1.
Cole, Tomas, 1983-
(author)
Possessed Earth : Ownership and Power in the Salween Peace Park of Southeast Myanmar
2020
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
In the wake of seven decades of protracted revolution and armed conflict in Southeast Myanmar, an ensemble of indigenous peoples and transnational activists have begun formulating a radical alternative vision of how peace and conservation might be achieved in practice. Through translating and rescaling indigenous modes of possessing the earth, this ensemble is working to transform 5,000 km2 of highly contested terrain in the highlands along the Salween River into a conservation zone they call the Salween Peace Park.In this study I explore what indigenous practices and cosmologies, and the ways they are being translated and rescaled into the Salween Peace Park, might teach us about ownership, sovereignty, and politics at large.The first half of this study focuses on the highlands along the Salween River, to explore how people residing here commonly treat their landscapes as already possessed, in the dual and entangled senses of being both occupied or haunted by spectral more-than-human presences, and controlled and owned by them. In these Possessed Landscapes human ownership of land is always ephemeral, ultimately nesting in the encompassing ownership of spectral presences (who I describe as persons). Humans can only borrow land by constantly negotiating with and propitiating its spectral owners. A corollary of these indigenous modes of possessing the earth is that these highlands were not so much anarchic as in sense of “no ruler”, but rather, power and sovereignty is nesting in the hands of the spectral owners of the earth. I describe this as an alternative mode of politics that I name Spectral Sovereignty. In the second half I take a small step back to shuttle between the residents of these highlands and networks of activists based in Chiang Mai in Thailand. Here I focus on both growing new forms of dispossession and counterinsurgency that have accompanied the cooling of armed conflict, and efforts by ensembles of indigenous peoples, activists, armed groups, and conservationists to attempt to push back and re-territorialise and re-possess the earth. I go on to explore how this ensemble is subtly translating and rescaling possessed landscapes and spectral sovereignty into land laws and conservation policy as a way to transform these former war zones into a protected area, the Salween Peace Park. I then show how, in the process of establishing this protected area, these activists are continuing the revolutionary movements to attain greater autonomy for the indigenous people residing here. I then close this thesis by exploring what is happening as the Salween Peace Park is coming into contact and being negotiated on the ground in these highlands. Here we find revolutionary politics and spectral sovereignty are becoming entwined into a form of Alter-Politics that is unsettling established notions of sovereignty and politics. However, beyond unsettling, it also gestures towards alternative ways of understanding the shifting entanglements between people, politics, spectres, and other unseen more-than-humans, and radical alternatives to conservation and armed conflict in Myanmar, and beyond.
2.
Aguirre Vidal, Gladis, 1967-
(author)
Mobilising care : Ecuadorian families and transnational lives between Ecuador and Spain
2019
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This thesis focuses on the dynamics of care in the transnational lives of Ecuadorian migrant women in Spain. It is concerned with the various forms of care that take shape and are sustained in the workplace, between friends, and among family members in Ecuador and Spain. Ultimately, it sheds light on how care is mobilised to sustain ideals of solidarity at work as well as togetherness in transnational life. The thesis is set against the background of the economic and political crisis in Ecuador of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which resulted not only in the dollarization of the economy and the removal of the country’s president, but in a dramatic shift of traditional male migration from the southern highlands to the United States, to a new wave of largely middle class female migration to Western Europe, especially Spain. Women from across the country left their children, spouses and elderly parents behind to work in domestic and care jobs abroad. In Ecuador, this disturbed the dominant cultural imaginary of the co-habitating and united family, centred on the presence of the woman as mother and wife. In light of this, the thesis engages with women’s dilemmas in giving and receiving care during years of absence, the role of family members, friends and domestic workers in this process, and the development of long-term goals focused on remittances, reunification, return, and the ultimate goal of creating a better future. Most generally, while challenging a series of dichotomies between love and money, home and work, gift and commodity—which have structured academic discussions concerning the feminization of international migration—the thesis describes the intimate relationship between women’s participation in the gift economy and a global labour market through the lens of care relationships.
3.
