, Onto-theology, and Afoundationalism in Public Administration”
Thomas Catlaw, Arizona State University
Much work in social science has elaborated the ways in which the “ontological” assumptions of a paradigm, framework, or conceptual scheme are connected to the epistemological and methodological possibilities of those frameworks. Drawing on the work of Alain Badiou, this paper argues that, by and large, efforts to typologize social scientific paradigms share an underlying commitment to ontotheology, or the utopian proposition that Being is One. This paper elaborates the various ways in which this proposition is expressed and argues that this commitment retains a stumbling block to the development of an open, pluralistic approach to social science. The paper presents Badiou’s ontology of the pure multiple as an alternative way of approaching ontological questions and to rethinking the grounds for pluralism in social inquiry."

“Khōra: An Inquiry into Polytopian Philosophy”
Dragan Stanisevski, Mississippi State University
The proposed paper examines polytopian philosophy as an envisioning of plural societies (many-places) that could be both utopian (no-place) and eutopian (good-place) (Landi, 1536, in Tucker, 2003). The paper first looks at polytopia through Kristeva’s lens as a philosophy of inclusion (1977, 1984, 1993, 1994). The paper then connects polytopian philosophy to Derrida’s (1995) discussion of Plato’s khōra. Khōra is a space that is simultaneously an evading receptacle and an erasure and as such does not give an established architecture, but it allows an opportunity to deliberatively participate in the process of co-creation of polytopian narrative(s) of societies to be (Derrida and Eisenman, 1997, pp. 35-36). Polytopian philosophy enables us to think of possibilities of better societies where differences could meet again and again without imposition of ideological absolutes (see Mannheim, 1936).

Moderator/Discussant: Louis Howe, University of West Georgia

The folks listening

Louis Howe did a great job as moderator, giving a seemingly rambling, but clearly well thought out, set of comments and reactions and questions for each presenter.  He was self-deprecating and funny in the lowest key possible way.  And as, he said, this was a really challenging set of papers. 







I don't think I can blog too much of the conference.  This is far more challenging than blogging, say, the legislature or the redistricting board. 

"Governance and the Utopian Imagination."

That's the Public Administration Theory Network (PATnet) conference theme this year.

I proposed to the conference organizers that we make this a little more personal - what in public administration stirred our own utopian imaginations?  I reasoned: 

Most of us in PATnet have either pursued a doctoral degree and/or a career in the academic field of public administration.

So I thought it useful to ponder:

1. why we have committed so much of our time and abilities to this field
2. whether we have found what we were looking for or have been disappointed.  
3. what we hoped  to get in the field when we began,
4. what we got, and
5. what recommendations we have for people starting out today and for the field of public administration.

I got word that people on the organizing committee liked the idea but didn't know how to fit it into the schedule.  Staci Zavataro contacted me about a Tweet Up and as we talked we came up with the idea of an  ongoing side conversation before, during, and perhaps, after the conference.


Think of this as a movable session the flows throughout the conference and that people can participate in this session in different ways. 

• There's a conference hashtag on Twitter - #PATnet2013.  
• The PATnet Facebook page will host some of this. 
• You can leave comments here. 
• We're looking for help to set up a discussion forum at the PATnet website.
• We're inviting conference attendees to ask these questions of people the meet at the conference during breaks, over meals, in elevators, etc.  
• And we're going to set up an informal gathering for those who'd like to get together to follow this pursuit.  So far we've discussed a post session/pre-dinner gathering in the hotel lobby one night, but we're open to suggestions. 

Meanwhile, you can address the questions or the process in the comments section below this post.  (If you're having trouble getting past the spam blocking steps to comment, you can email me)


[NOTE to regular readers of this blog - I'm using my blog to do this because it's something I know how to do to move this along.   I hope you'll indulge me.]

[NOTE to PATnet members - we needed a place to point people to and I offered this spot on my personal blog until a more appropriate place can be set up.]

