Lisa Disch
Biographic Data
| ID | 640320 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa Disch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Disch |
| SIGNATURE | DISCH L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1445-4428 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 572 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Democracy for Busy People by Kevin J. Elliott
Repenser le « French feminism » avec Christine Delphy
Response to Robert B. Talisse’s Review of Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy
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Political Theory: Intellectual Decline or De-Institutionalisation
Political theory: Intellectual decline or de-institutionalisation
Chapter 6. Debating Constructivism and Democracy in 1970s France
Chapter 6 (and the one that follows) provides the theoretical justification for the intuition that links the arguments of these various chapters together: that democratic political representation urgently requires plurality as its enabling condition. In this chapter, I build the architecture for this claim from the political theory of Claude Lefort, who was the first to name indeterminacy—the irreducibility of political divisions to (putatively) …
Chapter 5. Manipulation: How Will I Know It When I See It? And Should I Worry When I Do?
Chapter 1. In Defense of Mobilization
I turn first to mobilization, a term of art in every subfield of political science, which I reclaim from its commonplace uses. Mobilization as I use the term casts off this most basic intuition of both pluralist and participatory theories of democracy: that groups form around shared interests to demand laws and policies that serve those interests. I argue in this chapter that mobilization creates constituencies. I support this claim by drawing on…
Chapter 3. Can the Realist Remain a Democrat?
In chapter 3, I take up influential works by self-proclaimed realist social scientists and journalist-ethnographers of white grievance that paint a dark picture of the political competence of mass electorates. Aiming to change the terms of this competence debate, I draw on work by Katherine Cramer and Suzanne Mettler to reframe incompetence as not a failure of citizens but a constituency effect, both of elite political communications and of publi…
Chapter 2. From the Bedrock Norm to the Constituency Paradox
Chapter 2 introduces the term constituency paradox to reevaluate interest representation, the predominant empirical model of democratic representation, which imagines that people form and fix their preferences prior to engaging with political institutions and political campaigns. So long as preferences satisfy this bedrock norm, researchers can safely rely on responsiveness as an indicator that political representation is working as it should. Re…
Chapter 7. Radical Democracy and the Value of Plurality
Chapter 7 features the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the first political theorists to make a constructivist turn in the name of democratic political representation. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, they defend a constructivist account of representation that prioritizes a concern with preserving plurality over a preoccupation with detecting and disarming manipulation. Their classic work provides an important resource for theorists …
Conclusion
The concluding chapter maintains what has been argued throughout the book: that manipulation poses a less significant threat to democracy than sorting. This claim, implausible as it must sound to those who remain preoccupied by citizen competence, makes sense from a radical democratic vantage point. Radical democracy counts plurality as the enabling condition of representative democracy, when representation is understood in constructivist terms a…
Chapter 4. Realism for Democrats
Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy
Reclaiming populism
Contemporary Poetry Archive
The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation
This is the first edited volume to provide a comprehensive introduction and a critical exploration of the constructivist turn in political representation. Divided into three thematic parts, the 13 newly commissioned essays presented here develop constructivist turn as a central concept advancing the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation because constituencies, or groups, exist as agents of democratic politics onl…
Worlding the Earth: Ephraim's Who Speaks for Nature
Worlding the Earth:Ephraim's Who Speaks for Nature Lisa Disch (bio) Laura Ephraim. Who Speaks for Nature? On the Politics of Science. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 189 pp. $52.25 (hc). ISBN 9780812249811. This exquisitely written book poses a question that sits at the intersection of political theory and science studies: how do natural scientists come to be privileged spokespersons for nature? The "widespread assumption," …
Constructivist Turn in Political Representation
Response: Feminist Theory as Praxis
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Benjamin Barber and the Practice of Political Theory
Ecological Democracy and the Co-participation of Things
Is ecological democracy possible? If so, what would it entail? This chapter first reviews the literature based in deliberative democracy that proposes to extend communicative competence to non-humans, and then traces an alternative constructivist line of environmental political thinking from its beginnings in the strand of science and technology studies pioneered by Bruno Latour and others known as actor-network theory, through two actor-network …
The End of Representative Politics
It is often argued today that representative politics is in crisis. Trust in politicians, political parties and even the political system is lower than ever, and for many people politics is at best an entertaining spectacle. At the same time, new forms of politics have emerged. In The End of Representative Politics, Simon Tormey argues that these new forms of politics represent a hope for the future. They do so by eschewing old forms of represent…
Debating representative democracy
Preface: Critique of Naturalizing Reason
This text, which is translated here for the first time in English, is taken from the “Preface” to The Main Enemy, Volume Two: Thinking Gender (2001). It is a companion piece to the 1993 essay “Rethinking Sex and Gender” (first published in French in 1991).
Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation
This article analyzes what I term "the dilemma of democratic competence," which emerges when researchers find their expectations regarding democratic responsiveness to be in conflict with their findings regarding the context dependency of individual preferences. I attribute this dilemma to scholars' normative expectations, rather than to deficiencies of mass democratic politics. I propose a mobilization conception of political representation and …
The “Constructivist Turn” in Democratic Representation: A Normative Dead‐End
Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy
Democratic Representation and the Constituency Paradox
That acts of democratic representation participate in creating the interests for which legislators and other officials purport merely to stand gives rise to the “constituency paradox.” I elucidate this paradox through a critical reading of Hanna Pitkin'sThe Concept of Representation,together with her classic study of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,Wittgenstein and Justice. Pitkin's core insight into democratic representation is that democrat…
More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt
My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. Hannah Arendt
Radical Democracy's 'Modern Constitution
Radical democracy's `modern Constitution'``There are few better illustrations of the waywardness of Taliban rule than its treatment of Afghanistan's womenöharassed and brutalized for simply walking down the street, confined to their homes unless accompanied by a man, denied education, forced to wear the head-to-toe burqa that makes them look like faceless ghosts moving beyond the boundaries of perception.''Michael Hill Baltimore Sun (25 November …
Sexual Violence and the Reproduction of Male Power in the Locker Room: The “Lisa Olson Incident”
Numerous media commentators have deemed the sexual harassment locker room incident between Lisa Olson and the New England Patriots to be an embarrassing case of mismanagement. Our analysis challenges this popular assumption; we argue that the event represents an overt manifestation of male power by means of sexual violence against women. The response to Olson suggests that in an era where women’s entry into sport has challenged men’s exclusive ho…
Judith Butler and the Politics of the Performative
Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation
Local community opposition constitutes the single greatest hurdle to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. Conventional explanations of its causes focus on questions of risk and equity; that is, on outcomes of facility siting. In this focus it is assumed that hazardous waste management is synonymous with facility siting, when siting is in fact only one of many possible answers to the management problem. Rather than ask wh…
Representation as ‘Spokespersonship: Bruno Latour's Political Theory
The End of Representative Politics
It is often argued today that representative politics is in crisis. Trust in politicians, political parties and even the political system is lower than ever, and for many people politics is at best an entertaining spectacle. At the same time, new forms of politics have emerged. In The End of Representative Politics, Simon Tormey argues that these new forms of politics represent a hope for the future. They do so by eschewing old forms of represent…
How could Hannah Arendt glorify the American Revolution and revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the historiography of the French and American Revolutions
This article situates Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution in the traditions of French and American revolutionary historiography to demonstrate that Arendt’s ‘fable’ of the American Revolution was at odds with her argument about the council form. I argue that had Arendt really wanted to inspire a resurrection of the council form in the present, she would have done better to orient her readers to the French Revolution, specifically to the experiments in …
Impartiality, Storytelling, and the Seductions of Narrative: An Essay at an Impasse
I have been working on this article for some time now in hopes of writing my way out of an impasse. I think of this place as a deadlock that forms where feminist convictions about the transformative power of telling stories butt against the claims of literary theorists regarding the seductions of narrative. This term narrative sits at the joint of this abutment, helping at once to produce these fields as distinct domains and to set them at odds w…
Christine Delphy's Constructivist Materialism: "An Overlooked "French Feminism
This essay revisits the work of Christine Delphy, a leading activist in the women's liberation movement in France and a leading materialist feminist theorist whom many US feminist scholars have written off as a "seventies feminist": she not only published one of her most-read pieces in the 1970s but is also judged to typify that period by virtue of her (in)famous conceptualization of women as a class. This essay undertakes a close reading of Delp…
