Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bush's selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.     

‘Layered Networks’: Imperial Philanthropy in Birmingham and Sydney, 1860–1914

Traditionally, histories of philanthropy have adopted a nationalist focus. Influenced by new imperial history, this article seeks to move beyond national borders by placing metropolitan and colonial philanthropic practices in a single frame of analysis. This approach facilitates not only a comparison of philanthropic activities in two specific sites, Birmingham and Sydney, but a broader analysis of how philanthropic practices in both sites were shaped by ideas in constant flow between Britain, its colonies and the wider world. Evidence from various charities in Birmingham and Sydney reveal the existence of ‘layered networks’ spanning the local, national, imperial and global. As such, this article aims to extend the work of transnational/cross-border histories and geographical networks, by retaining a sense of the local.     

Best for society? Transnational opposition to sexual and gender equalities in Canada and Great Britain

While much has been written about the limitations of new legislative equalities, there is a silence in geographies of sexualities regarding the backlash to these changes and the reiteration of particular heteronormativity. In working across Great Britain and Canada, we argue that these resistances are trans-scalar, operating transnationally as well as evoking nation, classroom, home and body. Arguments at the local level are embedded in and draw on the broader ‘natural family’ arguments circulating at local/regional, national and transnational levels. Drawing on the literature on transnationalism that understands these processes as (re)forming values and practices, this article explores the discourses that reiterate the naturalness and centrality of particular forms of heterosexuality as key for a healthy society and the protection of children. The latter works on three levels. First, the child cannot be ‘naturally’ produced outside of heterosexual sexual relations. Second, the raising of these children appropriately and healthily redefines ‘family’ within heteronormative structures. Third, comments that might be termed ‘homophobic’ are reframed as merely free speech as a way to counter LGBT recognition. We finish the article by arguing for explorations of heterosexuality within transnational networks to resistances to LGBT equalities.     

What is national self‐determination? Nationality and psychology during the apogee of nationalism*

Abstract. The idea of national self‐determination propounded at the 1919 peace conference centred in Paris marked a new era in international relations. In this article I re‐examine the history of the idea of national self‐determination in this period by situating it in the context of ‘the psychological turn’. I argue that national self‐determination came to serve as a popular philosophical basis for post‐war democracy among Entente liberals at a time when the Enlightenment equivalence between democracy and ‘self‐determination’ was under challenge from new scientific depictions of the unconscious and irrational, and the biologically determined self. The focus of my discussion is the psychological discourse that threaded through the versions of national self‐determination articulated by British and French intellectuals during World War I.     

En route to New York: diasporic networks and the reconfiguration of female entrepreneurship in Senegal

This article examines the influence of migration and transnational social networks on female entrepreneurship. It interrogates shifting patterns of market development, juxtaposed to the lure of new economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs located at the periphery, Senegal. I critically analyse how a distinct and classed category of Senegalese women entrepreneurs navigates international spaces and legal restrictions in attempts to launch profitable economic ventures in metropolitan centres such as New York City and negotiate new forms of representation and agency in contentious socio-economic spaces. By interrogating the complex interplay between women entrepreneurs and diasporic communities, I weave an often-missing gender perspective into the analysis of the emergence of female transnational entrepreneurship and diasporic social networks. This article demonstrates that diasporic social networks, transnational markets and spatial interconnections, while contributing to market revitalisation and expansion, are nonetheless fraught with tension. Diasporic social networks embody paradoxical positions. They represent an enabling economic transactional space, while embodying an informal social space that nonetheless remains sites of power struggles deeply embedded in gendered, sociocultural and economic dynamics that transfer from local to transnational contexts.     

Educated non-elites’ pathways to cosmopolitanism: the case of private degree students in Singapore

In this article, I explore a range of actually existing cosmopolitanisms performed by young people studying at a private higher educational institute in Singapore. Based on fieldwork over a period of eleven months conducted with these educated but non-elite youths between 2013 and 2014, I discuss how private degree students (a vernacular term) draw on various resources across different sites and domains of their everyday life to construct themselves, as well as their campus experiences, as ‘cosmopolitan’. Adopting an understanding of cosmopolitanism as a social practice, I argue that these young people perform three criss-crossing pathways to become cosmopolitan that unsettle dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism as an elite cultural capital, disposition, and subjecthood within extant scholarship on international/transnational education. In particular, I explore these pathways through the framing themes of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, ‘cosmopolitan learning’, and ‘unanticipated cosmopolitan’. In doing so, the article adds texture and complexity to existing discussion about young people’s subjective views as well as practices of cosmopolitan citizenship in and through international/transnational higher education.     

