Souvenirs of conquest: Israeli occupations as tourist events

It is perhaps self-evident to suggest that military conquest shares something with tourism because both involve encounters with "strange" landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latter - strategies for rendering the strange familiar or for translating threatening images into benign ones. There have been numerous studies of this history of borrowing. Scholars have considered how scenes of battle draw tourist crowds, how soldiers' ways of seeing can resemble those of leisure travelers, how televised wars have been visually structured as tourist events (e.g., the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), and how the spoils of war can function as a body of souvenirs. These lines of inquiry expand our understanding of tourism as a field of cultural practices and help us to rethink the parameters of militarism and warfare by suggesting ways they are entangled with everyday leisure practices. © 2008 Cambridge University Press.

Diasporic Agents and Trans-Asian Flows in the Making of Asian Modernity: The Case of Thailand

How do our everyday actions shape and transform the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of â everyday' actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors and their decisions can shape the global economy. They analyse a range of seemingly ordinary or subordinate actors, including peasants, working classes and trade unions, lower-middle and middle classes, female migrant labourers and Eastern diasporas, and examine how they have agency in transforming their political and economic environments. This book offers a novel way of thinking about everyday forms of change across a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade, taxation, consumerism, labour rights and regimes. It will appeal to students and scholars of politics, international relations, political economy and sociology.

Minor Moves: Growth, Fugitivity, and Children's Physical Movement

From tendencies to reduce the Underground Railroad to the imperative "follow the north star" to the iconic images of Ruby Bridges' 1960 "step forward" on the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School, America prefers to picture freedom as an upwardly mobile development. This preoccupation with the subtractive and linear force of development makes it hard to hear the palpable steps of so many truant children marching in the Movement and renders illegible the nonlinear movements of minors in the Underground. Yet a black fugitive hugging a tree, a white boy walking alone in a field, or even pieces of a discarded raft floating downstream like remnants of child's play are constitutive gestures of the Underground's networks of care and escape. Responding to 19th-century Americanists and cultural studies scholars' important illumination of the child as central to national narratives of development and freedom, "Minor Moves" reads major literary narratives not for the child and development but for the fugitive trace of minor and growth.

In four chapters, I trace the physical gestures of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pearl, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy, Harriet Wilson's Frado, and Mark Twain's Huck against the historical backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Act and the passing of the first compulsory education bills that made truancy illegal. I ask how, within a discourse of independence that fails to imagine any serious movements in the minor, we might understand the depictions of moving children as interrupting a U.S. preoccupation with normative development and recognize in them the emergence of an alternative imaginary. To attend to the movement of the minor is to attend to what the discursive order of a development-centered imaginary deems inconsequential and what its grammar can render only as mistakes. Engaging the insights of performance studies, I regard what these narratives depict as childish missteps (Topsy's spins, Frado's climbing the roof) as dances that trouble the narrative's discursive order. At the same time, drawing upon the observations of black studies and literary theory, I take note of the pressure these "minor moves" put on the literal grammar of the text (Stowe's run-on sentences and Hawthorne's shaky subject-verb agreements). I regard these ungrammatical moves as poetic ruptures from which emerges an alternative and prior force of the imaginary at work in these narratives--a force I call "growth."

Reading these "minor moves" holds open the possibility of thinking about a generative association between blackness and childishness, one that neither supports racist ideas of biological inferiority nor mandates in the name of political uplift the subsequent repudiation of childishness. I argue that recognizing the fugitive force of growth indicated in the interplay between the conceptual and grammatical disjunctures of these minor moves opens a deeper understanding of agency and dependency that exceeds notions of arrested development and social death. For once we interrupt the desire to picture development (which is to say the desire to picture), dependency is no longer a state (of social death or arrested development) of what does not belong, but rather it is what Édouard Glissant might have called a "departure" (from "be[ing] a single being"). Topsy's hard-to-see pick-pocketing and Pearl's running amok with brown men in the market are not moves out of dependency but indeed social turns (a dance) by way of dependency. Dependent, moving and ungrammatical, the growth evidenced in these childish ruptures enables different stories about slavery, freedom, and childishness--ones that do not necessitate a repudiation of childishness in the name of freedom, but recognize in such minor moves a fugitive way out.

Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Judgment

Hannah Arendt's theory of political judgment has been an ongoing perplexity among scholars who have written on her. As a result, her theory of judgment is often treated as a suggestive but unfinished aspect of her thought. Drawing on a wider array of sources than is commonly utilized, I argue that her theory of political judgment was in fact the heart of her work. Arendt's project, in other words, centered around reestablishing the possibility of political judgment in a modern world that historically has progressively undermined it. In the dissertation, I systematically develop an account of Arendt's fundamentally political and non-sovereign notion of judgment. We discover that individual judgment is not arbitrary, and that even in the complex circumstances of the modern world there are valid structures of judgment which can be developed and dependably relied upon. The result of this work articulates a theory of practical reason which is highly compelling: it provides orientation for human agency which does not rob it of its free and spontaneous character; shows how we can improve and cultivate our political judgment; and points the way toward the profoundly intersubjective form of political philosophy Arendt ultimately hoped to develop.

Regulating the Ocean: Piracy and Protection along the East African Coast

From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region.

This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast.

Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.

To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.

The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy.

Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.

Due to her tender age: Black girls and childhood on trial in South Carolina, 1885-1920

Drawing on local criminal court records in western and central South Carolina, this dissertation follows the legal experiences of black girls in South Carolina courts between 1885 and 1920, a time span that includes the aftermath of Reconstruction and the foundational years of Jim Crow. While scholars continue to debate the degree to which black children were included in evolving conversations about childhood and child protection, this dissertation argues that black girls were critical to turn-of-the century debates about all children's roles in society. Far from invisible in the courts and jails of their time, black girls found themselves in the crosshairs of varying forms of power --including intraracial community surveillance, burgeoning local government, Progressive reform initiatives and military policy -- particularly when it came to matters of sexuality and reproduction. Their presence in South Carolina courts established boundaries between early childhood, adolescence and womanhood and pushed legal stakeholders to consider the legal implication of age, race, and gender in criminal proceedings. Age had a complicated effect on black girls' legal encounters; very young black girls were often able to claim youth and escape harsher punishments, while courts often used judicial discretion to levy heavier sentences to adolescents and violent girl offenders. While courts helped to separate early childhood from the middle years, they also provided a space for African-American children and family to engage a legal system that was moving rapidly toward disenfranchising blacks.

Environmental policy and technological change

The relationship between technological change and environmental policy has received increasing attention from scholars and policy makers alike over the past ten years. This is partly because the environmental impacts of social activity are significantly affected by technological change, and partly because environmental policy interventions themselves create new constraints and incentives that affect the process of technological developments. Our central purpose in this article is to provide environmental economists with a useful guide to research on technological change and the analytical tools that can be used to explore further the interaction between technology and the environment. In Part 1 of the article, we provide an overview of analytical frameworks for investigating the economics of technological change, highlighting key issues for the researcher. In Part 2, we turn our attention to theoretical analysis of the effects of environmental policy on technological change, and in Part 3, we focus on issues related to the empirical analysis of technology innovation and diffusion. Finally, we conclude in Part 4 with some additional suggestions for research.

Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality.

Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others.