Omaha Airport Has Free Wifi

That may seem like a minor issue, I have been trying to identify the airports I've been in that have free wifi.  DC didn't.  Berlin didn't.  The Eurostar train station in Ebbsfleet didn't, nor did any of the trains we were on.  All had wifi available if you paid. 

So I like to give credit to airports that still give free wifi. 

The panel went well this morning.  Another panelist had a paper which used the beheading of John the Baptist to make a model of scapegoating which he then applied to Abu Ghraib.  And there are some interesting possible applications to Juneau too.  You can read it here.  I changed my paper too much to post it. 

We Walk to Iowa Before Dinner

As part of the conference, there was a guided walk along the redeveloped Missouri River waterfront near the hotel.  Our guide was the Army Corps of Engineers biologist who played a major role in the work.  He spoke to us a lunch about developing a plan for the Missouri including people from all the states it runs through and how the Corps had to be dragged into a new way of thinking about dams and about citizen participation.

The walk started on the Con Agra 'campus.'  Merriam Websters' online dictionary defines campus this way:

Etymology: Latin, plain

Date: 1774

1 : the grounds and buildings of a university, college, or school
2 : a university, college, or school viewed as an academic, social, or spiritual entity
3 : grounds that resemble a campus

I wonder when definition 3 came into use.  Anyway, ConAgra is a major employer here.   They are a major purveyor of packaged foods in the US, but they did withdraw advertising from the Glen Beck show,  but one could ask why they were advertising with him in the first place.  Probably because that was a good audience for them.

 Soon we were walking along the river on this warm, but very windy evening.

This is the pedestrian bridge across the Missouri River into Iowa.

This sign told not only of the good things the dams built along the Missouri did (stopped flooding downstream), but also the serious negative impacts (such as 51 of 67 native Missouri River fish are now rare, reduced in numbers, and in one case endangered). That's not something common in such public signage. 

The Missouri River from the bridge.

And into Iowa. 

Kaneko, Much Warmer, Cold

There was a reception last night at the Kaneko.  What I could figure out was there is an artist named Jun Kaneko.  I liked what I saw there, but there wasn't much information about the space.  The website gives a little more info.  The mission statement seems appropriate to this blog:

Creativity begins with an idea - seeing things differently.

By the way, did you know there was Nebraska wine?  I'm not drinking alcohol for health reasons at the moment, so I can't give a report.

It warmed up a lot - into the 70s - yesterday and today was supposed to be much warmer, but when we got up it was pouring out.  It really has to be raining hard for me to pick up the falling rain on my camera.    And then it stopped.  The parked cars in the lower left of the picture above are the same cars in the lower right of the picture below.

Those white tents in the back are the farmers' market.   J went and got some tomatoes, but I have to report, sadly, they didn't taste any better than the ones we get in Costco in Anchorage.  Not even as good.  But cheaper.

Meanwhile, I'm fighting off a cold with lots of liquid and vitamin C.

I've gotten to see some old friends and meet some new ones.  There have been some good exchanges of ideas, but nothing spectacular.  And my cold isn't helping.

To Blog or Not at PATNET

I'm tempted to bring my computer downstairs and live blog the conference. But this is a conference I've been to as a participant in the past, not as a blogger, and I'm not sure I can do both. I'll try to get up a sense of what's happening to my brain here, but I've decided it's better to spend my time talking to folks than to be blogging hard.


Mark Bevir did the opening talk this morning and then there was an afternoon panel on his talk and book Democratic Governance.  

It's been seven years since I've been to a PATNET conference and it looks like Powerpoint has made a significant beachhead.  This was a conference that had resisted the technology in favor of people talking directly to each other. 

This was a panel on the impact of technology on governance and decision making.   More later, but I'm just doing this as a quick break. 

From Sunny DC to Cool, Rainy Omaha

It was nice to see the Alaska Airlines plane at the National Airport.

It was sunny and getting warm when we left, but fairly hazy.

Rain drops as we waited for the hotel shuttle.  

Downtown Omaha.  We're here for the Public Administration Theory Network Conference.