Papers by Sophia Woodman
Identities, 2021
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The International Journal of Human Rights
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Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China, 2019
Book chapter published in: Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China, edited by Teresa Wright, ... more Book chapter published in: Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China, edited by Teresa Wright, Edward Elgar, 2019.
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Gender Dynamics, Feminist Activism and Social Transformation in China, 2018
Book chapter published in: Gender Dynamics, Feminist Activism and Social Transformation in China,... more Book chapter published in: Gender Dynamics, Feminist Activism and Social Transformation in China, edited by Guoguang Wu, Yuan Feng and Helen Lansdowne. Basingstoke: Routledge, 2018.
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Place and Citizenship: Case Studies on the Borders of Citizenship, 2018
Book chapter published in Place and Citizenship: Case Studies on the Borders of Citizenship, edit... more Book chapter published in Place and Citizenship: Case Studies on the Borders of Citizenship, edited by Cherstin M. Lyon and Alison F. Goebel. Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.
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Citizenship Studies, 2017
The paradigmatic 'migrant' in China is a worker of rural origin, but more than 30% of the one-fi... more The paradigmatic 'migrant' in China is a worker of rural origin, but more than 30% of the one-fifth of the population living and working away from their place of hukou registration are inter-urban migrants, a group mostly neglected by scholars. Based on ethnographic observation and interviews from two Chinese cities – one on the coast, one in the impoverished interior – this article examines how a range of types of migrants deal with citizenship and mobility. It shows that a key criterion for being able to settle in a new place and gain access to local social citizenship is migrants' level of 'culture,' expressed primarily through formal education. Linking access to local citizenship for migrants to their 'cultural quality' goes largely unquestioned, as it is connected to the legitimacy of education as a means of differentiating among citizens more generally. This logic shapes family migration strategies as parents seek to ensure that their children will receive an education that enables access to the kinds of good jobs and benefits that enable full citizenship wherever they live.
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Citizenship Studies, 2017
Citizenship in China—and elsewhere in the global South—has been perceived as either a distorted e... more Citizenship in China—and elsewhere in the global South—has been perceived as either a distorted echo of the 'real' democratic version in Europe and North America, or an orientalized 'other' that defines what citizenship is not. In contrast, adopting a 'connected histories' perspective makes Chinese citizenship a constitutive part of a modernity that is still unfolding. Since the nineteenth century, concerns about citizenship have been central to debates about the building of state and society in China. Some of these concerns are echoed in key tensions related to the practices of citizenship in China today, particularly in three areas: a state preference for sedentarism and governing citizens in place vs. growing mobility, sometimes facilitated by the state;; a perception that state-building and development requires a strong state vs. ideas and practices of participatory citizenship;; and submission of the individual to the 'collective' (state, community, village, family etc.) vs. the rising salience of conceptions of self-development and self-making projects. Exploring manifestations of these tensions can contribute to thinking about citizenship beyond China, including the role of the local in forming citizenship orders;; how individualization works in the absence of liberal individualism;; and how 'social citizenship' is increasingly becoming a reward to 'good citizens', rather than a mechanism for achieving citizen equality.
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A focus of the ‘Idle No More’ protests among indigenous people in Canada, sparked in December 201... more A focus of the ‘Idle No More’ protests among indigenous people in Canada, sparked in December 2012, has been actions in defence of the wild salmon, with marches, petitions and lobbying efforts as well as a transnational campaign against the Norwegian multinationals who are the dominant actors in global salmon aquaculture. By contrast, contention over the impact of salmon farms in places such as Scotland and Ireland has tended to pit environmentalists against those concerned about jobs and economic activity in areas that are often short of both. Although similar contests are also present in the Canadian northwest, the indigenous activists’ vision of ‘justice for the wild salmon’ enmeshes the salmon in a discursive and moral formation grounded in interdependent (yet changing) ways of living with the salmon that have continued over thousands of years, despite colonial efforts to disrupt and destroy both indigenous knowledge and practices. In the indigenous perspectives, culture and nature are intimately bound together in a seamless web enacted through practices that have continued over time, despite the encroachment of capitalist economic frameworks for food production and imposition of private property relations. The chapter compares struggles around salmon farming in Europe and North America, highlighting how the effort to bring indigenous accounts of the salmon into a transnational campaign posits rights to a different world—not one conceived in the hegemonic terms of current debates about sovereignty, economic development, environment and so on. The alternative worlds visible in some indigenous anti-salmon farm campaigns are not only of consequence to those peoples and their ways of life—they represent a critical resource for rethinking the very nature of being in the world.
