Doctoral Dissertation Research: Citizenship, Identity, and Rural-Urban Migration

这个论文项目研究了当一个国家经历由资本主义市场改革引发的转型时，公民制度会发生什么。该研究对有限的关于公民制度的文献做出了贡献，这些制度与西欧的公民模式不同。这个项目提出了两个密切相关的问题。首先，正在进行资本主义改革的国家的公民身份是如何在法律中被描述和建立的，以及如何被经验和实践的，特别是在弱势群体中。其次，通过比较和对比公民权发展的轨迹，本项目旨在澄清并有助于对西欧以外资本主义发展与公民权发展之间关系的理论理解。在过去的三十年里，中国和印度的资本主义市场改革极大地改变了社会政治格局，引发了两国公民制度的转型。然而，中国和印度的公民身份发展很难用现有的公民身份文献来解释，这些文献仍然主要来自西欧的经验。该项目将研究中国和印度公民如何理解、解释、实践和质疑公民身份，而不是将公民身份视为一种地位或一套预先确定的权利，而是将公民身份视为日常实践和不同社会参与者之间的互动所产生的关系。该项目将特别注重低收入国内移徙者的经验。作为城市的新移民，许多外来务工人员面临着在家乡成为陌生人的矛盾存在，因为他们被视为“在自己国家的城市里实际上的外国人”。因此，外来务工人员进入城市作为一个研究场所，外来务工人员努力确立自己作为城市合法成员的身份，从而缓解了积极的、可观察到的公民身份实践和争论。更具体地说，这项人种学研究将研究北京和德里的建筑工人，他们大多是来自邻近省份的低收入农民工。更广泛的影响研究公民身份的必要性同时具有经验性和规范性。在大多数情况下，公民身份的含义是重要的，因为公民身份影响并定义了人们的日常生活。通过研究低收入建筑工人的生计，该项目有可能有助于更好地理解和明确广大贫困人口的需求和斗争。这个项目的调查结果将与决策者有关，因为它们将提高公众对受剥削工人状况的认识。

SES-1434668Nitsan ChorevOi Ying I PangBrown UniversityThis dissertation project examines what happens to citizenship regimes when a country undergoes transformation, triggered by capitalist market reforms. The study contributes to the limited literature on citizenship regimes which diverge from the model of citizenship in Western Europe. This project asks two closely-related questions. Firstly, how is citizenship in countries undergoing capitalist reforms described and instituted in the law, but also experienced and practiced, especially by disadvantaged populations. Secondly, by comparing and contrasting the trajectories of citizenship development, this project aims to clarify and contribute to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between capitalist development and citizenship development outside of Western Europe. Over the past three decades, capitalist market reforms in China and India have substantially altered socio-political landscapes, triggering the transformation of the citizenship regime in each country. Yet the citizenship development of China and India is difficult to explain with existing literature on citizenship, which is still largely derived from the experiences of Western Europe. Informed by an understanding of citizenship not as a status or as a predetermined set of rights to be conferred on the population, but rather as relations that arise out of everyday practices and interactions between different societal actors, this project will study how citizenship is understood, interpreted, practiced, and contested by citizens in China and India. . In particular, this project will focus on the experience of low-income internal migrants. As newcomers to the city, many internal migrant workers are faced with the paradoxical existence of being a stranger at home, as they are treated as "virtual foreigners within the cities of their own country". The entry of internal migrant workers into cities therefore serves as a research site where migrants' struggles to establish themselves as rightful members of the city bring into relief the active and observable practices and contestations of citizenship. More specifically, this ethnographic study will study construction workers in Beijing and Delhi, who are mostly low-income migrant workers from neighboring provinces. Broader ImpactThe imperative for the study of citizenship is simultaneously empirical and normative. The implications of citizenship in most contexts are significant in that citizenship status impacts and defines the daily lives of people. By examining the livelihoods of low-income construction workers, this project has the potential to contribute to a better understanding and clarity of the needs and struggles of a vast, underprivileged population. The findings from this project will be relevant for policy makers as in that they will generate a greater awareness of the situation of exploited workers among the general public.