Sexual citizenship in Latvia: geographies of the Latvian closet

This study examines sexual citizenship in Latvia. It investigates the process by which political narratives have heterosexed the nation since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. My aim in exploring this process is to develop a deeper understanding of non-heteronormative identities and counter-hegemonic spaces in this heterosexist society. Drawing on discourse analysis of political media statements I argue that despite the legalizing of homosexuality, political narratives have continued to sex the nation as heterosexual, forging the national closet. I then explore how these narratives become experienced in lives of sexual minorities through the state's failure to prevent sexual discrimination. Drawing on participant observation and a decoding of the urban landscape, I investigate how the Latvian closet is materialized in the bodies and places of the everyday lives of ‘gay’ men living in the capital, Riga. Examined in this way insights are given to the spatial forms of political resistance to heterosexism in Latvia and how it differs from western models.     

Understanding ‘trafficking vulnerabilities’ among children: the responses linking to child protection issues in Nepal

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to discuss child trafficking in Nepal within the broader framework of child protection. It examines both individual (gender, ethnicity and caste) and structural (their experiences in relation to work, migration, education and lack of birth registration) vulnerabilities and their links with child trafficking as a child protection concern. The paper provides suggestions for why there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of trafficking vulnerabilities as part of a continuum, rather than a distinct event, to improve outcomes for children. We use the evidence presented here to call for a holistic approach. Policies and programmes must be integrated within the broader concerns of child protection, thus strengthening the system from local to national level, while recognising the importance of children’s rights to participate in any decision-making.     

Sexual citizenship in ‘the New Tasmania’

The state of Tasmania, the smallest in the Commonwealth of Australia, has recently reformed its law relating to relationships by amending over 100 pieces of legislation to include a range of relationships, including lesbian and gay partnerships, among those given recognition and legal entitlement. This government-sponsored legislation is represented as central to the program of economic revival, social reform and branding described as ‘the New Tasmania’. This article locates the relationship reform in this discourse of Tasmania's newness and in the context of neo-liberal approaches to globalisation. It argues that sexual citizenship takes a multitude of forms and its value, like the value of relationship reform legislation, cannot be easily determined. Indeed, it asks whether sexual citizenship as a form of belonging can ever be disentangled from the various contexts where it is performed. It concludes by privileging the desires and performances of sexual citizenship over the constitution of sexual citizenship in rights or recognition.     

Traditions in transition: Sanskritization and Yakkhafication in East Nepal

Based on fieldwork conducted amongst the Yakkha of East Nepal from 1989–90, this article looks at the similarities and differences in how “tradition” is approached by anthropologists and historians. It focuses on reflexivity, performance and process as key intellectual traditions within both anthropology and history, but takes issue with Hobsbawm’s suggestion that “tradition” is the stuff of “modern” societies while “custom” is a feature of “traditional” ones. It also argues for the “construction” rather than “invention” of traditions, by anthropologists as well as by people they study. In the case of the Yakkha, this construction can be seen in the changes in agricultural techniques over the past 150 years, the use of pellet bows by Yakkha men, and the celebrations of the ostensibly Hindu festival of Dasain. Only with hindsight can the ‘invented’ nature of the Dasain tradition be appreciated; even so, during the research period covered by this article, the rituals that epitomized ‘Sanskritization’ were simultaneously the subject of ‘Yakkhafication’, a process reflecting the negotiation, manipulation and subversion of Yakkha identity.     

Gender and household decision-making in a Lao Village: implications for livelihoods in hydropower development

Hydropower development with concomitant changes in water and land regimes often results in livelihood transformation of affected people, entailing changes in intra-household decision-making upon which livelihood strategies are based. Economic factors underlying gender dimensions of household decision-making have been studied rigorously since the 1970s. However, empirical data on gender and decision-making within households, needed for evidence-based action, remain scarce. This is more so in hydropower contexts. This article explores gender and livelihood-related decision-making within rural households in the context of hydropower development in Lao PDR. Based on a social well-being conceptual approach with data from a household survey and qualitative interviews, it focuses on household decisions in an ethnic minority resettlement site soon after displacement, from an interpretive perspective. The article, first, aims to assess the extent to which household decision-making is gendered and secondly, to understand the complex reasoning behind household decisions, especially the relevance of material, relational, and subjective factors. It argues that while most household decisions are ostensibly considered as ‘joint’ in the study site, the nuanced nature of gendered values, norms, practices, relations, attitudes, and feelings underlying these decisions are important to assessing why households might or might not adopt livelihood interventions proposed by hydropower developers.     

