EVENTS

Abstract

That capitalism and democracy go hand in hand is a belief well-established within the existing literature on development. In their classic, “Capitalist Development and Democracy”, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens argue that capitalist development can create democratic pressures by strengthening the working class and other subordinate classes. It is puzzling, therefore, that even given such structures and institutions in India as democratic elections, a vibrant civil society, and active unions, which are lacking in China, Chinese construction workers not only work and live under much better conditions, but also display a far heightened sense of rights consciousness and are much more active in rights contestation than their Indian counterparts. In this presentation, the speaker will briefly discuss her empirical findings based on 9 months of fieldwork in Beijing and months of fieldwork in Delhi. She will explore four themes or areas which may help coherently understand and interpret these empirical findings, namely: capacity to aspire, informality and stateness, the professionalization of civil society, and social embeddedness. ​

About the Speaker

Irene Pang is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Sociology and a trainee under the Graduate Program in Development at Brown University. She holds an MA in Sociology from Brown University and a BA in Sociology with a Certificate in Cross-National Sociology and International Development from the Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation project studies how capitalist development affects the conceptualization, expression, and contestation of citizenship through the experience of internal migrants in China and India, specifically that of construction workers in Beijing and Delhi. She is a recipient of the Bucerius PhD Scholarship from the ZEIT-Stiftung (Germany), the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (US), and the Brown-India Initiative Graduate Fellowship.​