At the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen

Website: www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul

The inter-disciplinary Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) at the University of Aberdeen will offer two or more PhD studentships starting 2011-12. We welcome applicants from anthropology, cultural and literary studies, history, legal theory and socio-legal studies, philosophy, politics, religious studies, sociology and theology. The studentships will include full fees and may include partial maintenance.

Please note that applicants must have completed or be close to completing a postgraduate Masters degree.

Deadline for full consideration of applications for the 2010-11 studentships is 30 March.

The Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law aims to produce conversation across the social sciences and humanities on key concepts of the modern polity. Citizenship, civil society and rule of law are three such key concepts, all three of some pedigree but enjoying a new lease of life, prescribed by bodies such as IMF and United Nations, championed by social movements, and debated in the media and in academic research. We are also interested in related concepts such as democracy, human rights, multiculturalism and pluralism, as well as in the question of religion including how ‘religious’ is distinguished from ‘secular’.

Please visit www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul for a description of the Centre’s mission, staff and activities, and for information about how to apply for the PhD studentships.

After the defense

On 11.01.10, I had a public defense of my dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The questions were firm but fair, and I came away with a nice grade (yes, German Ph.D. dissertations are graded).

Thanks to everybody who in one way or another made writing the dissertation less of a pain than I am sure it would have been.

OK, we knew that already. But the point was brought home particularly well with regards to the education sector in developing countries by Professor Emeritus Pai Obanya of Ibadan University in a podcast interview with the London International Development Centre (LDIC). Professor Emeritus Lalage Brown of Glasgow University was also on the podcast.

On the MDG goals, Professor Obanya says that the problem is that they are not owned by developing countries. People simply sign up to programmes that they don’t fully understand because someone promises to fund the programmes if they sign up to them.

He made a distinction between Education and schooling. They also discuss ICT in education.

Towards the end of the podcast, Professor Brown says there is a lot for Nigeria to celebrate during the 50th independence anniversary this year. I think so too; I will do a post on that sometime soon.

The podcast is worth your time.

POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS FOR RESEARCH ON ‘THE HUMAN ECONOMY’

UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria invites applications from suitably-qualified researchers for Post-Doctoral Fellowships to contribute to an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Human Economy’.

People always insert themselves practically into economic life on their own account. But what they do is often obscured, marginalised or repressed by dominant economic institutions and ideologies. The human economy is conceived of as being made and remade by people themselves, being based on a holistic conception of human needs and with the interests of humanity as a whole in mind.

This project builds on and will contribute to a collaborative international research program that began in the World Social Forum, 2001 and has already brought together theoretical and practical work on alternative economic institutions in Brazil, Argentina, France, Britain and other countries. Its prime focus is on the growing scope for economic initiatives that lie between the stark alternatives of the free market and state planning. As well as guaranteeing social rights, governments must encourage forms of self-organization where solidarity has a greater role. Equality and freedom come from the mutuality of everyday life, and not just from market contracts or citizenship.

Scholars who have undertaken research relevant to these topics in disciplines such as Social Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Economy, Development Studies, Philosophy, Literature or Geography are welcome to apply.  Because the making of world society is at stake, there are no restrictions on where this research has been done. But the Faculty has a particular interest in fostering a dialogue on such issues between researchers from countries in the ‘global South’.

The Faculty intends to award up to six Fellowships associated with this project to begin in January 2011, with the aim of bringing together scholars from around the world, and stimulating an international and interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. Successful applicants will

• Have completed a doctoral degree in a relevant discipline within the past seven years
• Preferably be younger than 40 years
• Have undertaken in-depth and high-quality research on a topic relevant to the project

Fellowships are for one year (2011), with the possibility of renewal for a further year depending on progress.  Fellows will be expected to write up and publish research relevant to the designated theme, and will have an opportunity to undertake additional, comparative research in southern Africa, should this be appropriate.

Successful applicants will also be expected to

• Contribute to the Faculty of Humanities Seminar Programme
• Participate in an International Workshop on ‘The Human Economy’ to be hosted by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria in the course of 2011
• Provide guidance to postgraduate students who will undertake research on topics linked to the interests of particular Fellows.  Each Fellow would mentor at least one student.

Fellows will receive

• A tax-free stipend of up to R175 000 per annum
• A return air ticket between their country of residence and South Africa
• Funding for possible research in southern Africa
• Funding to attend one international conference outside South Africa during their tenure
• Access to the facilities of the University of Pretoria, including office space.

Applicants must complete the University of Pretoria Post-Doctoral Application Form before 30 June 2010.  Applications will be considered by the university’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship Committee.

For further information, please contact

John Sharp, Professor of Social Anthropology and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria (john.sharp@up.ac.za)

OR

Keith Hart, Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Pretoria (johnkeithhart@gmail.com)

The abstract of a paper titled ‘Investigative Journalism and Scandal Reporting in the Nigerian Press’ by Muhammad Jameel Yusha’u:

Using interviews conducted with Nigerian journalists, this article explores Nigerian journalists’ understandings of investigative journalism, and whether they use it to investigate the allegations of corruption scandals against various public officeholders. The results show that Nigerian journalists have a fair understanding of investigative journalism. However, they do not fully agree that it is being practiced. The results also show that clientelism is a feature of journalism practice, and one of the factors that impedes the practice of investigative journalism. The research has identified the challenges militating against the practice of investigating journalism in order to uncover the cases of corruption scandals. Such impediments include poor remuneration, bad working conditions, corruption within the media, and the relationship between publishers and politicians.