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The demise of collective units that attach citizens to the state in China has been overstated; th... more The demise of collective units that attach citizens to the state in China has been overstated; the hegemonic form of citizenship in China today links participation and welfare entitlement to membership in a specific locality, this article shows. Combining socio-legal analysis of relevant rules and ethnographic research in villager and resident committees in Tianjin, it outlines how this form of local citizenship operates. As successors to Maoist collectives, these committees similarly concentrate different dimensions of citizenship in one institutional setting, acting as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. These institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call “socialized governance.” This form of governance blurs the boundaries between political compliance and social conformity, and makes social norms a particularly strong force in the citizenship order. While variably achieved in practice, this form of citizenship represents an ideal that shapes conditions for politics and perceptions of inequality.
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Asian Studies Review, Mar 2015
In contemporary China strict censorship coexists with significant freedom of expression and restr... more In contemporary China strict censorship coexists with significant freedom of expression and restrictions are enforced inconsistently. Yet certain principles underlie determinations of what is acceptable public speech, depending on the institutional location of the utterance, the identity of the speaker and the time of the event. What is allowed depends on the specific circumstances, but it results from patterns in the institutional practices of Chinese politics that involve constraining debate within “segmented publics”. This article analyses how formal and informal rules limit discussions of particular issues to specific segmented publics, and how varying degrees of debate are permitted within these institutional fields, based on the expertise of their members or, in the case of associations, their engagement in specific areas of policy implementation. Another dimension of variation relates to the personalised character of authority in the Chinese system of governance, which means that leaders set the tone for debate within institutional spheres they control. State control, however, is only part of the story: segmented publics are dynamic spaces where boundaries are permeable, often contested, and constantly in formation. The operation of segmented publics is explored here through case studies of activism in the legal field; on women’s rights in the associational field; at the grassroots in resident and villager committees; and in oppositional publics.
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Critical Asian Studies, 2011
The channeling of popular struggles through legal cases is central to the strategy of the emergin... more The channeling of popular struggles through legal cases is central to the strategy of the emerging “rights defense” movement in China, linking grassroots contention with professional mediators who translate grievances into the institutional environment of law. This was the case in an unusual, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 2005 to remove an elected village chief in Taishi Village in Guangdong, China, by legal means. While the grievances that sparked the campaign were about the unequal distribution of the benefits from village development, the strategy of instituting a recall procedure and the framing of the campaign in terms of democracy and rule of law obscured distinctly gendered issues of poverty and inequality in the village, even though women were among the most visible protesters. This article employs a “sociology of translation” to link framing processes and power dynamics, thus proposing a methodological approach to reconnecting framing with other aspects of movements. In the Taishi case, the translation of the dispute into the language of law had contrary effects: it opened the door to a legitimate, if temporary, public space for the airing of villagers' claims. At the same time, translation legitimized the voices of “experts” who then became de facto leaders in this public space; it also increasingly shifted the action to the internet, to which the villagers apparently had no access. This analysis raises questions about whether such strategies may result in either the formation of durable rights-based identities among grassroots participants or a sense of being connected to a broader social movement.
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This study uses the China case to revisit some of the central assumptions of the literature on ci... more This study uses the China case to revisit some of the central assumptions of the literature on citizenship, showing how citizens and states are formed in and through the local places where citizenship is practiced. It suggests that the location of the political and of citizens have been an understudied aspect of citizenship orders, not just in relation to the growing impact of global and transnational forces, but also in sub-state entities.
Through fine-grained examination of the daily interactions between citizens and state agents, this study shows how citizenship in China is embedded in local relationships of belonging, participation and entitlement anchored in institutions that organize people in workplaces, urban neighborhoods and rural villages. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in four communities in Tianjin, China, the study examines how two such institutions, the villager and residents committees, act as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. The practices of these institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call “socialized governance.” Both enabling and constraining, this exists in tension with bureaucratic-rational forms of governance, such as the current Chinese leadership’s objective of “ruling in accordance with law.” While the frameworks for citizenship are set at the national level, its local, cellular character means great variation among places in both form and practice. My model of local citizenship helps explain patterns of economic and social inequality and of contentious politics in contemporary China.
