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The American University in Cairo

April 30, 2016

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Jilin University

April 30, 2016

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Peking University

April 30, 2016

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Howard University

April 30, 2016

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Deliberative Polling® as a Means of Improving Public Knowledge

April 27, 2016
By 19648

Otgontuya Dorjkhuu, who received a Sylff fellowship in 2009 at National Academy of Governance, served as a moderator in Mongolia’s first deliberative poll. Drawing on this experience and on the results of deliberative polls conducted in six countries including Mongolia, Otgontuya discusses why the concept of Deliberative Polling® is crucial and how citizen participation plays a key role in public policy.

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Deliberative Polling® is a novel concept for most people, even though experiments have been conducted in many countries around the world, including the United States, Britain, other countries in the European Union, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Ghana. A broad range of issues are discussed in a DP event, such as the economy, education, health, the environment, elections, and political reform. This method of polling is especially suitable for issues about which the public may have little knowledge or information or where the public may have failed to confront the trade-offs applying to public policy. It is a social science experiment and a form of public education in the broadest sense (Center for Deliberative Democracy, December 2003).

Mongolia’s First Deliberative Poll

Mongolia’s first deliberative poll was held on December 12–13, 2015, under the title of “Citizens’ Participation: Tomorrow’s City.”

On December 12–13, 2015, a scientific random sample of residents of Ulaanbaatar¹ gathered for two days of deliberation about major infrastructure projects proposed in the capital city’s master plan. The program consisted of small group discussions and plenary sessions exploring arguments for and against 14 large projects that would require borrowing, during which questions were posed to experts. All of the deliberative events were broadcast live on three television channels in Mongolia.

The 317 individuals who completed the two days of deliberation can be compared in both their attitudes and their demographics with the remaining 1,185 who took the initial survey. No significant differences were seen between the two groups in gender, education, age, employment status, marital status, or income (CDD, January 2016).

The three project proposals that received the highest ratings after deliberation share an environmental focus on clean energy, energy efficiency, and waste disposal. The top proposal, “improved heating for schools and kindergartens,” had a mean rating of 0.94 out of 1. It consisted of upgrading the insulation and technology used in public school heating systems. The runner-up proposal, “protection of Tuul and Selbe rivers,” featured preliminary efforts to improve water flow and rehabilitate the rivers. Although support for the project went down somewhat after deliberation, its rating was still the second highest at 0.93. The rating for the third most popular proposal, “an eco park with two waste recycling facilities,” was largely unchanged after deliberation at 0.92.

These results are consistent with the public’s strong environmental priorities expressed in other questions in the survey (CDD, January 2016). Both before and after deliberation, participants were highly focused on policy goals aimed at reducing air, water, and land pollution. Air pollution is the biggest issue for all citizens of Ulaanbaatar city, especially in winter.

Evaluating the Process

Evaluation is one of the most important aspects of the Deliberative Polling process. For comparison, I selected six countries in different regions (Asia, Africa, and North America) where deliberative polls had been conducted.

Participants in all of these countries rated the process highly. On average, 91.6% approved of “the overall process” in the six selected countries. Evaluations of the small group discussions and plenary sessions were similarly high, with anywhere from 86.7% to 93.0% of participants giving positive responses to all of the questions. An average of 91.3% felt that their group moderator “provided the opportunity for everyone to participate in the discussion,” while 90.3% thought that their group moderator “sometimes tried to influence the group with his or her own views.”

Participants in Mongolia, Britain, California (United States), and Ghana felt that they had learned a lot about people who were very different from them. Mongolian, British, and Ghanaian participants rated the process more highly than those of the other three countries .

Table 1. Evaluations of the Deliberative Polling Process by Country

Evaluations	Mongolia	Japan	South Korea	Britain	California	Ghana
The overall process	94.3%	85.6%	92.2%	99%	89%	90%
Participating in the small group discussions	95.0%	87.4%	94.8%	95%
Meeting and talking to delegates outside of the group discussions	93.4%		79.0%	94%
The large group plenary sessions	95.0%	78.6%	84.2%	89%
My group moderator provided the opportunity for everyone to participate in the discussion.	98.1%	82.4%		90%	91%	95%
The members of my group participated relatively equally in the discussions.	97.5%	61.0%		73%
My group moderator sometimes tried to influence the group with his or her own views.	90.9%	82.8%		95%	93%	90%
I learned a lot about people very different from me—about what they and their lives are like.	95.6%			91%	88%	99%

Notes: Figures in the table are collected from the reports on Deliberative Polling conducted in each country. With regard to the first four items in the list, respondents were asked to rate on a scale of 0 to 10 (where 0 is “a waste of time,” 10 is “extremely valuable,” and 5 is exactly in the middle) how valuable each component was in helping them clarify their positions on the issues. For the latter four items, they were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with each statement.

