Patricia Mooney Nickel
Biographic Data
| ID | 155677 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patricia Mooney Nickel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patricia Mooney |
| FAMILY NAME | Nickel |
| SIGNATURE | NICKEL P M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Virginia Tech |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9307-3908 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Man from Somewhere: Author, Affiliation, and Letterhead
The Man from Somewhere: Author, Affiliation, and Letterhead
Ethics, One Health approaches, and SDGs: Conference lessons for an emerging field
One Health ethics is an emerging field that has gained traction since its origin in approximately 2015. This article builds upon the insights shared during a panel discussion on One Health, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and ethical conflicts at the 28th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Society Conference. The conference, themed Sustainable Development and Courage: Culture, Art, and Human Rights, aimed to advance and e…
Philanthropy and the Politics of Well-Being
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists
It has been scarcely a decade since social scientists, prompted by Michael Burawoy's argument for public sociology, began widely debating the merits of public scholarship in the social sciences. When in 2004 Burawoy called for public sociology at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, Twitter did not exist and smartphones as we know them today were not yet on the production line. In 2008, when public sociolo…
Philanthropy, Hermeneutics, and Power
With novel charitable and philanthropic opportunities emerging at an astonishing rate, it is rarely necessary today to draw the reader’s attention to the cultural politics of philanthropy; the word philanthropy is associated with nearly every celebrity personality, as well as nearly every market transaction and community activity—from buying shoes to wearing them to a charity gala at the local donor-funded museum. These practices activate action …
Thrift Shop Philanthropy
Although the charity thrift shop is typically treated as an apolitical nonprofit entity, it plays a significant cultural and political role in the contemporary practice of governing. In this article, I am concerned with how well-being is distributed through the governance of time and labor as it intersects with the circulation of the thrift shop commodities that fund the welfare mix. I am simultaneously concerned with how these practices of power…
Luxury Lines
In its materialization of regard and disregard, the 2015 introduction of the Starbucks luxury line prompts new questions about the impact of an emergent app ascetic on the everyday practice of order. In this article, I build on previous studies of time and power, while simultaneously exploring the material practice of luxury narrated by, but practiced in contrast to, promises of community and social consciousness. I argue that time is made luxuri…
Culture, Politics, and Governing: Contemporary Ascetics and the Pecuniary Subject
In Culture, Politics, and Governing, the study of contemporary ascetics provided me with a way to approach the practice of knowledge production and its intersection with cultural production that was able to take into account the institutionalization of authors and artists and the ways in which their practices were both governed and governing, often through valorization. Recently, I have worked to extend this framework to settings that are less ob…
Haute Philanthropy: Luxury, Benevolence, and Value
In this essay I investigate the relationship between luxury, ostensible benevolence, and value as they are manifest in the production and reproduction of the pecuniary subject. I use haute philanthropy as a contrast medium through which we can understand the contemporary practice of value and subjectivity in relation to governing. I draw theorists of pecuniary relations together with contemporary understandings of subjectivity and suggest a frame…
Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft
Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inqui…
Celebration and governing: The production of the author as ascetic practice
This essay explores the power relations inherent to the contemporary practice of celebration of author production and present relations of governing. I explore such practices of celebration as a lens for understanding the role of valorization of the author in knowledge production, arguing that celebration can act as an ascetic technology that governs potentially transformative critical subjectivities. I begin with an exploration of the relationsh…
Revisiting the Artificial Negativity Thesis: An Interview with Timothy W. Luke
The Institutionalization of Author Production and the Performance Imperative as an Ontological Fiction
This essay inquires into the institutionalization of the author as a governing practice. I observe the experience of two authors—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Mr. Perestroika”—in relationship to two institutions—the Soviet Writers' Union and the American Political Science Association—as they contest the imperative to produce cultural/knowledge representations on behalf of the present. Drawing on Michel Foucault's identification of the political pra…
North American critical theory after postmodernism: Contemporary dialogues
North American Critical Theory after Postmodernism P.M.Nickel Timothy W. Luke Douglas Kellner Craig Calhoun Seyla Benhabib Andrew Arato Ben Agger Nancy Fraser Robert J. Antonio Epilogue P.M.Nickel
