Events November-December 2010
Events
CISRUL seminars, October-December 2010
Wed 3 November: Reading group and pre-conference discussion: What Equality?
Our first event will combine a reading on equality with a discussion of the workshop that we will hold in June. We will read the introduction to Chris Armstrong Rethinking Equality: The Challenge of Equal Citizenship, which we have chosen because it summarizes some of the debates on equality and how they apply to citizenship. Armstrong argues that citizenship remains the most promising avenue for equality even though it also bears both exclusion and hierarchy (as Holston argued in our 2009 workshop). But we can also discuss how equality figures in ideas of civil society and of rule of law as well as of human rights.
Wed 17 November: Research seminar by Trevor Stack "Citizenship in the Eyes of the Law and as Living in Society"
Scholars often begin with a definition of citizenship - usually the rights-bearing membership of nation-states - and focus on how citizens' rights on paper relate to their rights in practice. In the fieldwork that I conducted between 2007 and 2010 in the Mexican states of Michoacan and Jalisco, I began instead with my informants' own notions of citizenship and then tried to establish how their notions fed into a variety of practices. My informants did, like scholars, talk about the rights that citizens can or should be able to claim on governments, and they were also quick to stress that there was more to citizenship than its legal definition. Unlike scholars, though, they often talked about citizenship in broader terms of the obligations and commitments that arise from the condition of living in society. So being a citizen involved more than just claiming rights on government, on paper or in practice, and society rather than the state was the ground for the figure of the citizen. I will focus on the implications for our understandings of citizenship in relation to civil society and rule of law.
Wed 1 December: Reading group and discussion of 6CC course: What Gives Us Rights?
We will begin with a discussion of the review essay "Towards a New Sociology of Rights: Genealogies of 'Buried Bodies' of Citizenship and Human Rights" by Christopher Roberts and Margaret Somers, whom we have also invited to our June workshop. That will lead us into a discussion of our contributions to the 6CC course "What Gives Us Rights?" in which most of us will be involved.
Wed 15 December: Research seminar by Matyas Bodig "Citizenship, Civil Society, Rule of Law: Changing World, Shifting Theoretical Agenda"
I will outline a classical model (derived from in my earlier work) about the relationship between citizenship, civil society and rule of law, and then explore the changes that prompt a new synthesis of them, using Bryan Turner as my guide. I want to concentrate on why the idea of constitutional democracy is no longer likely to integrate civil society, citizenship and the idea of the rule of law the way one might have thought a few decades ago. Citizenship is becoming a more and more under-inclusive term compared to 'population', and, in many countries, the theoretically and politically fruitful interplay between civil society and citizenship never occurred.
Trevor Stack
05 October 2010