Knowledge Gains

The knowledge index can be used as an indicator to explain changes in opinion on policy goals. In most of the cases that I reviewed, the percentage of those who correctly answered questions rose significantly after deliberation. For instance, in the case of Mongolia, correct responses regarding the percentage of households in Ulaanbaatar city that live in apartments increased by 12 points from 47% before deliberation to 59% after (CDD, January 2016).

In Japan, the overall knowledge gains were substantial and statistically significant; an average knowledge gain of 7.4% was seen in the six questions that were asked. Participants who correctly answered what percentage of Japan’s electricity generation comes from nuclear power (about 30%) increased 13.7 points from 47.4% to 61.1% (CDD, September 2012).

In Ghana, only 21.6% of participants knew prior to deliberation that the percentage of the Tamale population with daily access to potable water was about 40%. After deliberation, the percentage rose significantly to 37.6%, an increase of 16 points (CDD and West Africa Resilience Innovation Lab, December 2015).

Among the California participants, correct responses to the eight questions asked increased substantially by 18 points overall (CDD, October 2011). The knowledge index clearly showed relevant and substantial knowledge gains among the participants.

The Moderator’s Role

The members of Group 10, which was moderated by Otgontuya Dorjkhuu (back row far right) with the mayor of Ulaanbaatar city and Professor James Fishkin of Stanford University seated at front row center.

Deliberative Polling is an attempt to use public opinion research in a new, constructive, and nonpolitical manner, and moderators play a key role in the process. They ensure fruitful and civil exchange between participants and let all points of view emerge. With their help and support the participants can find their voices, discover their views, and develop their own opinions (CDD, December 2003). In the Ulaanbaatar event, the 317 deliberators were randomly assigned to 20 small groups led by trained moderators². The moderators helped deliberators go through discussions of all projects according to the agenda presented in the briefing materials. The two-day process alternated between small group discussions and plenary sessions until all 14 projects were discussed.

The project proposals were rated³ on the same scale before and after deliberation. Citizen opinions both before and after indicated that all of the proposals were thought to be desirable.

In Conclusion

Deliberative Polling is a useful approach to increase citizens’ participation and voice in the policy making process. Following the deliberation in Ulaanbaatar, the participants changed their views in many statistically significant ways, had greater knowledge, and together identified specific policy solutions that could help address the country’s priority issues.

As a moderator for Mongolia’s first deliberative poll, I found that participants were very enthusiastic and exchanged their views without reservation. My observations from the event leads me to believe that, given an opportunity like this to participate in discussions on critical issues, people would be willing to express their opinions anytime on any topic. According to reports on Deliberative Polling events that have been conducted in other countries, the overall knowledge gains after deliberation were substantial and statistically significant.

Finally, it can be concluded that Deliberative Polling not only is a form of public consultation but can also serve as a means of improving public knowledge.

References

Center for Deliberative Democracy (December 2003). What is Deliberative Polling®? Retrieved December 13, 2015, from http://cdd.stanford.edu/what-is-deliberative-polling/
Center for Deliberative Democracy (January 2016). Mongolia's First Deliberative Poll: Initial Findings From "Tomorrow's City."
Center for Deliberative Democracy (January 2012). First Deliberative Polling in Korea: Issue of Korean Unification, Seoul, South Korea.
Center for Deliberative Democracy (January 2010). Final Report: Power 2010—Countdown to a New Politics.
Center for Deliberative Democracy (October 2011). What's Next California? A California Statewide Deliberative Poll for California's Future.
Ulaanbaatar City. Retrieved December 13, 2015, from ulaanbaatar.mn
Center for Deliberative Democracy and West Africa Resilience Innovation Lab (December 2015). Deliberative Polling in Ghana: First Deliberative Poll in Tamale, Ghana.
National Statistical Office of Mongolia (2015). Statistical Yearbook 2014.
Center for Deliberative Democracy (September 2012). The National Deliberative Poll in Japan, August 4–5, 2012 on Energy and Environmental Policy Options.

