Taxpayer governmentality: governing government in Metro Vancouver’s transit tax debate

In a 2015 plebiscite, voters in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia rejected a proposed sales tax dedicated to funding a regional transportation plan. Opposition was spearheaded by a taxpayer group that focused on the perceived incompetence and wastefulness of the region’s transportation authority. Exercising a liberal imperative of ‘permanent critique of government’, the taxpayer group assembled evidence addressed to ‘taxpayers’. Developing a theoretical account of ‘taxpayer governmentality’, the paper analyses how people are addressed and fashioned as taxpayer subjects, empowered and responsibilized to govern government, and their own political conduct, as sceptical, calculating, non-political, economic actors. The paper concludes by suggesting that this taxpayer subject may be productive for understanding the practice of liberal critique and limitations of the state.     

Hunger strikes,detainee protest,and the relationality of political subjectivization

This paper attends to the relationships and spatialities through which immigration detention centers, though isolating and constraining spaces, are shaped by detainees. I approach the problematic of detainee resistance and agency through both Critical Citizenship Studies and feminist relational frameworks. I do so through a case study of one particular rupture – the 2014 hunger strikes at the Northwest Detention Center. My analysis of the 2014 hunger strikes at the NWDC directs me to conceptualize detainee activism as a process of political subjectivization, though one that is fraught with physical and political risk to both detainees and the order of sovereignty and citizenship. This process is undergirded by and productive of a series of interpersonal and political relations that mediate detainee actions and statements, and constitute them as a rupture in the order of sovereignty and citizenship.     

Political activism in Iran: strategies for survival,possibilities for resistance and authoritarianism

This article examines mobilizations and activism in authoritarian settings by considering the case of Iran. By focusing on the transformation of activism since the 1990s and the green movement, it advances an explanation of how oppositional political groups have been able to survive and produce forms of resistant subjectivity despite authoritarian constraints. In order to do so, the article brings together two scholarly traditions, namely Social Movement Theory (SMT) and the study of subjectivity and resistance as framed by Sari Hanafi. SMT explains how activists have been able to navigate repression and create opportunities for mobilization while shifting between formal and informal politics. The study of subjectivity helps conceptualize the type of subjects or political citizens that authoritarian environments generate. The article builds on field research with activists conducted in Iran and Turkey between 2007 and 2016. It argues that authoritarian constraints allow autonomous activism to flourish while emptying of meaning the regime-sanctioned political infrastructures.     

试论群众公认原则确立的理论依据

党的十七大把群众公认原则作为提高选人用人公信度的准则之一，是因为群众公认原则首先建立在深厚的马克思主义基础上，同时也汲取了西方文明的一些思想，特别是肥沃的民主思想。人民主体性是群众公认成为干部选拔任用评价主体的根本依据；集体决策理论是群众公认成为干部选拔任用评价主体的合理内核；政治参与是群众公认成为干部选拔任用评价主体的基本要求。     

In search of a theoretical approach to the analysis of the ‘Colour revolutions’: Transition studies and discourse theory

The article aims to identify a theoretical framework which would be able to provide explanation for the cases of political mobilization during the ‘Colour revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. It reviews the existing literature on the topic, which is predominantly oriented by the ‘transition paradigm’. The major shortcomings of this literature are identified: the privileging of either structure or agency when accounting for social change, a strong emphasis on the role of elites and insufficient attention to collective agency. Accordingly, I argue that the methodology of poststructuralist discourse theory may importantly supplement the ‘transitological’ framework owing to its ability to conceptualize the dynamic interdependence between structure and agency, as well as the formation of collective political identities.     

FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE: KEEPING THE SUBJECT ALIVE

One of the main purposes of feminist jurisprudence is to create or find better ways of being and living for women through the analysis, critique, and use of law. Rich work has emerged, and continues to emerge, from feminist theorists exploring conceptions of the self, personhood, identity and subjectivity that could be used to form a basic unit in law and politics. In this article, it is argued that a strong sense of human subjectivity needs to be retained to enable the human potentiality of women and men to flourish. This can be done in a way which is not essentialist, yet does not dissolve the subject out of existence, issues pertinent to feminist jurisprudence in recent years.     

法的主体性与公共性的分立与契合——对构建法治社会和谐利益秩序的一点思考

法的主体性是指法体现的各主体的利益和意志的不平衡程度,法的公共性是指法体现全社会公共利益的程度,法的主体性与公共性是法的双重属性,它们既是分立的,又是契合的。追求利益秩序的和谐是法治的基本目标,欲实现这一目标,正确处理法的主体性与公共性的关系是其关键。     

‘A MAD age’: Heibon Punch,student protest,the media and consumer society in Cold War Japan

Abstract

In the 1960s, Heibon Punch became one of the most popular weekly magazines in Japan. It was the first weekly magazine aimed at young men and I examine here a selection of articles from the late 1960s, a period of violent student protests and international uncertainty, to argue that the importance of Heibon Punch can be found in the creation of a commodified urban, male subjectivity. In the pages of Heibon Punch, the counter-cultures that were emerging along with the protest movements taking to the streets of the major cities, became firmly embedded within the ideological state promotion of a consumer culture. The government's explicit connection of national development to domestic consumption after the ANPO protests was tied to American military and economic power, and was simply one more assault on popular sovereignty. In the pages of Heibon Punch, the political nature of the social and economic transformations wrought by high-speed economic growth was effaced by the relentless consumerisation of individual subjectivity. I place the magazine, its editorial stance and mediatisation of subjectivity, within the broader emergence of an urban, middle-class culture of consumption that served to blur the contours of individual male subjectivity, and was, in many ways, a precursor of neo-liberal subjectivities that emerged full-blown both politically and economically in the 1970s and 1980s. By pressing its readers to decide for themselves how to negotiate the identities, ideas, and goods on offer in its pages, Heibon Punch shifted the focus of political subjectivity from the established social and political system to the core of the individual subject.     

中国司法与民意的沟通——基于主体间交往理性的认知

考察中国传统司法活动特质、民主革命时期司法活动特质、西方司法活动特质,今日之中国司法仍然徘徊在情理与国法之间,面临着司法的六重困局,力求通过主体间交往理性的认知以寻求脱困之思路。在三元结构下,进一步追问谁之民意,调和非理性民意,如网络暴民民意、操纵民意、偏执民意以及变调民意(仇官、仇富、侠客等),通过主体间交往理性的认知,达到沟通民意与司法的效果。通过司法中民意表达的认知机制、方法和路径选择,达成国家司法话语权和民间司法话语权的交涉和沟通,实现由舆论法庭走向制度化表达。     

当代西方美学理论中的主体观和身体意象

本文从身体主体论立场出发,重构了当代西方美学中的两个身体意象系列——主体系列和客体系列,揭示了两类身体意象的不足和相应理论体系的欠缺,强调当代身体美学研究应该充分重视身体主体性,建构出与身体的复杂性、丰富性、创造性相称的身体意象.