EVENTS

Abstract

Existing theories of citizenship development, derived largely from the historical experience of Western Europe, suggest that capitalist development is usually accompanied by the expansion of rights. In China and India, however, even if greater sets of rights have been codified in the law since market reforms, questions remain regarding the actual accessibility of these rights. Rejecting the common definition of citizenship as a predetermined set of rights readily conferred on the population, this presentation starts with the premise that citizenship is constructed and gains meaning through everyday interactions between actors of civil society, the state, and the market. Accordingly, the study of citizenship is not just through textual investigation, but through ethnography. By following internal migrant workers, specifically, construction workers in Beijing and Delhi, as they interact with other workers, employers, state officials, and activists, this study seeks to answer three questions. Firstly, how is citizenship currently instituted in the law in China and in India? Secondly, what are the barriers faced by internal migrants in accessing citizenships rights, and how are these barriers reproduced? These two empirical questions will have important implications for a more theoretical question, namely: what can the trajectories of citizenship development in China and India in the context of rapid marketization, which contrasts each other and that of Europe, tell us about the relationship between capitalist development and citizenship development? In this presentation, I will offer some preliminary thoughts on my findings in Beijing by structuring it around the case of a construction worker who was severely injured at work. By following his and his family’s struggle for compensation and tracing his interactions with subcontractors, the developer, various government officials, and legal aid workers, I attempt to concretely map out the configuration of relations between the state, the market, and civil society which is giving rise to an emergent regime of marketized citizenship. I argue that the marketization of citizenship is, first and foremost, manifested in changes in the formal structure of rights and the marketization of citizenship is further expressed through the construction of informality.

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.