¹Ulaanbaatar city had 1,363,000 residents as of 2014 (National Statistical Office of Mongolia, 2015).
²Before the event, Professor James Fishkin of Stanford University delivered a day of training to all moderators. Moderators were trained not to give any hint of their own opinions. Their role was simply to facilitate an equal, mutually respectful discussion of the pros and cons of the various proposals.
³The final results provide a ranking of priorities from 0 (extremely undesirable) to 10 (extremely desirable), with 5 being exactly in the middle.

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Toward an Understanding of the Medieval Mediterranean World

April 15, 2016
By 19620

Gregory Williams received a two-year Sylff fellowship at the American University in Cairo for the academic years 2011-2012. He has been conducting a series of archaeological excavations in Aswan, Egypt, using an SRA grant. In this article, he argues that archaeological findings from the medieval Mediterranean world are often ignored, and suggests that the region’s Fhistory has much to teach today’s world about living in harmony and appreciating diverse cultures and religions.

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Map of Medieval Egypt and Nubia.

Since 1996, when Samuel Huntington first popularized the term “clash of civilizations,” much of our contemporary understanding of Islam and the Muslim world has centered on a dichotomous relationship between East and West. The international media ―and to some degree the academic community as well― has wholeheartedly accepted this ideology despite its inherently flawed nature. The acceptance of the idea that current political conflicts run along the religious and ideological lines of Islam and Western society greatly underrepresents the importance of historical and cultural factors when trying to understand and resolve those conflicts.

As a Sylff fellow I studied in Cairo, Egypt, and as a PhD student I was fortunate enough to receive a Sylff Research Abroad (SRA) award to continue my field research in Aswan, Egypt. During this time spent in the Middle East I was struck by what seems to be a major lack of understanding of premodern history among today’s policymakers, journalists, and pundits. The medieval history of the Mediterranean, which often helps to explain the diversity of cultures and languages in this part of the world, is often completely ignored. It is hard to read a newspaper, watch the news, or discuss political events without thinking in terms of Islam versus Christianity or East versus West. However, many historians have argued convincingly that Islam and Christianity developed as sibling traditions, with much more in common than we often appreciate or acknowledge. The Mediterranean region should be understood as a single, inter-cultural sphere.

View of the Nile at Aswan.

Archeology is a field that can make important contributions to our knowledge of daily life and the history of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities in the Mediterranean region. Unfortunately, for most of this discipline’s history, projects have focused on the ancient past, and artifacts from the more recent past have often been ignored—or even removed and destroyed! How can we build a more comprehensive historical and cultural understanding of our recent and medieval past? This effort must begin by making focused, concerted efforts at important multiethnic and multireligious archaeological sites where a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between different ethnic groups and religious communities can be conceived. The SRA award has allowed me to make a start on this kind of study in Aswan, Egypt, a site with a unique setting on the historical border between Christian and Muslim lands in Africa.

Hybrid material culture in the ninth to tenth century CE.

Hybrid material culture in the 9th-10th Century CE.

Fortunately, recent archaeological excavations in Aswan, run jointly by the Swiss Institute for Architectural and Archaeological Research on Ancient Egypt and the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities, have presented a unique opportunity to explore this premodern past. Most previous excavation work in Egypt has disregarded the country’s medieval remains in search of its pharaonic past. In Aswan, the medieval city is treated as an important part of understanding Egypt’s history. While many cities and towns in Europe and the United States employ archaeologists to check that a new construction project will not destroy important cultural remains, this practice has only recently been introduced in Egypt. European and Egyptian archaeologists are working together on joint excavations to protect the city’s cultural heritage in spite of the illegal building and looting practices that sometimes plague Egyptian cities, and the results have made important contributions to our understanding of all periods of Egypt’s history.

During the ninth and tenth centuries CE, Aswan was home to various Arab tribal families, Coptic Christians, and Beja nomadic groups from the Eastern desert. Legal documents discovered elsewhere in Egypt in synagogue storerooms known as geniza suggest that a Jewish population also existed there for some time as well. Today, Aswan continues to be an important center for both Christians and Shi’a Muslims, although the vast majority of Egypt’s population is Sunni. The first cataract of the Nile became a major trading location for goods between Muslim Egypt and Christian Nubia. During this time, pilgrims passed through Aswan on their way to and from Mecca and Medina for the annual hajj, and merchants profited from the products of the Wadi al-‘Allaqi gold mines just to the southeast. Artifacts from excavations in Aswan have begun to highlight these kinds of interactions and the movement of peoples and products that were occurring inside and outside the Islamic world.

