Race,Gender, Science and Citizenship

This paper argues that the history of embodiment of human racial and gendered differences must be seen as part of the history of liberal citizenship and its limits. The author suggests that a science of similarity and difference can never be a reliable guide to questions of rights. The consequences of this conclusion for our understanding of science and the gendered body are addressed in the second half of the paper, in an effort to clear the way for a more adequate and inclusionary model of citizenship and rights.     

Escaping Violence,Seeking Freedom: Why Children in Bangladesh Migrate to the Street

In Bangladesh, as in many developing countries, there is a widespread belief amongst the public, policy makers and social workers that children ‘abandon’ their families and migrate to the street because of economic poverty. Ignoring and avoiding mounting evidence to the contrary, this dominant narrative posits that children whose basic material needs cannot be met within the household move to the street. This article explores this narrative through the analysis of detailed empirical research with children in Bangladesh. It finds that social factors lie behind most street migration and, in particular, that moves to the street are closely associated with violence towards and abuse of children within the household and local community. These findings are consistent with the wider literature on street migration from other countries. In Bangladesh, those who seek to reduce the flow of children to the streets need to focus on social policy, especially on how to reduce the excessive control and emotional, physical and sexual violence that occur in some households. Economic growth and reductions in income poverty will be helpful, but they will not be sufficient to reduce street migration by children.     

The Meaning and Value of Freedom: Berlin contra Arendt

This essay considers the theoretical disagreement between Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt on the meaning and value of freedom. Berlin thinks that negative liberty as non-interference is commendable because it is attuned to the implication of value pluralism that man is a choice-making creature and cannot be otherwise. By contrast, the political freedom to act is in Arendt’s view a more fulfilling ideal because it is only in political action that man’s potentiality is actualised, his unique identity manifested and his being-in-the-world-with-others reaffirmed. What lies beneath the two thinkers’ dispute over the most satisfactory meaning of freedom, I argue, is a deeper disagreement over human nature itself. The implication of this analysis for the contemporary debate between pluralist liberals and their agonistic critics is briefly discussed in conclusion.     

Female Workers,Political Mobilization,and the Meaning of Revolutionary Citizenship in Beijing, 1948-1950

After entering Beijing in January 1949, the Communist Party immediately sent cadres to local factories in order to mobilize female industrial workers into a women＇s movement and to establish the idea of ＂revolutionary citizenship.＂ The Party wished to nurture this idea in both the local political arena and in women＇s lives inside and outside the factories. This article demonstrates that a host of factors defined revolutionary citizenship, including party directives, choices in revolutionary strategy, cadres＇ interpretations of directives and their own initiatives, and workers＇ reactions to mobilization. It was in this complex mix of mobilization, women＇s strategies to protect and advance their own interests, and the politics of group representation in the revolution, that female workers came to understand the meaning and impact of revolutionary citizenship and the shape of labor-state relations in the emerging socialist China.     

Race Always Mattered: Black-on-Black Mob Violence and Interracial Relations in Kansas

This study examines black-on-black mob violence and situates it within the historiography of mob disorder in the United States more generally. Unlike previous such studies, this one employs intra-racial violence among blacks as a prism through which to explore interracial relations between blacks and whites. It examines the roles that whites assumed in these incidents, the objectives that they pursued, and the influence that they exercised over the trajectory of subsequent events. Rather than focusing on lynching alone, as have previous studies, this one addresses several non-lethal types of mob violence, such as beatings, whippings, and the like, as well as the threat of violence, as embodied in threatened lynchings. Moving away from the usual focus on the American South and the years from 1880 until 1930, this study examines the Midwestern state of Kansas in the years from 1869 until 1911.