La représentation politique et les « effets de subjectivation »: Comment poser la question de la légitimité démocratique après le tournant constructiviste
Cet article pose la question suivante : comment construire un critère normatif adapté au tournant constructiviste des théories de la représentation ? Pour répondre à cette question, je prends appui sur la recherche empirique menée aux États-Unis sur le policy feedback qui élargit la réflexion à propos de la légitimité démocratique. Plutôt que de s’interroger sur la nature de la relation entre les représentants et les représentés (est-elle concrèt…
Tea Party Movement: The American ‘Precariat
This article juxtaposes the Tea Party movement in the US with the European 'precarity' movement to advance a counterintuitive argument. Whereas Tea Party supporters' politics is conservative, their material commitments and aspects of their rhetoric place them in a liberal genealogy: they defend interests and distinctions that are a New Deal inheritance. An earlier version of it was delivered at the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing M…
Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics
Debating representative democracy
The People as “Presupposition” of Representative Democracy - An Essay on the Political Theory of Pierre Rosanvallon
Benjamin Barber and the Practice of Political Theory
The Most Damage I Can Do: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism
Claire Loves Julie: Reading the Story of Women's Friendship in La Nouvelle Héloise
Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise is two novels in one: a story of wifely virtue and a counterstory of women's friendship. Whereas the virtue story exemplifies what feminist readers since Mary WoRstonecraft have considered to be the most oppressive of Rousseau's prescriptions for women, the friendship counterstory questions the ethical foundations and social manifestations of the model of patriarchal authority that Rousseau ordinarily defe…
Toward a Feminist Conception of Politics
Throughout most of the past decade, the syllabus for a political science course in feminist theory would have included texts by feminist historians, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics, but very few political theories by feminists.1 In the last two years, however, a distinctive new direction in feminist analysis has emerged with the publication of several books that introduce a feminist critical theory of politics. …
Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States . Lori D. Ginzberg Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation . Donald G. Mat…
Toward a Feminist Conception of Politics
Throughout most of the past decade, the syllabus for a political science course in feminist theory would have included texts by feminist historians, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics, but very few political theories by feminists.1 In the last two years, however, a distinctive new direction in feminist analysis has emerged with the publication of several books that introduce a feminist critical theory of politics. …
Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation
Local community opposition constitutes the single greatest hurdle to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. Conventional explanations of its causes focus on questions of risk and equity; that is, on outcomes of facility siting. In this focus it is assumed that hazardous waste management is synonymous with facility siting, when siting is in fact only one of many possible answers to the management problem. Rather than ask wh…
Association Distributes Annual Awards
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Sexual Violence and the Reproduction of Male Power in the Locker Room: The “Lisa Olson Incident”
Numerous media commentators have deemed the sexual harassment locker room incident between Lisa Olson and the New England Patriots to be an embarrassing case of mismanagement. Our analysis challenges this popular assumption; we argue that the event represents an overt manifestation of male power by means of sexual violence against women. The response to Olson suggests that in an era where women’s entry into sport has challenged men’s exclusive ho…
More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt
My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. Hannah Arendt
Claire Loves Julie: Reading the Story of Women's Friendship in La Nouvelle Héloise
Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise is two novels in one: a story of wifely virtue and a counterstory of women's friendship. Whereas the virtue story exemplifies what feminist readers since Mary WoRstonecraft have considered to be the most oppressive of Rousseau's prescriptions for women, the friendship counterstory questions the ethical foundations and social manifestations of the model of patriarchal authority that Rousseau ordinarily defe…
Books in Review
When a Looker Is Really a Bitch: Lisa Olson, Sport, and the Heterosexual Matrix