North American Critical Theory After Postmodernism
In a series of interviews this book explores the formative experiences of a generation of critical theorists whose work originated in the midst of what has been called 'the postmodern turn,' including
Philanthromentality: Celebrity Parables as Technologies of Transfer
The way in which individualised acts of attention-seeking by celebrities become entertaining scripts of subjectivity for a population that is increasingly aware of an overall decline in well-being offers a lens into the ways in which excessive celebrity selves and their philanthropic temperance have become ascetic cues directed at the stability of a global governing regime. In this essay I argue that modern-day parables of philanthropic celebriti…
Public Sociology and the Public Turn in the Social Sciences
Public sociology broadly conceptualized is a form of intellectuality involving dialogue between sociologists and the publics with whom they are concerned. Beyond this broad framing, what type of dialogue, with what purpose, which public(s), and the functions of intellectuals and the knowledge they produce are widely contested. In this essay, I explore the politics of academic disciplines, knowledge, and discourse as it has emerged within the deba…
Public Sociology for Human Rights as Rites of Rule
This article critically considers Michael Burawoy's 'public sociology for human rights' through the lens of Timothy W. Luke's 'rites of rule'. The author argues that, while admirable in its stated aim, public sociology for human rights neglects to reveal its roots in governmentality and thus does not recognize the empirical practice of human rights within cosmopolitan global governance as a shift to consolidated contragovernmentality. The author …
Public sociology and the governance of possibility
This chapter critically considers two conceptions of sociological labor as they have recently been articulated in two competing visions for public sociology. I use the contrast between Ben Agger's and Michael Burawoy's recent professions of public sociology as a lens through which to critically understand the way in which the narratives produced by sociological labor govern the emergence of knowledge, which would be the basis of transformation
Public Intellectuality: Academies of Exhibition and the New Disciplinary Secession
Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Welfare: A Critique of Martin
Social and political theory underwrite the welfare state in their portrayal of the world and of possibility. Edward J. Martin’s recent attempt to understand welfare policy through the lens of postmodern theory is therefore an important one and an undertaking that I appreciate. However, it is specifically because social and political theory are so influential in the construction of welfare policy that it is equally important that critical social a…
A Reply to Martin’s Response
Text, portrayal, and power: A critique of the transformation of the state thesis
Celebrations of transformation abound: globalization, global civil society, cosmopolitanism, increased 'development', and, within this cacophony of celebration, an allied transformation of the state thesis which proposes that we have entered an era in which power is competitively distributed through post‐liberal democratic governance networks. By way of reframing how we understand power relations within the transformation of the state thesis, in …
Public Administration and/or Public Sociology: Disciplinary Convergence and the Disciplinary Dispersion of Public Sentimentality
Lately, disciplinary vocabulary seems to be outpacing disciplinary transformation. Disciplinary turns of phrase are intensified in public administration not only because it is literally a governing vocabulary but also because the discipline has never been an easily definable area of scholarship or practice. Although public administration research thus far has been focused on transformations within the discipline, my focus here is outward, toward …
A Critique of the Discourse of Marketized Philanthropy
Philanthropy has received increased attention in recent years and is an important focus for social theorists concerned with discourse. The authors argue that the transformative potential of philanthropy-its potential to represent the need for and bring about social change-is increasingly lost in the current market-based discourse of philanthropy that includes consumption of products (i.e., cause-related marketing) and consumption of media and cel…
Responding to "Natural" Disasters: The Ethical Implications of the Voluntary State
Natural events are not automatically disasters; they become disasters because of their negative impact on humanity. This paper argues that the wake of natural disasters exposes the ethical difficulty of the "voluntary state." In particular, we demonstrate that the failures of the voluntary state are exposed by disasters such as that caused by Hurricane Katrina. Such failures of the voluntary state offer an unfortunate impetus for reconsidering th…
Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft
Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inqui…
Network Governance and the New Constitutionalism
We in public administration and the interdisciplinary spaces where public administration theory is increasingly relevant are seemingly engaged in an academic discourse about alternative constitutions of state administration, a fact that may be reason for optimism. Yet this is a fabricated discourse to the extent that there is very little discussion about how the state and its associated literary practices are constitutive and therefore whether or…
