Protest events occur against the backdrop of public life. Of 382 public events in police records for one year in a small U.S. city, 45% convey a message, 14% involve social conflict, and 13% are standard protest event forms. Local newspapers covered 32% of all events, favoring events that were large, involved conflict, were sponsored by business groups, and occurred in central locations. The more liberal paper also favored rallies and events sponsored by national social movement organizations (SMOs) or recreational groups. Discussion centers on the ways these factors shape the content of the public sphere.

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How events enter the public sphere : Conflict, location, and sponsorship in local newspaper coverage of public events

This article charts the winding and tumultuous course Israeli gay men have taken in their struggles to claim a visible and audible place within the Israeli public sphere. Whereas for the greater part of history, Jewish gay men were symbolically annihilated by various social institutions, for the past decade they have been active as agents of social change. The paper's objectives are to offer an account of the developments that enabled such a transformation, to review socio-political strategies in an arena not yet discussed in academic literature, and to examine the roles mass media play in these processes. The article is composed of four chapters: literature review, detailed descriptions of the erstwhile and present legal, social, and cultural status of gay men in Israel, and a brief discussion of Orthodox-Jews' reactions. As this is a preliminary, and the first of its kind, study, it combines analyses of a diversified melange of sources. The author deliberately employs an eclectic methodological...

From Terra incognita to Terra firma: the logbook of the voyage of gay men's community into the Israeli public sphere.

This paper critically examines the role of farmers’ markets in Australian agriculture. A case study is undertaken in South Australia, where all stallholders at three farmers’ markets situated in Adelaide, Willunga and Berri were surveyed regarding their production and marketing techniques. Overall responses supported literature highlighting the importance of farmers’ markets to the producers who chose to exploit this marketing niche. A strong co-reliance on ‘wholesale sales’ was also recognised, suggesting an important integration of productivist and post-productivist approaches to agricultural development. Of most promise for long-term agricultural sustainability was evidence that certain groups of farmers were found to be realising the potential of these and other alternative markets, in terms of their risk reducing capacity, and diversifying to include various conservation values into their agricultural enterprises. These groups were less concerned about market fluctuations and more concerned with issues of social equity, environmental health and having fun, which meant they unwittingly epitomised the goals of political ecology, by challenging the dominant agricultural methods of production and marketing. It seems these groups also recognised that the direct nature of their transactions would sow beneficial social, environmental and economic ‘seeds’ for change. Finally, it is argued that policies to improve access to farmers’ markets and reduce the cost of participation would assist small scale Australian agricultural producers to evolve smoothly into a multifunctional era.

South Australian farmers’ markets: tools for enhancing the multifunctionality of Australian agriculture

The importance of farmer education in South Australia.

Globally, protected-area managers confront increasingly complex and competing interests and demands, expressed by a variety of parties. When an action concerning the governance and management of a protected area is infused with such complexity, decision making requires an evaluation of that action's legitimacy. Most often, this evaluation is implicit rather than expressly articulated. The purpose of this study was both to illustrate the importance and utility of explicitly evaluating legitimacy and to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how the legitimacy of protected-area governance and management might be understood. To better understand the concept of legitimacy, we conducted a case study of subsistence-based resource use in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The collection of firewood, medicinal plants, thatching grass, and meat by local residents living outside Kruger has long been a contentious issue. Since the park's establishment in 1926, resource use among local residents has been a...

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1638&context=etd

Margarita Alario

Papers

Environmental Destruction and the Public Sphere: On Habermas’s Discursive Model and Political Ecology

Environmental Risks, Social Asymmetry, and Late Modernity: Toward a Political Ecology