What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.     

The African bill: Chinese struggles with development assistance (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Chinese diplomats and politicians have sought to underline the mutually beneficial and cordial nature of Chinese engagement with Africa through the use of phrases such as ‘win‐win cooperation’ (huying huli hezuo) and ‘friendly collaboration’ (youhao hezuo). Avoiding the use of concepts such as ‘aid’, which suggest a hierarchical relationship between giver and receiver, they have argued that Chinese initiatives on the African continent are fundamentally different from Western development assistance. An anthropological glance at the situation on the ground however, shows that these statements are not only a part of political rhetoric, but that they also mask the similarities between Chinese and Western involvement with development in Africa.     

Altersgerechtes Wohnen im Quartier

Standort - Im Alter nimmt das Quartier aufgrund geringerer Aktionsradien an Bedeutung zu. Der Beitrag befasst sich mit der Frage, welche Besonderheiten sich bei Senioren-Haushalten im Hinblick auf...     

Studying marriage migration to Europe from below: informal practices of government,border struggles and multiple entanglements

The growing importance of marriage as a migration strategy has been accompanied by a problematisation and securitization of marriages between binational couples in media and policy discourse. Moreover, marriage migration has received increased scholarly attention. In this article, we propose an analytical framework for the study of marriage migration and its government that permits to transcend three biases and related blind spots that we identify in the existing literature. While this literature offers rich insights into marriage migration and states’ ever more laboured attempts to control and regulate it, this literature is, nevertheless, characterised by an implementation gap bias, a control bias and, finally, a destination country bias. To address these biases, we propose an analytical framework that is inspired by the autonomy of migration approach. We propose to ethnographically study binational couples’ encounters with marriage migration related authorities in countries of destination and citizenship with a particular focus on binational couples’ struggles for visas, resident permits and a right to family life. Illustrated through ethnographic research, we show that this methodology permits to highlight three aspects of marriage migration that have not been sufficiently considered so far. These include the securitization of marriage migration ‘from below’ through informal practices of government on the ‘street-level’, binational couples’ inherently political border struggles and their capacity to negotiate restrictive legislations and bureaucratic hurdles and, finally, what we call the multiple entanglements of binational couples in the border and citizenship regimes of two or more nation-state orders.     

Crusader Diet in Times of War and Peace: Arsur (Israel) as a Case Study

This paper puts forward an archaeozoological analysis of two sizeable animal bone assemblages from the thirteenth‐century Crusader town of Arsur (Israel). Each represents a distinct behavioural practice, one of meat eaten in peaceful times and the other of meat consumed under stressful conditions while preparing for and undergoing a siege, when consideration was given to factors of benefits and space. Our results show that the faunal remains from before and during the Mamluk siege enunciate differences of subsistence and identity at the site at two different times and under diverse conditions.     

Facetiming common worlds: exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones

ABSTRACT

Children, educators, and researchers at a child care center in Victoria, Canada and Melbourne, Australia have been collaborating on an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry project that grapples with children’s relations with place and technologies. Resisting narratives of environmental stewardship and instrumental digital education that dominate in the settler colonial contexts of contemporary Canadian and Australian early childhood education, this article shares stories, practices, questions, and tensions generated within the inquiry. After outlining how we think with Facetime on iPhone within a common worlds pedagogies framework, we detail two practices generated in the inquiry: (1) exchanging digital place stories and (2) crafting pedagogical contact zones with place and technologies. These practices, we argue, make visible how our collaboration reconfigures children’s relationships with place and technologies in consequential ways, and risks generating uneasy, unfamiliar, and tentative pedagogies that respond to messy entanglements within digital, more-than-human common worlds.     

Town founding in seventeenth-century North America: Jamestown in Virginia

Jamestown in Virginia provides a case study of one facet of the geography of England's overseas expansion in the seventeenth century. Recent discussions of not only Jamestown but all early North American settlements have laid stress on two points. The first towns were founded as entrepôts for international trade in raw materials and were located at central points on colonial coastlines to exert monopoly control over trade. But Jamestown fulfilled neither of these objectives. It was conceived by its promoters, at least initially, as a trading station similar, in many ways, to the Kontors of the Hansa towns and the fondachi of Italian city states. In English institutional terms Jamestown was to be a staple. Its location was off-centre with respect to pre-settlement boundary lines. Its founding was influenced partly by perceptions of the Chesapeake and partly by rivalries in the imperial contest for North America. Jamestown's settlers also had a comprehensive list of town site criteria that included references to trade routes, to site defensibility, and to the physical environment. Although not a prototype for later colonization of the Atlantic Seaboard, Jamestown represented the first settlement form.     

No proxy for quality: why journal rankings in political science are problematic for political theory research

ABSTRACT

Journal rankings for political science have been regularly published, from the 1970s onwards, by the American Political Science Association’s ‘state of the discipline’ journal. Politics journals have also been officially ranked by the Australian Political Studies Association into four bands (A*, A, B and C) from 2007 onwards. This article shows, first, that the assumption grounding these exercises (namely, that disciplinary journal rankings can serve as proxies for the quality of articles in their pages) is undermined by the findings of the broader research evaluation literature, especially with respect to sub-disciplines (like political theory, Australian politics, and some types of qualitative comparative politics) that bear certain characteristics. Next, outlining the findings of a 2018 survey, it is argued that the disciplinary use of journal rankings in political studies not only has damaging effects on research in political theory, but also advantages other sub-disciplines. The paper closes with two recommendations.     

FGM or FGMo? Cross‐cultural dialogue in an Italian minefield (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

On 20 December 2012 the United General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution banning the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). In this article, Mara Mabilia aims to draw attention to the lives of immigrant women in Europe, and more specifically Italy, from some of the 30 or so chiefly Islamic countries of Africa, where what she prefers to call ‘female genital modification’ (FGMo) is practised. Her aim is neither to advocate the practice, nor to challenge the bans instituted in the West. Rather, her aim is, more broadly, to probe how women, having undergone these practices, live in host societies that interpret these chiefly as human rights violations through the prism of unacceptable violence. To condemn FGM should not imply condemnation also of the 100–140 million women that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates have undergone this practice.