Thrift Shop Philanthropy
Although the charity thrift shop is typically treated as an apolitical nonprofit entity, it plays a significant cultural and political role in the contemporary practice of governing. In this article, I am concerned with how well-being is distributed through the governance of time and labor as it intersects with the circulation of the thrift shop commodities that fund the welfare mix. I am simultaneously concerned with how these practices of power…
Public Sociology and the Public Turn in the Social Sciences
Public sociology broadly conceptualized is a form of intellectuality involving dialogue between sociologists and the publics with whom they are concerned. Beyond this broad framing, what type of dialogue, with what purpose, which public(s), and the functions of intellectuals and the knowledge they produce are widely contested. In this essay, I explore the politics of academic disciplines, knowledge, and discourse as it has emerged within the deba…
Public Administration and/or Public Sociology: Disciplinary Convergence and the Disciplinary Dispersion of Public Sentimentality
Lately, disciplinary vocabulary seems to be outpacing disciplinary transformation. Disciplinary turns of phrase are intensified in public administration not only because it is literally a governing vocabulary but also because the discipline has never been an easily definable area of scholarship or practice. Although public administration research thus far has been focused on transformations within the discipline, my focus here is outward, toward …
Beyond Public vs. Private: The Transformative Potential of Democratic Feminist Management
The transformative potential of public administration is forestalled by the portrayal of management as sphere-specific or apolitical and the resultant portrayal of marginality as natural. The lived exper iences of people at the organizational level and beyond deny the ob jectivity of separating public and private management and thus, through the exposure of the politics of management, open a space for discussion of the transformative potential of…
Public Sociology for Human Rights as Rites of Rule
This article critically considers Michael Burawoy's 'public sociology for human rights' through the lens of Timothy W. Luke's 'rites of rule'. The author argues that, while admirable in its stated aim, public sociology for human rights neglects to reveal its roots in governmentality and thus does not recognize the empirical practice of human rights within cosmopolitan global governance as a shift to consolidated contragovernmentality. The author …
Haute Philanthropy: Luxury, Benevolence, and Value
In this essay I investigate the relationship between luxury, ostensible benevolence, and value as they are manifest in the production and reproduction of the pecuniary subject. I use haute philanthropy as a contrast medium through which we can understand the contemporary practice of value and subjectivity in relation to governing. I draw theorists of pecuniary relations together with contemporary understandings of subjectivity and suggest a frame…
Philanthromentality: Celebrity Parables as Technologies of Transfer
The way in which individualised acts of attention-seeking by celebrities become entertaining scripts of subjectivity for a population that is increasingly aware of an overall decline in well-being offers a lens into the ways in which excessive celebrity selves and their philanthropic temperance have become ascetic cues directed at the stability of a global governing regime. In this essay I argue that modern-day parables of philanthropic celebriti…
The Inevitability of Enduring Historical and Cultural Patterns: The Paradox of Decentralization Efforts in Ukraine
Since Ukraine's independence in 1991, Western governments, international tribunals, and global financial organizations have descended with billions of dollars and thousands of consultants, all directly or indirectly dedicated to decentralization efforts. These monies, as well as the benefits of acceptance by the European community, are often contingent upon compliance with particular Western policy recommendations for decentralization. These effo…
Philanthropy and the Politics of Well-Being
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists
It has been scarcely a decade since social scientists, prompted by Michael Burawoy's argument for public sociology, began widely debating the merits of public scholarship in the social sciences. When in 2004 Burawoy called for public sociology at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, Twitter did not exist and smartphones as we know them today were not yet on the production line. In 2008, when public sociolo…
Luxury Lines
In its materialization of regard and disregard, the 2015 introduction of the Starbucks luxury line prompts new questions about the impact of an emergent app ascetic on the everyday practice of order. In this article, I build on previous studies of time and power, while simultaneously exploring the material practice of luxury narrated by, but practiced in contrast to, promises of community and social consciousness. I argue that time is made luxuri…
Culture, Politics, and Governing: Contemporary Ascetics and the Pecuniary Subject
