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Best paper, PAQ 2022

Congratulations to Barbara Patrick and Aaron C. Rollins on the selection of their paper, "Delivering Culturally Competent and Equitable Police Services Via Social Media: Assessing Two Way Dialogue between Police Agencies and Vulnerable Citizens" as the best paper published by PAQ in 2022. We are pleased to make this scholarship freely available here.

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call for papers: nonprofit management for social change

ASPA's Section on Nonprofit Management has issued a call for papers for a symposium to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic research and practice might embrace its interdisciplinarity by developing theories and methodological approaches to challenge traditional ways of understanding and address wicked problems facing communities today. We invite you to submit original manuscripts on methodological approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic studies that embrace interdisciplinarity in a number of ways. Please see the attached for more details.

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PAQ Articles

Diversity and Coexistence: Towards a Convivencia for 21st Century Public Administration

KYM THORNE
PAQ, Vol. 37 No. 3, (2013)

This paper explores the relationship between diversity and coexistence. It proposes that the convivencia period of 'watchful coexistence' that existed in Spain for centuries provides a model for enduring meaningful and lasting diversity. This period was notable for 'structures of concession' where different religious, ethnic and cultural groups acquired characteristics in common whilst still maintaining their distinct and separate identities.
The Spanish convivencia rejected overly destructive interactions or retreats into separate religious and/or ethnic 'ghetto's'. Instead, echoing Grey’s, and especially Sennett's, investigations into the value of constructive conflict, this convivencia involved forms of disorder and related public administration practices that continually refreshed a diverse yet interconnected, vibrant, pragmatically tolerant society. The re-conquest of Spain by Christian monarchs did not eliminate Moorish Spain and demonstrated the problematic nature of ‘either/or’ formulations that reject diversity and coexistence.
A renewed contemporary convivencia should revolve around interactions where groups and individuals directly confront and interact with alien groups and individuals with different habits and customs. These disorderly interactions should prevent groups and individuals from becoming rigid and complacent and should assist groups, individuals and social compacts to achieve psychological and other forms of maturity. This approach to diversity and coexistence provides a much-needed alternative to the 'demonizing', 'dehumanizing', 'either/or' approaches representative of recent, still prevalent, fundamentalisms opposed to difference and the ‘other’.

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