Assemblage-democracy: Reconceptualising democracy through material resource governance

This article furthers political geographic thinking on democracy by generating and employing a conceptualisation of ‘assemblage-democracy’. Bringing an assemblage perspective to democratic thinking brings to the fore three key dimensions: the co-constitution of material and non-material connections; connectivity and associations, in particular engagement with multiple heterogeneous ‘minoritarian’ publics; and the (re)construction of spatial configurations such as scale. We employ these three dimensions of materiality, publics, and scale, in combination with the concept of (de)territorialisation to produce a geographic conceptualisation of democracy as emergent, precarious, and plural.We operationalise and refine the concept of assemblage-democracy through an empirical analysis of democratic experiments with energy resources. Specifically, we analyse negotiations involved in emergent democratic energy experiments through in-depth qualitative empirical study of community-owned energy projects in the UK, asking what kind of democracy emerges with new technologies and how? In answering this question, we demonstrate the fragile, contingent, and contested nature of democratic practices and connections produced in the (re)enactment of energy infrastructures. In doing so, this article also shows how an assemblage lens can offer a renewed understanding of how democratic politics is configured through material resource governance.     

Gramsci's activists: How local civil society is shaped by the anti-corruption industry,political society and translocal encounters

The rise of the international anti-corruption industry over the past two decades has led to questions about how this industry impacts local civil society organizations in developing countries. For some academics the rise of the anti-corruption industry has led to more meaningful local responses, for others it has helped reinforce apolitical and neoliberal-inspired solutions. This article suggests that these debates would benefit from more nuanced and multi-scalar analysis. Drawing on in depth interviews, media analysis, grey materials and academic and practitioner literature, this article focuses on a group of anti-corruption activists in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The article compares a group of activists called the Coalition to its more radical predecessors, a local non-governmental organization by the name of Melanesian Solidarity. It uses a Gramscian framework to argue that responses to corruption in PNG have not simply been shaped by the anti-corruption industry. Rather they have been shaped by: the incentives and capacity of political society, international discourse on corruption and the nature of ‘translocal encounters’. These findings show that much of the academic literature on the anti-corruption industry has fallen into a ‘transnational trap’, by overemphasizing transnational linkages between organizations working to address corruption. Approaching the study of local anti-corruption movements with a focus on the complexity of scale, as this paper does, has important implications for theorizing responses to corruption in developing countries.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

‘Assisting you to become a local’: NGOs and constructed foreign spouses in Eastern Taiwan

As social and cultural contexts change and globalization spreads, the number of transnational-marriage migrants mainly from Southeast Asia has increased in Taiwan. Using institutional ethnography, this article investigates the roles of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and projects aimed at helping foreign spouses to adapt to their new life. I mainly elaborate that NGOs emerge as important actors in assisting and empowering transnational spouses to ‘become locals’. In empowerment projects, foreign spouses are given a voice to elaborate themselves. However, this article elaborates that these projects are a scheme of education to shape each such migrant into a proper ‘Taiwanese wife/mother/daughter-in-law’. Also, these projects particularly promote ‘exoticism’ of migrants and become key sources of how local people understand the images of ‘foreign spouses’. As a result, though NGOs play positive roles in empowering foreign spouses, we need to be aware that NGOs’ efforts may ironically become a mechanism to strengthen transnational spouses’ gender roles and cultural stereotypes.     

Børnemagt/children’s power in the Freetown of Christiania: citizenship,agency and vulnerability

This article contributes to the field of research on children and citizenship, by analysing retrospective narratives about experiences of Børnemagt (Children’s Power) in the Freetown of Christiania, Denmark, in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on strategies for agency and rights, as well as on vulnerabilities. Power relations regarding age and space are used as analytical tools. Runaway children from harsh backgrounds found a refuge in Christiania and tried to take charge of their own lives after rejecting the care they had received from adults and societal institutions earlier in life. The freedom experienced in Christiania supported the young people in their elaboration of citizenship, at the same time as the attitude of ‘leaving the children to their own devices’ excluded them from a citizenship based on interdependency and interrelationality. Vulnerability, it is argued, is a constitutive element of citizenship that needs to be further elaborated within this field of research.     

What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328)

This article examines how Parisian university clerics responded to the city's communities of beguines (uncloistered religious women), highlighting in particular the ways in which clerics employed the term ‘beguine’ in sermons and preaching material from thirteenth-century Paris. Because the beguines were not hidden behind convent walls but were instead a visible presence in the city, they were often the focus of Parisian clerics' ideas about religious women. Sermons preached, composed, and copied in Paris reveal the process by which Parisian medieval thinkers constructed, although not always consciously, a negative meaning for the term ‘beguine.’ Always poorly defined, ‘beguine’ evoked a wide variety of meanings and associations for clerical observers in medieval Paris. The varied ideas about and images of the beguine allowed the Parisian intellectual elite to include these women in discussions of their own position in society as clerics in charge of the religious instruction of the laity. Clerics used the beguine as an example of the contemplative life, often comparing their own intellectual approaches to religious knowledge with the beguines' mystical knowledge. These positive comparisons, however, were joined by negative accusations when clerics expressed concern that the beguine thought too highly of her spiritual gifts.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

A new military history of the Italian Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento: the case of ‘transnational soldiers’

