Reminder: WedTech Lecture Today, Jonathan Barker

[Stephen Guerin]

Pizza will be available...

TITLE: Fearful Asymmetry: Terror, Power, and the Shape of Popular Action
SPEAKER: Jonathan Barker
AFFILIATION: Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Toronto

TIME: Wed June 8 12:30p-1:30
LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room

ABSTRACT: The deeper argument for participation holds that through participation
in the decisions that affect their lives, people exercise and develop the best
of themselves as full human and social beings.  Participation takes further
meaning from its potential for pushing social reforms that reduce injustices
within and between societies.  Today these positive qualities of participation
are challenged by core features of globalization. Participation requires spaces
in which equality of voices is recognized and protected, yet globally and in
most economies and large-scale organizations inequality of social and economic
power is on the rise.  The most complete forms of participation take place in
settings that make decisions for whole communities and encompass all the
features of social life, yet power tends to become more fragmented and dispersed
with the deliberative bodies losing power in relation to military machines,
corporations, and administrative bureaucracies. New technologies of violence
threaten participation from the mighty via bombs and security police, and from
the margins via terrorist acts. New information technologies strengthen the
strong, but also give new capacities to the weak. The fear inspired by terrorist
acts and the so-called war on terrorism has skewed the field of action sharply
in favor of the holders of economic and military power.  Those who work for the
deeper benefits of expanded participation in particular activities are
well-placed to assess this new fearful asymmetry and to act against it. Many of
the most committed and creative participatory initiatives are local, but their
success is not assured by only local strengths. Local participation works best
when it is linked to wider networks of technical and political knowledge, when
it gains some support from higher political and administrative officials, and
where basic political rights are protected by laws and customs. Spreading the
benefits of participation under today?s conditions will require new kinds of
settings joined in new kinds of networks.

BIO Jonathan Barker?s teaching, writing, and research have focused on issues of
participation and political change in the developing world. His research on
rural policy and politics in Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda shows how political
action is related to a crisis of livelihood and complex survival strategies
(Rural Communities under Stress: Peasant Farmers and the State in Africa,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). He developed a conception of
political settings that can be used in field research on grass roots political
action.  The ideas are explained and put to use in a series of case studies in
India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Nicaragua, the United States, and England he
carried out in collaboration with graduate researchers.  That work showed how
people with little power and few resources often can create and use political
space to defend their livelihoods and to assert their identities (Street-Level
Democracy: Political Settings at the Margins of Global Power, Toronto: Between
the Lines, 1999 and West Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian Press, 1999.) Most
recently he has tried to understand the ways popular political action is
affected by terrorist acts and the war on terrorism (No-Nonsense Guide to
Terrorism, Toronto, Between the Lines and the New Internationalist, 2003 and
London: Verso, 2003). Jonathan Barker is Professor Emeritus of Political Science
at the University of Toronto. His email is [hidden email]