In Culture, Politics, and Governing, the study of contemporary ascetics provided me with a way to approach the practice of knowledge production and its intersection with cultural production that was able to take into account the institutionalization of authors and artists and the ways in which their practices were both governed and governing, often through valorization. Recently, I have worked to extend this framework to settings that are less ob…
The Institutionalization of Author Production and the Performance Imperative as an Ontological Fiction
This essay inquires into the institutionalization of the author as a governing practice. I observe the experience of two authors—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Mr. Perestroika”—in relationship to two institutions—the Soviet Writers' Union and the American Political Science Association—as they contest the imperative to produce cultural/knowledge representations on behalf of the present. Drawing on Michel Foucault's identification of the political pra…
On the Convenience of "Postmodern" Public Administration "and" the State for the Continuation of Modern Public Administration as a Legitimized State
The first half of the title of Michael Spicer's book, Public Adminis tration and the State is problematic at the outset because there is no distinction between public administration and the state; public adminis tration is the state. The second half of the title, A Postmodern Perspec tive, further confuses the issue because there is little, if any, distinction to be made between modernity and modern public administration, which, as Michel Foucaul…
The Inevitability of Enduring Historical and Cultural Patterns: The Paradox of Decentralization Efforts in Ukraine
Since Ukraine's independence in 1991, Western governments, international tribunals, and global financial organizations have descended with billions of dollars and thousands of consultants, all directly or indirectly dedicated to decentralization efforts. These monies, as well as the benefits of acceptance by the European community, are often contingent upon compliance with particular Western policy recommendations for decentralization. These effo…
Beyond Public vs. Private: The Transformative Potential of Democratic Feminist Management
The transformative potential of public administration is forestalled by the portrayal of management as sphere-specific or apolitical and the resultant portrayal of marginality as natural. The lived exper iences of people at the organizational level and beyond deny the ob jectivity of separating public and private management and thus, through the exposure of the politics of management, open a space for discussion of the transformative potential of…
Forum—Intergenerational Dialogue on Public Administration Theory: Introduction
Responding to "Natural" Disasters: The Ethical Implications of the Voluntary State
Natural events are not automatically disasters; they become disasters because of their negative impact on humanity. This paper argues that the wake of natural disasters exposes the ethical difficulty of the "voluntary state." In particular, we demonstrate that the failures of the voluntary state are exposed by disasters such as that caused by Hurricane Katrina. Such failures of the voluntary state offer an unfortunate impetus for reconsidering th…
Network Governance and the New Constitutionalism
We in public administration and the interdisciplinary spaces where public administration theory is increasingly relevant are seemingly engaged in an academic discourse about alternative constitutions of state administration, a fact that may be reason for optimism. Yet this is a fabricated discourse to the extent that there is very little discussion about how the state and its associated literary practices are constitutive and therefore whether or…
Forum—Ongoing Intergenerational Dialogue on Public Administration Theory: Introduction
On the Convenience of "Postmodern" Public Administration "and" the State for the Continuation of Modern Public Administration as a Legitimized State
The first half of the title of Michael Spicer's book, Public Adminis tration and the State is problematic at the outset because there is no distinction between public administration and the state; public adminis tration is the state. The second half of the title, A Postmodern Perspec tive, further confuses the issue because there is little, if any, distinction to be made between modernity and modern public administration, which, as Michel Foucaul…
Public Sociologies Reader
Public sociology and the governance of possibility
This chapter critically considers two conceptions of sociological labor as they have recently been articulated in two competing visions for public sociology. I use the contrast between Ben Agger's and Michael Burawoy's recent professions of public sociology as a lens through which to critically understand the way in which the narratives produced by sociological labor govern the emergence of knowledge, which would be the basis of transformation
Public Intellectuality: Academies of Exhibition and the New Disciplinary Secession
Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Welfare: A Critique of Martin
Social and political theory underwrite the welfare state in their portrayal of the world and of possibility. Edward J. Martin’s recent attempt to understand welfare policy through the lens of postmodern theory is therefore an important one and an undertaking that I appreciate. However, it is specifically because social and political theory are so influential in the construction of welfare policy that it is equally important that critical social a…
A Reply to Martin’s Response