Simultaneous identities: ethnicity and nationalism in mother tongue education in Nepal*

The scholarly works on ethnicity and nationalism have been highly dominated by binary frameworks. In addition, the normative preference for civic consciousness and the concerns of national disintegration often separate the notions of ethnicity and nationalism. This article suggests that the notions of ethnicity and nationalism cannot be understood exclusively as a choice between maintaining the integrity of the nation and completely rejecting it. Drawing on fieldwork in mother tongue schools in Nepal, the article draws attention to the ways in which school actors discursively positioned ethnic identity as imperative to national identity, the one that bolsters the notion of Nepali nationhood. By paying close attention to the everyday context within which discourses of nationalism are situated, this article argues for an analytical necessity to approach ethnicity and nationalism in relation to each other to appreciate the process of symbolic negotiations in public spaces.     

Diversity and cultural policy: cultural citizenship as a tool for inclusion

At the crossroads of citizenship, cultural and diversity studies, I enter in the emerging debate on cultural citizenship. Culture is seen as a channel for diversity inclusion, and cultural policy carries the function of enhancing citizenship. My reasoning will follow two steps. First, in overviewing the recent literature, I identify two main drivers making cultural citizenship: the democratic/equality and the identity/national drivers. However, I will note that the debate is concentrated in the plurality of meanings of ‘culture’, and not, as I will argue as a second step, in the plurality of citizenship traditions: a liberal, a communitarian and a republican one. This view is at the basis of different approaches of cultural policies when we focus on them as enhancing cultural citizenship in diversity contexts. At the end, I will also contend that this can ground an interpretative framework capable of distinguishing current social practices and policies.     

Nation‐freezing: images of the nation and the migrant in citizenship packages

ABSTRACT. New nationalism differs from classical nationalism in terms of its content and focus. Whereas classical nationalism distinguishes itself from other nation‐states in defining its national identity, new nationalism distinguishes the ‘native’ national identity from that of its current and prospective citizens of migrant origin. The terms of integration thus become conditions of membership in the national community. Citizenship and integration policies emerge as central arenas where the discourse of new nationalism unfolds. This study looks into the discourses of cultural citizenship by studying the content of the official ‘citizenship packages’ – materials designed to welcome newcomers and assist them in their integration – in three Western European countries: The Netherlands, France and the UK. What images are depicted of the nation‐state and the migrant in citizenship packages, and (how) do these images freeze the nation?     

Hegemonic at home and subaltern abroad: Kamaiya masculinities and changing mobility in Nepal

As former bonded labourers (or slaves), the Kamaiya of far-west Nepal have a history of marginalization, poverty and limited mobility due to the constraints inherent in the Kamaiya system of bonded labour (banned in 2000). Based on ethnographic research in the post-slavery era, this article examines how mobility is becoming an important part of Kamaiya masculinities. I consider in particular an account of migration acquired over a series of interviews with a Kamaiya man named Ram. Ram’s migrant trajectory from Nepal to India and back over variable lengths of time reflect a broader literature on circular migration in India. I argue that transnationally performed migrant masculinities are alternatively subordinated and hegemonic across geographically diverse contexts. By accepting and performing subordinated, often oppressive masculine roles in a broader South Asian context, men such as Ram are producing new, locally hegemonic or at least desirable masculine roles in Kamaiya villages in Nepal.     

Beyond the civic–ethnic dichotomy: investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty‐three countries

ABSTRACT. The traditional distinction between civic and ethnic citizenship continues to dominate the study of citizenship concepts. In recent years, various authors have questioned the dichotomous character of these concepts. In this article, we empirically investigate the applicability of this dichotomy based on an analysis of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data across thirty‐three societies. The analysis demonstrates that this dichotomous structure can indeed be detected and therefore the theoretical dichotomy can be considered as empirically valid. While ethnic citizenship refers most strongly to having national ancestry, for civic citizenship the most important criterion seems to be to obey national laws. However, the ethnic concept of citizenship can also be defined in a negative manner: for ethnic citizenship, obeying the national laws is clearly not a sufficient condition. Further analysis also reveals that the measurement of both concepts is not equivalent cross‐nationally, so that findings on civic and ethnic citizenship are difficult to compare across societies.     

