Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Edward Shils, as a graduate student and instructor at the University of Chicago in the late 1930s, accepted the bleak prognosis of Karl Mannheim's Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus--which an enthralled Shils had translated into English. During the war, however, Shils came to reject Mannheim’s gloomy, dissensual analysis of modernity. This paper argues that Shils’ dismissal of Mannheim drew significantly upon a direct and explicit intellectual assault by fellow emigres to England. During the war--even while he maintained regular contact with Mannheim--Shils was exposed to an often vituperative dismissal of Mannheim’s work by Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, in the pages of the London School of Economics journal Economica. After the war, when both Popper and Shils joined the LSE faculty--Hayek’s affiliation dated to 1931--Shils’ encounter with their critiques was deepened. And in these early postwar years, Shils became close friends with yet another emigre Mannheim critic, Michael Polanyi. Combined, these sustained and sophisticated criticisms helped wrest Shils from his interwar, Mannheim-friendly intellectual coordinates.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Popper's political theory invites a reassessment. Its great influence invites examination. It is open to both criticism and new, exciting applications.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the contested terrain of the temporal and spatial restructuring of global informational capitalism and, drawing on key concepts from Karl Polanyi and illustrated by evidence from the software industry in Ireland, advances the concept of ‘time space intensification’ to attempt to capture the dynamics of contemporary transitions. There are three main dimensions to time space intensification. First, the experience of time and space are intensified as they are de-normalised with the cracking of the taken for granted 'time space containers' of nation, corporate hierarchy and job. As Biggart and Guillen (1999) point out, globalization does not produce homogenization but greater awareness of difference – time and space become more explicit elements of human experience. Second, time and space are themselves mobilized as key elements of strategic action. While all social practices have a spatial and temporal dimension, explicitly spatial and temporal practices become more critical to social and political action as social actors attempt to mobilize time and space in protection against the pressures of time space compression e.g. 'the region’ becomes a crucial element of economic development policy. Finally, time and space become highly politicized as struggles take place at multiple levels over the temporal and spatial organization of contemporary capitalism.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Response to "The Fundamentals of Rhetoric,” by Karl R. Wallace.
Karl Wallace's "The Fundamentals of Rhetoric" seeks to reinvent a locus for rhetoric within the shifting contours of American higher education and civic life. The effort is resolutely Aristotelean, inasmuch as he insists on locating rhetoric as an art distinctive in its concern for common knowledge and public argument. I argue in this essay that it not, however, merely atavistic; in fact, Wallace anticipates a good deal of later work in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly attempts by rhetorical theorists to resurrect a space for action and judgment within contexts of public affairs and debates over the common good.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper discusses the use of pop culture in the classroom as a means to teach foundational political science authors and concepts. It focuses on my experience using American Idol as a point of reference to discuss Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in undergraduate comparative politics courses. Students are asked to construct
a written argument outlining what Marx or Tocqueville would think about American Idol, based on their readings. My experiences demonstrates that asking students to reflect on their own contemporary experience through the prism of these two works in the discipline’s canon helps them in three ways: 1) to better understand the ideas of Marx and Tocqueville, as well as their differences; 2) to come away with an appreciation for the continued relevance of works in the discipline’s canon; and 3) to sharpen and develop
critical thinking and analytical skills.