The paper is here. If you don’t have online access to journals you can go here for a summary.

You probably know her. She is the award-winning author of An Elergy for Easterly, a beautiful collection of short stories. I didn’t drop the book until I finished it. Get it if you can.

She writes in Guardian of April 14:

Thirty years ago on Sunday the renegade British colony that had been Rhodesia was born as Zimbabwe. In the nightmarish events of the last 10 years the euphoria of that day has been all but lost. Certainly, the achievements of Zimbabwe in the last 30 years are in danger of drowning in the mire of statistics about rampant inflation and unemployment, in images of the political repression of a cowed populace – all taken as evidence by those Thabo Mbeki calls the Afro-pessimists. For his part, President Mugabe has certainly provided much grist to the mill of the brigade that believes Africans cannot rule themselves and that independence has achieved nothing worth celebrating.

As we say in Yoruba, One is able to see, even when one is crying.

Petina Gappah blogs here.

About politicians and courage:

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.

On Europe and the EU:

… Europe is a cultural space, which does not necessarily overlap with the EU as a physical space; otherwise there would be endless Israeli-style debates about where the frontiers should be. The EU is different, as it started its life as the European Economic Community with the idea that it was an open entity. Anyone could join if they conformed to the rules, the norms and the regulations. This was very easy to say in 1958 because most of Europe was in prison. You didn’t have to worry about whether you would have to take in Slovakia, because there was no risk, no prospect of that, thanks to the Russians. All you had to worry about were the wealthy countries of the West: either small, wealthy countries like Austria or big ones like Italy or Spain. After 1989 all this fell apart. The EU became legally, culturally and institutionally committed to expanding and accepting anyone who wanted to join from a space that could be recognised as Europe. Since no one defined that space, there was no limit. Turkey at the time was not a problem: first because in those years it was mostly a military dictatorship; and second, because it was on the other side of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and those two were not about to come into the EU.

Today we live in a very different situation. Europe is defined by the rules of the EU and its willingness to take in new countries. But already in the mid-1990s it was clear that no matter what anyone said in public, in private Brussels wanted to slow this process down, and if possible bring it to a stop. The reasons were very good, because the EU succeeded on the basis of genuine interstate co-operation, in which wealthy states or regions helped poor ones, and small new members could be forced to behave well. This was fine as long as the overwhelming majority of members were big and wealthy and the only likely new members were small, and either wealthy, or if poor, very small. When this changed in the 1990s, you started to hear people saying: ‘Wait a minute, Europe must be defined culturally, it must consider heritage: spiritual, architectural and linguistic heritage.’ This was simply a way of saying: ‘We can’t take in Muslims.’ Now, I did hear the Catholics say that Orthodox Christians can’t be accepted either. People would say this in Poland, in Croatia, to some extent in Hungary, but what they were really talking about were the Russians, the Serbs and the Romanians, not the Orthodox Christians in general. However, this could not be said openly, so once again the language was misused.

The concluding paragraph:

I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? We can’t come together on the basis of 19th or 20th-century ideas of inevitable progress or the natural historical progression from capitalism to socialism or whatever. We can’t believe in that anymore. And anyway, it can’t do the work for us. We need to rediscover our own language of politics.

The full article, in the London Review of Books, is here.

Food will grow more expensive as the earth warms

If you are in London:

The Dis/Order of Things: Predisciplinarity After Foucault

An Interdisciplinary Workshop. The afternoon will end with a keynote by Professor Simon During (Johns Hopkins): ‘Lost Objects: Magic and Mystery in the English Enlightenment’

Saturday 24 October 2009
Birkbeck College, University of London

This interdisciplinary research workshop brings together postgraduates, academics from different fields, and curators to think about Enlightenment Objects and discuss questions of disciplinarity in the wake of Michel Foucault’s seminal work The Order of Things (Les Mots et Les Choses 1966).

Download event details here or email Luisa Cale for more information: l.cale@english.bbk.ac.uk

Organised in collaboration with Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the School of Arts.

Earlier today I drew attention to the announcement of the ASA Globalog series on the financial crisis. The first post in the series is already up. Alexander F. Robertson of Edinburgh University writes about Corporate Greed:

The medieval burghers sought to dodge accusations of greed by political bluster or conspicuous acts of charity, but nothing provided better moral cover than their most successful and durable invention, the corporation.  This transcendent meta-body is no freak of nature, no historical accident.  It was invented by European merchants in the 15th century, along with enough moral latitude to allow great commercial ventures to flourish, and many rogues to prosper.  Chambers’ excellent Dictionary tells us that the corporation is ‘a succession or collection of people authorized by law to act as one individual and regarded as having a separate existence from the people who are its members’.  It allows real people to join forces for private gain, to mask their personal identities, dodge their liabilities, and defy mortality.  Moral ambivalence is intrinsic to the corporation.  It is the framework in which individuals are piously held to account, and yet can get away with almost anything.  Back in the 18th century, an English Lord Chancellor asked:  ‘Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?’ Continue reading.