A tale of ambiguity: citizenship,nationalism and democracy in Turkey

ABSTRACT. We argue that historically the official Turkish nationalism and citizenship regime have been marked by an ambiguity that arises from the simultaneous existence of – and repeatedly occurring swings between – the ethno‐centric and civic‐political understandings of citizenship. We also suggest that the concept of territoriality, which took precedence over other factors in the creation of a new state in 1923, has functioned as a hegemonic reference in the official conceptualisations of the Turkish nation and self. The territorial focus, over time, has been conflated with the ethnic conceptualisations of the nation: both become the underlining elements of the discourse of official nationalism in Turkey, and are utilised in the successive reformulations of citizenship into the 2000s. Through the analysis of schoolbooks and curricula, we further argue that the major oscillations in nationalism nevertheless coincided with the ruptures that characterised the making of modern Turkey: modernisation, democratisation, globalisation and Europeanisation.     

Constructions of cosmopolitanism in teenage citizenship in Singapore

This study aims to uncover the geographies of places informing teenagers' understanding of cosmopolitanism and citizenship. Children and young people (CYP) in Singapore are becoming more internationally mobile and growing up in highly globalised Singapore. There are three overall arguments in this paper. First, the local is the actual place to situate studies on cosmopolitanism and that cosmopolitanism should be considered as a dimension of deterritorialised citizenship amongst CYP growing up in highly globalised nation-states. There are ‘roots and routes’ approaches to citizenship and my second argument is that the ‘routes approach’ to citizenship has ingrained cosmopolitan experiences into young people's life-worlds and is arguably the stronger approach of the two for young Singaporeans. Finally, this study demonstrates that the experiences of CYP in geographies of education [Holloway, S. L., P. Hubbard, H. Jöns, H. Pimlott-Wilson. 2010. “Geographies of Education and the Significance of Children, Youth and Families.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (5)] are credible yet neglected life-worlds that can help reconstitute frameworks for understanding cosmopolitanism and citizenship [Harvey, D. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12 (2)].     

20世纪二三十年代安徽小学教员及其生计初探

19世纪末以来,随着现代教育的发展,教师逐渐成为一个新兴的职业群体。20世纪二三十年代,在安徽从事初等教育的主要是一个以中等学校毕业为主的男性群体。他们接受的是现代科学的训练,尽管学历不高,年龄不大,但却是乡村社会中的知识传播精英。他们收入微薄,繁重的生活压力与工作负担使得他们最终成为乡村革命的播火者。     

Universalized categories,dissonant realities: gendering postconflict reconstruction in Nepal

International agencies, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agencies, and development policy-makers have sought to incorporate ‘gender mainstreaming’ into postconflict policies and programs in an effort to ameliorate the unequal gender impacts of war. This article uses narratives of widow heads of household collected through field research in Nepal in 2008 and 2011 to illustrate how postconflict development discourses purporting to engage with gender not only take a narrow view of gender (i.e., by equating it to women-focused activities), but also neglect the complex and dynamic realities of women's lives. Postconflict interventions employ simplistic assumptions that neglect gender-specific postconflict insecurities and oppressions (such as systematic violence against women). By neglecting the crucial significance of social networks for widows' survival, postconflict reconstruction assumes women to be individualized receptacles for development/empowerment. The crucial role of social networks in constraining women's agency is obscured. At the same time, assumptions of homogeneity ingrained in universalized categories such as ‘widow’ and ‘conflict-affected’ obfuscate women's multiple identities, roles, and agency in their struggles for survival. The insights emerging from field research suggest a greater attunement of postconflict development interventions to women's lived experiences and social settings.     

Becoming public: public pedagogy,citizenship and the public sphere

This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts to reclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of public sphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline a conception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and the conservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity. The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality of common spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy: that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy of the public and that of public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the public quality of human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases the political by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility for forms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of human togetherness which contribute to the ‘becoming public’ of spaces and places.     