While the unsettling of the congruence between the national and citizenship has been widely noted, this study points to how local, national and global institutionalized dimensions of citizenship have consistently been mediated through or exercised in sub-state entities. The narrative of the nation-state has so dominated the literature on citizenship that it has generally made invisible the actual techniques and processes through which citizenship orders are made, re-made and contested. As a unitary state with a strong national project, the China case provides intriguing material for rethinking how the local shapes citizenship.
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International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 2010
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Pacific Affairs, 2009
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Teaching Documents by Sophia Woodman
This is the flyer for year 2 of this course, which is now open for undergraduates at all levels (... more This is the flyer for year 2 of this course, which is now open for undergraduates at all levels (Honours, as well as pre-Honours). We also have a website with materials generated by last year's group: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/cooperative-learning-course/
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A flyer for a new course I am involved in developed cooperatively by staff and students at the Un... more A flyer for a new course I am involved in developed cooperatively by staff and students at the University of Edinburgh.
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Book by Sophia Woodman
Decentralization is a buzzword of governance in the 21st century, with autonomy arrangements repr... more Decentralization is a buzzword of governance in the 21st century, with autonomy arrangements representing an extreme form. Often emerging in the resolution of conflicts left over from imperial and colonial orders, under such arrangements particular territorial units of national states are accorded special powers that go beyond what is available to other regional governments. This book presents detailed case studies of thirteen such autonomies from around the world, in which noted experts on each outline the constitutional, legal and institutional frameworks as well as how these arrangements have worked in practice to protect minority rights and prevent secession of the territories in question. The volume’s editors draw on the case studies to provide a comparative analysis of how autonomy works and the political and institutional conditions under which it is likely to become a workable arrangement for management of the differences that brought it into being.
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Blog posts by Sophia Woodman
Asia Pacific Memo, Jun 27, 2014
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Papers by Sophia Woodman
Through fine-grained examination of the daily interactions between citizens and state agents, this study shows how citizenship in China is embedded in local relationships of belonging, participation and entitlement anchored in institutions that organize people in workplaces, urban neighborhoods and rural villages. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in four communities in Tianjin, China, the study examines how two such institutions, the villager and residents committees, act as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. The practices of these institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call “socialized governance.” Both enabling and constraining, this exists in tension with bureaucratic-rational forms of governance, such as the current Chinese leadership’s objective of “ruling in accordance with law.” While the frameworks for citizenship are set at the national level, its local, cellular character means great variation among places in both form and practice. My model of local citizenship helps explain patterns of economic and social inequality and of contentious politics in contemporary China.
While the unsettling of the congruence between the national and citizenship has been widely noted, this study points to how local, national and global institutionalized dimensions of citizenship have consistently been mediated through or exercised in sub-state entities. The narrative of the nation-state has so dominated the literature on citizenship that it has generally made invisible the actual techniques and processes through which citizenship orders are made, re-made and contested. As a unitary state with a strong national project, the China case provides intriguing material for rethinking how the local shapes citizenship.
Teaching Documents by Sophia Woodman
Book by Sophia Woodman
Blog posts by Sophia Woodman
Through fine-grained examination of the daily interactions between citizens and state agents, this study shows how citizenship in China is embedded in local relationships of belonging, participation and entitlement anchored in institutions that organize people in workplaces, urban neighborhoods and rural villages. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in four communities in Tianjin, China, the study examines how two such institutions, the villager and residents committees, act as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. The practices of these institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call “socialized governance.” Both enabling and constraining, this exists in tension with bureaucratic-rational forms of governance, such as the current Chinese leadership’s objective of “ruling in accordance with law.” While the frameworks for citizenship are set at the national level, its local, cellular character means great variation among places in both form and practice. My model of local citizenship helps explain patterns of economic and social inequality and of contentious politics in contemporary China.
While the unsettling of the congruence between the national and citizenship has been widely noted, this study points to how local, national and global institutionalized dimensions of citizenship have consistently been mediated through or exercised in sub-state entities. The narrative of the nation-state has so dominated the literature on citizenship that it has generally made invisible the actual techniques and processes through which citizenship orders are made, re-made and contested. As a unitary state with a strong national project, the China case provides intriguing material for rethinking how the local shapes citizenship.