Jennische, Ulrik, 1981-
(author)
Small-Small : Moral Economy and the Marketspace in Northern Ghana
2018
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Over the past decade, the Ghanaian government has tried to include and accommodate the many people working in the so-called informal economy. This formalization process is in line with a global market-driven development discourse. The small-scale traders selling their goods from marketplaces and along the streets in major cities have been of particular interest.While the Ghanaian government defines these actors as working in an “informal sector” and thus beyond the formal political and economic system, it simultaneously targets them with welfare services and various policies with the purpose of including them in the creation of a modern welfare state and shaping them into moral and entrepreneurial citizens.In Tamale in northern Ghana, years of political neglect, violence, and structural adjustment have led to small-scale traders taking over streets, sidewalks, and infrastructure, which has created a boundless and dynamic marketspace that far exceeds the delimited and politically defined marketplaces. For the state, therefore, much of the formalization process is about restoring the control and power of public space through evictions and relocations of traders. In conjunction with the inclusive welfare services, this demonstrates the contradictions entailed in the politics of informality.The study is based on an ethnographic fieldwork among small-scale traders in northern Ghana with a specific interest in the events that occur at the intersection where state, market, and citizenship meet. By asking what it means to be a trader in this contradictory process of formalization, the dissertation aims to understand this transformative moment in Ghana’s political and economic history.In this study the emic notion of small-small is used to frame the norms of gradual progress and letting others in that define the moral economy of small-scale trade. Norms, values, and obligations generate trust and solidarity within the marketspace. But more than that, small-small produces a form of politics against an obstructive and unreliable state and it guides traders into the future by shaping dreams, aspirations, and possibilities. Situated in traders’ daily lives, work, and relationships, and through the small-small lens, this thesis investigates the underlying moralities of formalization. It describes the politics of the Ghanaian state, which in its attempt to create an inclusive welfare society, struggles to both protect the moral dynamics of small-scale trade while adhering to the norms and standards of an open liberalized economy.
4.
Lundberg, Arvid, 1985-
(author)
Openness as Political Culture : The Arab Spring and the Jordanian Protest Movements
2018
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This study is an exploration of the origins of the Arab Spring in Jordan and across the region. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the leadership of the Jordanian protest movements, it suggests a new way of understanding why these movements fell apart. A recurrent theme in accounts of the political movements that emerged in Jordan and the Arab world more generally in 2011 is that the unity that initially appeared on streets and squares never transformed into a viable coalition but instead dissolved. A common way to understand why the Arab Spring’s promise of a less authoritarian society was not fulfilled is to look at the center of a political system and explain why it did not become more democratic. These explanations depend on an alternative that we know only through our counterfactual imagination: a united opposition capable of bringing about a democratic system. Instead of imagining a united opposition and explaining why it was not realized, the thesis starts with the fact that the Jordanian opposition was deeply fragmented, but that there were attempts to counter this fragmentation by coordinating and specifying its demands. These attempts fell apart due to something more general than ideological, ethnic or religious divisions within the Jordanian opposition. They were based on a way of conducting politics that was uncommon among the leadership of the protest movements as well as among their opponents. These attempts were characterized by an emphasis on political ideas and programs rather than patronage and by an orientation toward political dialogue, which some Jordanians described in terms of “infitāḥ” (openness) and contrasted with a more polemical form of politics. This ethnographic study puts this more unusual form of politics into sharper relief and shows how it was rooted in political practices and values as well as comparable types of education and social life. This allows us to see how democratization is a movement that is not only political but also cultural, which takes shape in political activism, education and social life.
5.
Pan, Darcy, 1975-
(author)
Laboring Through Uncertainty : an ethnography of the Chinese state, labor NGOs, and development
2016
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This study sets out to understand how international development projects supporting labor activism work in contemporary China. It focuses on the lived experiences of and relationships among a group of grassroots labor NGOs in the province of Guangdong, South China; intermediary NGOs in Hong Kong; and Western funding agencies that try to bring about social change in postsocialist China where the political climate is still highly restrictive and the limits of the state’s tolerance for activism are ambiguous and uncertain. Foregrounding the notion of uncertainty, this study investigates how state control is exercised by examining a specific logic of practices, discourses, and a mode of existence that constantly mask and unmask the state. More specifically, this study explores how the uncertainty about the boundaries of permissible activism is generative of a sociopolitical realm in which variously positioned subjects mobilize around the idea of the state, which in turn leads to articulations and practices conducive to both self-censorship and a contingent space of activism. Viewed as such, the idea of uncertainty becomes an enabler through which certain kinds of practices, relationships, and networks are made possible and enacted, and through which a sociopolitical realm of intimacy is constituted by and constitutive of these relationships, networks, and practices. Situated in the domain of uncertainty, this study examines the ways in which uncertainty, both as an analytical idea and an ontological existence, produces an intimate space where labor activists not only effectively self-censor but also skillfully map the gray zone between the relatively safe and the unacceptably risky choices.