The article discusses new studies of foreign soldiers in the Italian armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorgimento against the background of recent scholarship on ‘transnational soldiers’, which acknowledges the complexities of foreigners' initial motives for enlistment and of the transnational processes inside the single armies. The article suggests that from the mundane structures of military life to the perceptions of the rank-and-file, many aspects of the soldiering experience in the multinational armed groups on all sides of the Risorgimento actually advanced rather than obviated national boundaries. This paper further demonstrates that the military cultures of the nationalists and the anti-unity forces were much more porous and mutually constitutive than is often recognised. The histories of the ‘transnational soldiers’ in the armed groups of the Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento are crucial for a possibly new, comparative history of the armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorigmento. This paper explores approaches of the culturally revived ‘new military history’ and suggests that it provides much still unrealised potential for Risorgimento historiography.     

Gatekeepers of the Urban Commons? Vigilant Citizenship and Neoliberal Space in Multiethnic Paris

This article draws from ethnographic research on a recently built park in one of Paris' predominately West African and Maghrebi districts. It demonstrates how urban design is used to “build‐in” neoliberal subjectivities to the city. This design approach appropriates a tradition of street democracy held by neighborhood associations and redirects their disproportionately middle class, French membership into managerial roles traditionally held by municipal agencies. This neoliberal political subjectivity, which I term vigilant citizenship, makes monitoring and controlling the social composition of the urban commons a form of civic engagement for middle class urbanites. In Paris, this vigilance is fueled by anxieties over the presence of West African and Maghrebi youth in public spaces. Activists do not passively adopt this neoliberal role; they strike a delicate balance as gatekeepers, weighing inclusion against an expectation to maintain a “successful” public space conforming to a republican model of citizenship.     

Race,space, and agency in the international introduction industry: how American men perceive women’s agency in Colombia,Ukraine and the Philippines

The international introduction industry, more commonly known as the ‘mail order bride’ industry, is often portrayed in American media as a conduit of human trafficking or a ploy by women from ‘third world’ countries to gain access to American citizenship. This study addresses how men participating in the international introduction industry perceived the industry and the agency/sincerity of women who participate in it across three different geographic spaces, namely Ukraine, Colombia and the Philippines, and how these perceptions often adopt racialized discourses that portrays white Ukrainian women as sexy ‘scammers’, while women of color are more likely to be portrayed as victims of poverty and patriarchy. Based on empirical data collected on romance tours within all geographic spaces with male participants, I suggest that men’s racialized assumptions regarding women’s intentions within the industry, as well as what type of agency they possess, are heavily based on tropes of the third world as backwards, traditional, and static.     

Caught between nationalism and internationalism: replicating histories of Antarctica in Hobart

In December 2013, a replica of ‘Mawson’s Hut’ (a historic structure in Antarctica) joined a growing list of polar tourist attractions in the Australian city of Hobart, Tasmania. Initially promoted as the city’s ‘latest tourist hotspot,’ the ‘replica museum’ quickly took its place in Hobart’s newly redeveloped waterfront, reinforcing the city’s identity as an ‘Antarctic Gateway’. The hut forms part of a heritage cluster, an urban assemblage that weaves together the local and national, the past and present, the familiar and remote. In this article, we examine the replica hut in relation to the complex temporal and spatial relations that give it meaning, and to which it gives meaning. Our focus is the hut as a point of convergence between memory, material culture and the histories – and possible futures – of nationalism and internationalism. We argue that the replica hut, as a key site of Hobart’s Antarctic heritage tourism industry, reproduces and prioritises domestic readings of exploration and colonisation over a reading of Antarctic engagement as a transnational endeavour. However, like other ‘gateway city’ heritage sites, it has the potential for aligning with a larger trend in international heritage conservation and heritage diplomacy, that of prioritising narratives of the past that weave together transnational connections and associations.     

Transnational Constructors of Parliamentary Democracy in Swedish and Finnish Constitutional Controversies, 1917–1919

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against ‘Western’ democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917–1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented.     

Public Authority and Conservation in Areas of Armed Conflict: Virunga National Park as a ‘State within a State’ in Eastern Congo

Much research on nature conservation in war‐torn regions focuses on the destructive impact of violent conflict on protected areas, and argues that transnational actors should step up their support for those areas to mitigate the risks that conflict poses to conservation efforts there. Overlooked are the effects transnational efforts have on wider conflict dynamics and structures of public authority in these regions. This article describes how transnational actors increasingly gained influence over the management of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and how these actors contributed to the militarization of conservation in Virunga. Most scholarly literature suggests that ‘green militarization’ contributes to the extension of state authority over territory and population, yet this is not the case in Virunga. Instead, the militarization of Virunga translates into practices of extra‐state territorialization, with the result that many in the local population perceive the park's management as a project of personalized governance and/or a ‘state within a state’. This article thus argues that it is important to depart from an a priori notion of the ‘state’ when considering the nexus of conservation practices and territorialization, and to analyse this intersection through the lens of public authority instead.