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the funders, to actually end up doing what they say they are committed to do. This chapter is an investigation into how NGOs’ acts of networking with foreign donors, 1 other NGOs and migrant workers can be transformative of citizenship. While their relationship with the state is a recurrent theme in the literature on NGOs, their relationships with funders are much less well researched. But the discussion of these relationships is essential to fully account for civic organising in China as a site
and peasants as those who are of a ‘worse sort’ and need to be ‘turned into citizens’ ( shiminhua ). The citizenship regime, with its cornerstone in the Maoist version of the hukou system, was both a consequence of this modernist vision of citizenship, and a driving force behind its contemporary entrenchment. The second section looks at how citizenship has been shaped in relation not only to the rural–urban divide, but also state–society relations. I reflect here on how the concept of citizenship has been shaped at the crossroads of Western and Confucian
citizenship. While the formation of NGOs seems to be a relatively moderate attempt to target injustice suffered by this vast social group in China, it remains rare and fraught with difficulty. But why is organising a migrant NGO so difficult? Is it because of the state's policies, or rather, is it the result of the lack of funding, lack of relationship with appropriate authorities ( guanxi ) or lack of social capital (Franceschini, 2014 )? There are certainly all these issues to consider, but they do largely boil down to the underlying problem of uneven
4 Producing flexi-corporatism: the restructuring of work in Germany We support a market economy, not a market society … Modern social democrats want to transform the safety net of entitlements into a springboard to personal responsibility… Part-time work and low-paid work are better than no work… (Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, 1999: 1–7) T he positioning of German state-society within the globalisation and restructuring debates is, in itself, highly contested between competing voices and claims. In a neo-liberal reading, evident across international
The Chinese state has long insisted that the ‘Chinese human rights’ ethos prioritises social rights above political and civil rights. Yet, the modernisation project in China has been geared towards high economic growth to ensure the regime's survival, rather than protection of any rights, social or otherwise. Indeed, the economic growth was achieved precisely at the cost of limited citizenship rights, which created unprecedented levels of social inequality. The population that emerged on the losing side of this social divide, the rural
reframing in the context of contemporary digital networks, the power-laden dynamics of which are epitomised in the increasingly ubiquitous technology of cloud computing. In the following, I interrogate how dynamics of capturing clouds in digital domains (in both possible meanings) interfere with borders and state power, and how they are resisted and rearticulated in and through contemporary works of art. Do digital networks and data clouds subvert state power and borders? Or do they, rather, reiterate and reinforce received structures of dominance by
6 Community gardening for integrated urban renewal in Copenhagen: securing or denying minorities’ right to the city? Parama Roy Introduction Community gardening has been identified as a means of resistance to social injustice (McKay, 2011) and specifically to neoliberal1 agendas and associated outcomes (Roy, 2010). At the same time, community gardens have also been identified as neoliberal artefacts (Pudup, 2008) that are used for gentrifying neighbourhoods (Quastel, 2009) or for compelling communities to compensate for State-retrenchment through grassroots
on legal action-type migrant worker NGOs often insist that their work cannot be transformative because it reproduces and strengthens the state's legalism regime, entrenching rather than transforming the status quo (Franceschini, 2014 ; Froissart, 2014 ). On the other hand, many labour-orientated studies turn away from citizenship as an unimportant, fancy, post-structuralist idea which does not reflect the true essence of migrant workers’ struggle (Chan, 2012b ). While the current literature on migrant worker activism in China presents migrant workers as active
et al., 1931 ). Going for the A-team, Sweden strategically developed the welfare state during the twentieth century, trying to even up the historical differences of urban and rural life. The call from Asplund et al. ( 1931 ) can be seen as a manifestation of a long-term process, starting in the sixteenth century, of state interventions and industrialisation of the fields
6 Not knowing as aesthetic imperative in Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran Kelly Sullivan In Pat Collins’s 2011 film, Tim Robinson: Connemara, Robinson describes his map-making in terms of what is unknown, explaining that the white space of the black-and-white maps represents ‘the state of ignorance with which one starts’. As if to drive home the point that the cartographer or writer of a place can at best gesture toward an entirety, he goes on to say, ‘your ignorance transcends any amount you write about the place or can express on one sheet’.1 He makes a similar