Other Political Animals: Aristotle and the Limits of Political Community

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the human-animal distinction among political theorists, suggesting a possible sea change in how relationships between animals and humans are understood. Yet despite this interest, Aristotle’s famous dicta that “man is a political animal” and that only “beasts and gods” might live without politics persist as the best-known statements on humans and animals and how they relate politically. This essay draws on Aristotle’s biological writings in order to qualify these statements, outlining two opposing threads in Aristotle’s thought: one where humans are seen to be similar to other political animals and hence capable of sharing in political community, and the second where humans are seen to be unlike other animals by virtue of their relation with the divine. I argue that the problems that inform Aristotle’s way of understanding the similarities and differences between humans and animals and between members of a political community challenge recent theoretical attempts to include other animals in the human political community.     

Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio,Manila

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance‐dependent, migrant‐sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted.     

Putting the Records Straight: ‘What is up with WAC?’

This paper is a reaction to the paper of Nick Shepherd and Alejandro Haber titled ??What is up with WAC? Archaeology and ??Engagement?? in a Globalised World??, published in Public Archaeology volume 10, number 2 of May 2011. Having been associated with WAC since its inception in 1986 and having been a player in all the programmes criticized by Nick Shepherd and Alejandro Haber, I am reluctantly obliged to provide some information to put the records straight. WAC being a true worldwide organization (not just international) has membership from different social, cultural, linguistic, political, economic, religious and ideological backgrounds. This calls for mutual respect and conscious effort to understand people and their points of view and also to be very sensitive to our differences. Summing up issues in the context of simplistic ??globalised world?? is big error of judgment.     

The Political Art of Patience: Adivasi Resistance in India

Abstract: This article documents the emergence of the Denotified Rights Action Group (DNG‐RAG), a national social movement orchestrated to assert the citizenship rights of adivasi (indigenous) populations in India. It assesses the movement's efforts to engage the central Indian government in meaningful dialogue to accommodate the inclusion of marginalized adivasis in the democratic politics of the nation. In doing so, the DNT‐RAG reasserts the primacy of the Indian state as the principal engine driving the project of nation building, and as such, the site that activists target to further an agenda of equitable development and democratic rights for those known as India's Denotified Tribes.     

Ecological modernisation,industry policy and the Australian automotive industry, 2007–13

Ecological modernisation (EM), in theory and practice, has increasingly become central to contemporary state environmental reform agendas. EM's allure lies in its central tenet that the contemporary institutions of capitalism can be ecologically adapted to achieve ‘win–win’ economic and environmental outcomes. How government policy can best accomplish this aim is contested, however, with weak and strong EM approaches advocating different roles for the state in facilitating ecological restructuring. The latter approaches argue that for EM processes to be successful, state intervention via ecological industrial policy is required. This article makes a unique contribution to the industry policy and EM debate by assessing the manner in which EM was conceptualised and implemented within the Australian government's automotive industry policy between 2007 and 2013. This analysis raises issues about the institutional capacity of states to pursue either weak or strong forms of EM.

生态现代化在理论上和实践上日益成为当代国家环境改革的中心议题。环境现代化所以诱人在于其核心原则：当代资本主义体制生态上可以取得经济、环境的双赢结果。不过政府政策如何实现这一目标确是挑战,生态现代化有强、弱二途,政府在促进生态重构时扮演不同的角色。按强势思路,要想生态现代化成功,需要国家通过生态产业政策进行干预。本文对2007至2013年澳大利亚政府的汽车产业政策形成和实施的方式做了评估,希望以此对产业政策以及生态现代化的辩论有所助益。本文还提出了国家实施强、弱生态现代化的体制能力的问题。     

Filipinos settle in the Canadian North: unsettling a gendered frontier

This paper explores how contemporary accounts of Filipino settlement in the Yukon articulate with the imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon.’ Since 2007, Whitehorse, Yukon has been as a prominent site of settlement for Filipino newcomers to Canada. This has been supported by the implementation of a new immigration policy–the Yukon Nominee Program (YNP)—inaugurated to address shortages in the territory’s service sector labour market. What happens, we ask, to frontier narratives when they are put into conversation with bodies, peoples, places, and collective experiences that they were never meant to narrate? We discuss how hegemonic notions of race, gender, and frontier masculinity are reworked and unsettled in emerging narratives of Filipino settlement. In working through multiple and contested notions of the frontier, we play on varying meanings of the verb “to settle.” Frontier mythologies seek to settle the disruptive potential of Filipino workers and families as they newly inhabit borderline spaces. At the same time, the hard work of “settling" into a foreign environment is set both within and against the hegemonic facade of frontier mythology. We find that while the examined discourses of arrival in the Yukon reinforce hegemonic accounts of the Yukon’s settlement, and obscure histories of settler colonialism through their celebration of multiculturalism and diversity, they also contain moments of ambiguity that “unmap” hegemonic frontier narratives.