Does school participatory budgeting (SPB) increase students’ political efficacy? SPB, which is implemented in thousands of schools around the world, is a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making in which students determine how to spend a portion of the school’s budget. We examined the impact of SPB on political efficacy in one middle school in Arizona. Our participants’ (n = 28) responses on survey items designed to measure self-perceived growth in political efficacy indicated a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.46), suggesting that SPB is an effective approach to civic pedagogy, with promising prospects for developing students’ political efficacy.

During his wartime exile in New York City, André Breton responded to the popular entrenchment of Surrealism as a language of shop window merchandising by leading a small group of artists and writers to take the publicity of Surrealism into their own hands. At Breton’s behest, Marcel Duchamp designed three shop windows to advertise texts released by the French publishing arm of the Fifth Avenue bookstore Brentano’s in 1943 and 1945. Although art historians have called attention to the relationship between these designs and the iconography of better-known works by Duchamp, this paper considers them as instantiations of Breton’s evolving thought within the context of a commercial environment already saturated with surrealist imagery. It places them within an iconographic web that includes, among others, Salvador Dalí’s famed fashion displays of the preceding decade, multiple iterations of Duchamp’s “twine,” and works by Kurt Seligmann, Roberto Matta, and Breton himself. The paper argues that, exemplifying the prewar surrealist motif of interior and exterior permeability and bringing it to a breaking point, these obscure windows for French-language texts became an important laboratory for the engaged critique of consumerism that would come to the forefront of the surrealist movement during the postwar period.