Mausoleums in the Aswan Cemetery.

In other words, Aswan was a highly diverse and “international” center in the medieval period. But this history is disregarded, as so often with medieval history in Egypt, as not ancient enough for the archaeologist and too long ago for the modern-day political scientist or economist. The reality is that these displays of multiculturalism and tolerance are important examples of how people can live together and have done so in the past. We can continue to treat people of other ethnicities and religions as coming from another civilization, or we can look to the not so distant past for a reminder of how “civilization” in the Mediterranean often meant complex, hybrid societies where people of different faiths lived together. Of course this coexistence was not always peaceful and without conflict. But unless we begin to incorporate cultural studies of the past into our modern conceptualizations of social conflict, we will be missing a very important piece of our shared human history.

It is easy to simply follow the national, institutional, and ideological lines that direct academic research in so many areas today. I believe that it is more important, though, to ask questions that transcend these dividing lines and investigate largely unexplored areas, such as the interaction between Muslim and Christian communities in North Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps by contributing to a more complete view of our history and the way in which people of different faiths and ethnicities interacted and lived together in the medieval world, research of this kind will give our current debates on the so-called “clash of civilizations” a much needed pause for reconsideration.

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Sylff Research Abroad 2016 Open!

April 15, 2016

Call for Applications for FY2016

The Tokyo Foundation is pleased to announce Sylff Research Abroad (SRA) ’s call for applications for fiscal 2016 (April 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017). The deadline for the first selection round is June 28 (for those planning research abroad after July 28) and for the second selection is January 9, 2017 (for those planning research abroad after February 6).

Click here for details of the announcement.

SRA supports current or past Sylff fellowship recipients to conduct academic research related to their doctoral dissertation in a foreign country. It provides the grant of up to US$5,000 each to successful applicants. We hope you will be able to become one of them.

We look forward to receiving your applications!

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Scheduled Maintenance (10-11 pm, April 15)

April 14, 2016

Access to Sylff website and Tokyo Foundation website (both English and Japanese) will be temporarily unavailable from 10 pm to 11 pm on Friday, April 15 (Japan Standard Time), while our web server is being upgraded to enhance access speed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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Theories of Modernism in Cinema

March 31, 2016
By 19686

Miłosz Stelmach, a 2014 Sylff fellow at Jagiellonian University in Poland, conducted research at Columbia University in New York on cinematic modernism. In this article, he provides insight into two contradictory definitions of “modernism” in cinema.

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Modernism in painting - Picasso's Guernica.

As a medium conceived at the very end of the nineteenth century, cinema is contemporary with such technological inventions as X-rays, radio, and the diesel engine, and with scientific breakthroughs like the discovery of electrons and radioactivity. It is the child of an era when modern science and modern society were being formed. Cinema is not only a modern technological invention; it is also a modern social practice. As a radically democratic medium, it served as one of the foundations of the emerging mass society and popular culture. Moviegoing was to become one of the most popular leisure activities for millions of people in the decades to come as the movie industry became one of the vital economic and social forces that shaped the modern world.

But if all that makes cinema an inherently modern phenomenon and one of the staples of modernity, what is it relation to the “art of the modern”—that is, to modernism itself? This question bothered film historians and theorists for years. The answer is necessarily related to what we understand by “modernism” in general. Only once we understand how the word is defined in terms of art history or literature can we start thinking of appropriating it to cinema.

Columbia University

To explore this matter more thoroughly I used an SRA grant to visit Columbia University in New York. There I was able not only to access all the basic written and visual materials in the field but also to meet distinguished scholars whose academic work has investigated various problems related to modernism. My encounters with their expertise in different fields of the humanities (comparative literature, art history, culture studies, and film studies) and their various nuanced points of view enabled me to trace how our understanding of modernism has developed.

James Joyce, one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

The traditional and still dominant account of modernism, and the one with which I was primarily familiar before my visit to New York, developed in English-language scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was during this period that a comprehensive theory of the subject was developed by scholars and critics like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Raymond Williams, who defined modernism as an artistic movement that had developed in different fields of cultural production in the late nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth. Modernism marks a break with the conventions of nineteenth-century realism in favor of extensive experimentation with medium—subjectivity, fragmentation, and nonlinearity. As manifested in the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dalí, the 12-tone musical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, and the stream-of-consciousness literature of James Joyce, modernism, as understood by Greenberg and others, employs a high level of self-consciousness and reflexivity, resulting in extensive efforts to explore the limits of a given medium and employ forms specific to it.

