Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines whether women in the French National Assembly affect policy. It posits that demands for and passage of "women friendly" policies are due to the critical acts (rather than a critical mass) of female deputies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In designing for the novel programmes characteristic of industrial society, modern architects’ exploration of modern themes heightened the critical role of the work of architecture; Critical Reconstruction, the dominant movement among Berliner architects and planners, explores these same themes, but from within the context of Berlin’s peculiar political-architectural legacy, which conduces to politicization but not critique. Modern architecture at its best, it can be argued, reflected the fragmentation and alienation of its world in the forms, materials, and functionalist orientation characteristic of it, but it unified all of these into a compelling ‘machine aesthetic’ that pointed to something beyond the troubled world of which it was a part. Critical reconstructionists adopt the formal language of the Modern Movement, as well as something of its aesthetic; but they are hostile to the revolutionary-utopian ideals cherished by the architectural avant-garde that invented the language and fashioned the aesthetic.

Critical distance boils over into outright hostility and urbanistic aggression when it comes to appropriating the spaces of the East German past, spaces that, like any other important cultural legacy , can be seen as crucial to the identity of those who survived the GDR. But this radical inclination is not carried over into the buildings that critical reconstructionists tend to build, which either seem removed from social meanings in their geometric abstractness, or eagerly highlight the affinities between the aesthetic of ‘simplicity’, ‘severity’, ‘austerity’, and so on, and the aesthetic produced by an older, far more troubled synthesis of architecture and politics.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Calanus, a zooplankton that can be employed as a resource for feed in the salmon aquaculture industry, may soon be harvested commercially in the waters of the North Atlantic for the first time. The resource can be processed into feed for the high-value carnivorous fish of the hard-pressed aquaculture industry, resolving one of the constraints on the growth of this industry. For biological and oceanographic reasons, Calanus can potentially be harvested at no ecological cost and in great quantities in the waters surrounding Svalbard; harvesting it elsewhere would mean more caution and lower harvesting quantities for ecological reasons. Technical problems and lack of research have prevented utilization of this resource in the past but Norwegian scientists and engineers will soon launch technologies that will open the resource to commercial harvest. There are no historical fishing rights for Calanus in the Fisheries Protection Zone around Svalbard, and Norways right to manage this zone is contested by almost all of the signatories to the Treaty. Will the principles and evolved institutions in the zone resolve the Svalbard issue when Calanus becomes commercially harvestable, or will Calanus be a critical juncture, which changes the zone? Several scenarios of institutional change will be explored.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper addresses questions crucial to the “overspecialized” field of communication: “Are the ‘mainstream’ and the critical research reconcilable?” “Has the replacement of the limited-effects paradigm with the concept of powerful effects provided a meeting point for the two approaches?” It juxtaposes two concepts of powerful effects – the “critical” homogenization explicated by the Frankfurt School and the extensively researched “mainstream” agenda setting. Despite identified brides between the two, this paper points to seemingly insurmountable differences. It also addresses the issue of applicability of homogenization and agenda setting to the new media environment, as the reconceptualization of production, dissemination and reception of content might have decreased the validity of the powerful effects generally, and of the distinction between “critical” and “administrative” specifically. It concludes by presenting how the two approaches change due to the new ICTs, how they might adapt, and how they should be researched.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is unconventional in that its data set is composed of the memories, and spiritual insights. This paper uses the unconventional method of “systematic sociological introspection and emotional recall” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000, p.737). Finally this paper produces unconventional results which are less definitive and more conditional than one would find in much more conventional pieces of communication research.