Trans-Himalayan power corridors: Infrastructural politics and China's Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal

This article examines the shifting dimensions of Chinese infrastructural aid in Nepal, focusing on the politics of anticipation and enunciation that shape Nepali perceptions of Chinese-facilitated development and negotiations concerning Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing from ethnographic research focused on sites of ongoing and planned infrastructure development in Nepal's two northern districts of Rasuwa and Gorkha, we analyze the uncertain remaking of these areas into trans-Himalayan power corridors. Our examination reveals the gamut of transitions, opportunities, reorientations, and expectations that the BRI and other forms of Chinese investment evoke in Nepal, showing how politics articulate infrastructures, and vice versa. After reviewing the historical context of Nepal-China relations, our empirical analysis begins in late 2014 when China became the single largest source of foreign direct investment in Nepal, continues through several rounds of negotiations about the BRI and other forms of Chinese infrastructural investment and aid, and concludes with a review of significant Nepal-China agreements at the Second Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing in April 2019. Tacking between remote construction sites, scenes of diplomatic debate, borderland villages, investment summits, and speculative media coverage, we demonstrate how the Belt and Road Initiative is differently enacted and co-constructed by a variety of Nepali and Chinese actors who interpret, reimagine, and rhetorically appropriate the BRI within their own narrations of future possibility.     

Geopolitics of landlocked states in South Asia: a comparative analysis of Afghanistan and Nepal

ABSTRACT

Foreign policies of landlocked states have been a topic of interest for scholarship on international relations but the landlocked states in South Asia have received negligible attention. Due to their geographical realities, South Asian landlocked states that include Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal, depend on their neighbours for trade with the outside world. A range of factors place landlocked states in an unequal relationship with their coastal neighbours. While these factors include the superiority of coastal neighbours in terms of economy, population size, and military strength, we argue that their landlockedness plays a crucial role. To further investigate the role of landlockedness, this study compares the foreign policy decisions that guide India-Nepal and Afghanistan–Pakistan relations. Based on the assessment of historical, economic and geopolitical factors, we argue that India and Pakistan exploit their landlocked neighbours to achieve their national interests. Frustrated by the treatment of their coastal neighbours and the presence of new trade opportunities have compelled Afghanistan to use its closeness with India to counter over-dependence on Pakistan and Nepal has enhanced cooperation with China to overcome its reliance on India, thereby creating a new geopolitical dynamic within South Asia.     

An account of cultural heritage and nature conservation in Mustang,Nepal

Abstract

This article was presented as a paper to ‘World Cultural Heritage: a global challenge’, an International Symposium at Hildesheim, Germany in February 1997. The paper outlines the problems of attempting to develop a combined heritage and tourism strategy for the small, remote, Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. The development of tourism brings both opportunities and threats to local people and their identity.     

Muslim active citizenship in Australia: Socioeconomic challenges and the emergence of a Muslim elite

The most recent national Census demonstrated that Australian Muslims continue to occupy a socioeconomically disadvantaged position. On key indicators of unemployment rate, income, type of occupation and home ownership, Muslims consistently under-perform the national average. This pattern is evident in the last three Census data (2001, 2006 and 2011). Limited access to resources and a sense of marginalisation challenge full engagement with society and the natural growth of emotional affiliation with Australia. Muslim active citizenship is hampered by socioeconomic barriers. At the same time, an increasingly proactive class of educated Muslim elite has emerged to claim a voice for Muslims in Australia and promote citizenship rights and responsibilities.

最近的全国普查显示,澳大利亚的穆斯林仍处于社会经济的弱势地位。在诸如失业率、收入、就业类型、家居拥有等关键指标看,穆斯林一直位于国家平均水平之下。这一模式在最近三次普查（2001、2006、2011）中非常明显。获得资源渠道的有限以及边缘化感觉阻碍着他们充分参与社会,以及在情感上融入澳大利亚。穆斯林的公民意识受困于社会经济障碍。与此同时,也出现了一班受到良好教育的穆斯林精英,这个积极进取的阶层开始为澳大利亚的穆斯林代言,促进他们的公民权利和义务。     

Concepts of citizenship in France during the long eighteenth century

François Furet famously described the French Revolution as ’the first experiment with democracy’, and modern French citizenship is often seen as having emerged during this period. Universal male suffrage was practised for the first time in 1792 and the Revolution also witnessed debate over such issues as: the rights of citizens; the extension of the franchise to poorer inhabitants and black slaves; and even whether women should be given political rights. Yet, the modern idea of citizenship did not emerge from nowhere in 1789. Rather it was the product of more than a century of debate. This article examines the different understandings of citizenship that were competing for dominance in France during the long eighteenth century: the ancient conception; the Bodinian understanding and the rights-based approach. Not only does it demonstrate the contribution of these approaches (and in particular the last) to revolutionary understandings of citizenship, but it also highlights how the tensions of the eighteenth-century debates, and the ambiguities inherent in the rights-based conception, sparked some of the key controversies of the Revolution.