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Academic development that supports the enactment of positive psychology practices through student-faculty pedagogical partnership can increase faculty confidence and capacity in their first year in a new institution. When student partners practice affirmation and encouragement of strengths-based growth, processes of faculty acclimation and self-authoring can be accelerated. This article presents a student-faculty pedagogical partnership program and positive psychology practices that focus on faculty strengths and capacities as the foundation for reinforcing and revising existing pedagogical strategies and for sustaining energy for continued development. It combines collaborative autoethnographic and comparative case study approaches to investigate the pedagogical benefits of these practices.

This essay examines the relationship between democracy and the unconscious. It does so by understanding democracy through the repressed desire for shared power by a collective actor that has episodically realized itself, in ways that haunt political languages, practices, and aspirations. Democratic flourishing rests upon erotic practices through which the demos transgressively transforms politics by embracing what we refer to as democratic narcissism. Democratic decline and impasse are symptomatic of repressed desires for power that have required the people's abjection rather than coalescing into a self-affirming narcissism of the demos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we theorize the democratic aspect of democratic socialism through some of its recent, theoretical articulations and several of its historical, fugitive appearances. To illustrate a potential democratic turn, we highlight how these moments reflect a paradox of democratic spirit: the necessity of cultivating collective consciousness of popular power, while also acknowledging the limits of this power through a lingering attachment to the liberal democratic state as the means of achieving or supporting a democratic socialist vision. We call this democratic mirroring, which exceeds a concept of representation centered on the constitutional state. Although the state should be an important site of struggle, we maintain the spirit of democratic socialism is animated by quotidian struggles for a decent existence and those struggles must be mirrored in a way that supports the political education, political psychology, and the political self-respect of the "demos" implied within democratic socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of citizenship have relied both explicitly and implicitly on the concept of "standing." This article challenges "standing" as a metaphor of citizenship by contrasting it with that of "injury." Examining Claudia Rankine's Citizen elucidates a poetics of citizenship that both calls attention to what prevents many black citizens in the United States from standing and provides a basis for alternative practices of citizenship. Refusing a politics of ressentiment often tied to identification of social injury, Citizen prefigures a transformed citizenship of tarrying, listening, and transformative interruption of the racialized status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic institutions. These antidemocratic trends have prompted some democratic theorists to reject the seeming inevitability of democratic forms of government and instead to consider democracy as a fugitive phenomenon. Fugitive democracy, as we argue below, is a theory composed of two parts. First, it includes a robust, normative ideal of democracy and, second, a clear-eyed vision of the historical defeats and generic difficulties attendant to that ideal. This article considers how democratic theorists might respond to the challenges posed by fugitive democracy and the implications of such an understanding for future research in democratic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic development that supports the enactment of positive psychology practices through student-faculty pedagogical partnership can increase faculty confidence and capacity in their first year in a new institution. When student partners practice affirmation and encouragement of strengths-based growth, processes of faculty acclimation and self-authoring can be accelerated. This article presents a student-faculty pedagogical partnership program and positive psychology practices that focus on faculty strengths and capacities as the foundation for reinforcing and revising existing pedagogical strategies and for sustaining energy for continued development. It combines collaborative autoethnographic and comparative case study approaches to investigate the pedagogical benefits of these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author considers the writings and essays of Joan Didion, focusing on how her insights prove problematic to such ideals as the American Dream and Democracy in the U.S. in such works as "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights." Topics include delusional beliefs of public opinion, water management in the development of the U.S. West, and detailing of failures of the political system.

This essay interprets Baldwin as continuing the Socratic practice of self-examination and social criticism while also shifting his Socratic undertaking by charting the limits of examination created by the harsh effects of race and slavery in the United States. The author argues that Baldwin’s Socratic practice inflects not only his essays—the center of previous analyses—but also his fictions. By transposing Socrates to issues of race in twentieth-century America and confronting the incoherent effects of a racialized society, James Baldwin thus carries forward and transforms a pivotal figure in the history of political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]