Text, portrayal, and power: A critique of the transformation of the state thesis
Celebrations of transformation abound: globalization, global civil society, cosmopolitanism, increased 'development', and, within this cacophony of celebration, an allied transformation of the state thesis which proposes that we have entered an era in which power is competitively distributed through post‐liberal democratic governance networks. By way of reframing how we understand power relations within the transformation of the state thesis, in …
Public Administration and/or Public Sociology: Disciplinary Convergence and the Disciplinary Dispersion of Public Sentimentality
Lately, disciplinary vocabulary seems to be outpacing disciplinary transformation. Disciplinary turns of phrase are intensified in public administration not only because it is literally a governing vocabulary but also because the discipline has never been an easily definable area of scholarship or practice. Although public administration research thus far has been focused on transformations within the discipline, my focus here is outward, toward …
A Critique of the Discourse of Marketized Philanthropy
Philanthropy has received increased attention in recent years and is an important focus for social theorists concerned with discourse. The authors argue that the transformative potential of philanthropy-its potential to represent the need for and bring about social change-is increasingly lost in the current market-based discourse of philanthropy that includes consumption of products (i.e., cause-related marketing) and consumption of media and cel…
Public Sociology and the Public Turn in the Social Sciences
Public sociology broadly conceptualized is a form of intellectuality involving dialogue between sociologists and the publics with whom they are concerned. Beyond this broad framing, what type of dialogue, with what purpose, which public(s), and the functions of intellectuals and the knowledge they produce are widely contested. In this essay, I explore the politics of academic disciplines, knowledge, and discourse as it has emerged within the deba…
Public Sociology for Human Rights as Rites of Rule
This article critically considers Michael Burawoy's 'public sociology for human rights' through the lens of Timothy W. Luke's 'rites of rule'. The author argues that, while admirable in its stated aim, public sociology for human rights neglects to reveal its roots in governmentality and thus does not recognize the empirical practice of human rights within cosmopolitan global governance as a shift to consolidated contragovernmentality. The author …
North American critical theory after postmodernism: Contemporary dialogues
North American Critical Theory after Postmodernism P.M.Nickel Timothy W. Luke Douglas Kellner Craig Calhoun Seyla Benhabib Andrew Arato Ben Agger Nancy Fraser Robert J. Antonio Epilogue P.M.Nickel
North American Critical Theory After Postmodernism
In a series of interviews this book explores the formative experiences of a generation of critical theorists whose work originated in the midst of what has been called 'the postmodern turn,' including
Philanthromentality: Celebrity Parables as Technologies of Transfer
The way in which individualised acts of attention-seeking by celebrities become entertaining scripts of subjectivity for a population that is increasingly aware of an overall decline in well-being offers a lens into the ways in which excessive celebrity selves and their philanthropic temperance have become ascetic cues directed at the stability of a global governing regime. In this essay I argue that modern-day parables of philanthropic celebriti…
Celebration and governing: The production of the author as ascetic practice
This essay explores the power relations inherent to the contemporary practice of celebration of author production and present relations of governing. I explore such practices of celebration as a lens for understanding the role of valorization of the author in knowledge production, arguing that celebration can act as an ascetic technology that governs potentially transformative critical subjectivities. I begin with an exploration of the relationsh…
Revisiting the Artificial Negativity Thesis: An Interview with Timothy W. Luke
The Institutionalization of Author Production and the Performance Imperative as an Ontological Fiction
This essay inquires into the institutionalization of the author as a governing practice. I observe the experience of two authors—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Mr. Perestroika”—in relationship to two institutions—the Soviet Writers' Union and the American Political Science Association—as they contest the imperative to produce cultural/knowledge representations on behalf of the present. Drawing on Michel Foucault's identification of the political pra…
Haute Philanthropy: Luxury, Benevolence, and Value
In this essay I investigate the relationship between luxury, ostensible benevolence, and value as they are manifest in the production and reproduction of the pecuniary subject. I use haute philanthropy as a contrast medium through which we can understand the contemporary practice of value and subjectivity in relation to governing. I draw theorists of pecuniary relations together with contemporary understandings of subjectivity and suggest a frame…
Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft
Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inqui…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Social science (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works)