Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.2, 2011  i 

Inclusion, Identity and the Capacity to Act 

 
This issue of the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal brings together papers which focus on 

involvement in civil societies in different locations, from Brazil to Papua New Guinea, from 

cyberspace to Australia, and which are concerned with inclusion, identity and the capacity to 

act. Baird and Henninger use the metaphor of serious play to show how digital technologies 

can prevent those with visual impairments from developing the literacy skills which are 

fundamental to contemporary life and propose the need for developers of applications for 

digital technologies to adopt a set of heuristic principles so that the digital playground is 

accessible to all. Maranhao and  Knijnik  explore Gilberto Freyre’s ideas from the 1930s 

about futebol mulato and the way these ideas have spread around the world the notion of the 

Brazilian mulatto as a symbol of a ‘racial democracy’, unique in Brazil. They argue that 

Freyre’s ideas, which are as applicable now as they were when they were first published, 

were useful in constructing the Brazilian identity, a nation of harmony in all its aspects, 

including the area of race, and how the idea of the mulatto has been used to minimise social 

disparities within Brazilian society. Bott, Grabowski and Wearing are concerned with 

complexity of developing a case for World Heritage listing in developing countries and 

in facilitating stakeholder collaboration in this process. They present a case study of 

Kokoda and the Owen Stanley Ranges which demonstrates that stakeholders exhibit differing 

levels of power, legitimacy, urgency and proximity and that collaboration is essential for the 

best outcome. In the context of tourism, Wearing and Darcy explore the question of the other 

in tourism, in this case, host communities, which are often seen as removed from the 

neoliberal business foundation of tourism.  They present an overview of how the engagement 

of host communities can expand the market for tourism and lead to more satisfying visitor 

experiences, enhance the sustainability of these experiences and, thus, be considered good 

management practice within the industry. They argue that, if sustainability is to move beyond 

economic and environmental Western constructs to embrace social sustainability, changing 

global values require tourism management to adopt more inclusive ways of practice and 

management principles. Finally, Arvanitakis is concerned with notions of citizenship and 

explores how the political moment, signalled by the anti-war protests in Sydney, Australia in 

2003 which brought more than half a million people onto the streets, was displaced into the 

everyday. He proposes that this displacement has led to a re-definition of ‘political action’ 

and the emergence of a different type of everyday politics. 
Hilary Yerbury