Democracy, Dialogue, and Environmental Disputes: The Contested Languages of Social Regulation. Bruce A. Williams , Albert R. Matheny The Environmental Promise of Democratic Deliberation. Adolf G. Gund…
Political Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity: Beyond Enlightenment and Critique. N. J. Rengger
The Concept of Pariah in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought
Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory is an international refereed open access journal, which publishes contributions on the transdisciplinary study of concepts. In classical rhetoric, ‘redescription’ refers to a rhetorical move that alters the use of a concept in one respect or another. The journal draws attention to conceptual moves within political theory, conceptual history and feminist thought, and highlig…
Judith Butler and the Politics of the Performative
Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity . Norma Claire Moruzzi
Radical Democracy's 'Modern Constitution
Radical democracy's `modern Constitution'``There are few better illustrations of the waywardness of Taliban rule than its treatment of Afghanistan's womenöharassed and brutalized for simply walking down the street, confined to their homes unless accompanied by a man, denied education, forced to wear the head-to-toe burqa that makes them look like faceless ghosts moving beyond the boundaries of perception.''Michael Hill Baltimore Sun (25 November …
Impartiality, Storytelling, and the Seductions of Narrative: An Essay at an Impasse
I have been working on this article for some time now in hopes of writing my way out of an impasse. I think of this place as a deadlock that forms where feminist convictions about the transformative power of telling stories butt against the claims of literary theorists regarding the seductions of narrative. This term narrative sits at the joint of this abutment, helping at once to produce these fields as distinct domains and to set them at odds w…
Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust
Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. By Ira Katznelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 208p. $29.00 cloth, $17.50 paper. This eloquent volume, which originated as Columbia University's Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures in 1997–98, has a dual mission. The first is personal. It is a “critical homage” to the post–World War II scholars who were Ira Katznelson's teac…
Rethinking Re-Presentation: Developments in Democratic Theory
Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory is an international refereed open access journal, which publishes contributions on the transdisciplinary study of concepts. In classical rhetoric, ‘redescription’ refers to a rhetorical move that alters the use of a concept in one respect or another. The journal draws attention to conceptual moves within political theory, conceptual history and feminist thought, and highlig…
Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy
Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory is an international refereed open access journal, which publishes contributions on the transdisciplinary study of concepts. In classical rhetoric, ‘redescription’ refers to a rhetorical move that alters the use of a concept in one respect or another. The journal draws attention to conceptual moves within political theory, conceptual history and feminist thought, and highlig…
The People as “Presupposition” of Representative Democracy - An Essay on the Political Theory of Pierre Rosanvallon
Representation as ‘Spokespersonship: Bruno Latour's Political Theory
Parties, Partisanship, and Democratic Politics
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
Radical Democracy and the Politics of Representation
Radical Democracy and the Politics of Representation Lisa Disch (bio) Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, ed. 2005. Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack. Manchester: Manchester University Press. This superb edited collection provides a sustained exploration of the intellectual origins, principal arguments, and political project of “radical” democratic theory—a body of work that the editors distinguish from liberal, Marxist, or comm…
La légitimité démocratique: Impartialité, reflexivité, proximité
This book makes the provocative claim that we are living in an era of democratic transformation, one characterized by a "decentering" of democracy that renders it nonsensical to sustain the pretence that electoral contests afford anything like popular sovereignty (8).Rosanvallon is certainly not the first to remark upon the growing gap between electoral politics and democratic principles.But he may well be the first to welcome it as giving rise t…
Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics
Political science (54 works) · Sociology (52 works) · Law (48 works) · Politics (43 works) · Law (31 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Democracy (26 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Social science (13 works)