This definition of modernism, underlining formal innovation, self-referentiality, and medium specificity, was easily (and readily) transferred to the field of film studies. This wasn not difficult, especially given the self-evident link between developments in cinema and the other visual arts in the 1920s. Avant-garde artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, and Salvador Dalí made movies themselves, and a number of cinematic movements were clearly inspired by the visual arts of the time, as reflected in names like German Expressionism and French Impressionism. Surrealism and constructivism also had a clear influence on the development of the esthetics of cinema.This understanding of modernism as a high-art tradition involving avant-garde experimentation with film language carried over to postwar international art cinema.

Ingmar Bergman, a chief modernist of cinema, working on the set.

Scholars like András Bálint Kovács (author of Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980) and John Orr (who wrote Cinema and Modernity) demonstrate how this type of cinema, best represented by the so-called New Waves and New Cinemas spreading all over the world in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately stems from modernist traditions. We can call this definition “exclusive” because it refers to the rhetoric of innovation and auterism (as epitomized by figures like Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few well-known examples) and sees these trends as marking a break with classical cinema realized in the elitist field of highly sophisticated artistry. Summarizing this point of view, Kovács identifies subjectivity, reflexivity, and abstraction as the basic characteristics of all modernist art and finds these qualities in the postwar films associated with the French New Wave, New German Cinema, and Soviet post-Thaw films, among others.

The “Modernity Thesis”

When I started my research on the concept of cinematic modernism, the standpoint described above seemed to me to be widely accepted and uncontroversial. But once I started digging deeper I realized that strong opposition to this view has emerged over the last two decades and that this understanding of the relationship between cinema and modernism has increasingly been challenged and reconfigured. From the 1990s on, many critics contradicted the traditional, Greenbergian theory of modernism as a drive toward formalist, artistic sophistication and medium specificity with their own, “inclusive” definition. These critics saw modernism simply as a cinematic reflection of modernity and its various aspects, one that did not focus on “high art” in particular but rather embraced mass culture in its entirety.

Probably the most emblematic and influential case made on behalf of this definition was an essay written by Miriam Bratu Hansen in 1999 entitled The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism. In the course of her argument, Hansen called classic Hollywood cinema “vernacular modernism.” In her words, “modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed.” In this sense, newspaper comic strips of the 1930s and Soviet socialist realism of the same period are just as modernist (if not more so) as the novels of Marcel Proust or the paintings of Jackson Pollock because they exploit the new possibilities of production, perception, and cultural engagement brought about by the modern world and transformed by the spirit of modernity. This theoretical standpoint was later dubbed the “modernity thesis.” One of its basic conceptions is that cinema as a whole is a modern art—an inherent product and consequence of modernity defined necessarily by its technological and industrial character.

The Gap

After studying the most important bibliographical materials and consulting with specialists in the field of modernism studies, I am coming to believe that the two theories of the same object (cinematic modernism) I have outlined above might not in fact be as distinct (and contradictory) as they appear. In my opinion, the difference between them is not that they approach the same phenomenon with different tools and conceptions, but that they are actually examining two different fields, and merely claiming the same name for them. The gap between the “exclusive” and the “inclusive” traditions is seen not only in the choice of material their proponents wish to analyze (“high” and “popular” culture) but also, more importantly, in the way they want to approach them.

The supporters of the “modernity thesis” and the idea of vernacular modernism are interested mostly in the context (as opposed to the text itself), focusing on the social, industrial, and cultural forces shaping the work. This is why Hansen and others look closely at the specific conditions that made the cinema an important part of modernity as experienced in the early years of the twentieth century. As she declares, her aim is to identify a certain historical point of “paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed.” By contrast, the idea of modernism developed by Clement Greenberg and represented in the field of film studies by András Bálint Kovács concentrates more on the relationships within cinema history itself. It emphasizes such questions as aesthetic autonomy, along with the internal evolution of specific narrative and artistic forms and their characteristics. Political, social, and cultural contexts naturally still play a vital role in these lines of investigation, but they are usually seen as possible explanations for certain formal and stylistic features and are not the main point of interest.

This is why I would like to argue that the conflict between the two theoretical orientations is in fact only illusionary. They are intertwined and in some cases complementary to each other—but most of the time they constitute different areas of film and culture studies, revealing to us different contours of what we call modernity.

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The University of Texas at Austin

March 31, 2016