At the turn of the nineteenth century, global capitalism has introduced an unprecedented phenomenon: the reorientation of temporality and spatiality. Capitalist temporality and global space allowed Asian intellectuals to imagine, for the first time, a synchronized globe, where Asia became consciously worldly. Asian intellectuals began to reinterpret the indigenous categories such as the tributary system in order to make sense of the regionalization of Asia in the capitalist world system. The unity of Asian countries formed an alliance which resisted the homogeneity and universality claimed by European hegemony. Along with the revival of the Asian ideal, the tributary system was reimagined as the incarnation of Asian heterogeneity, a source that could be utilized in the common struggle of resisting European hegemony. What the tributary system represented in the discourse of Asianism at the turn of the twentieth century, then, is a new possibility of relation between nation-states.

"Disenchanted" Democracy at the Crossroads of Late Modernity (Two German Concepts) Abstract The Thesis introduces two descriptions of democracy which represent recent contribution of German social science to the international academic discourse on the crisis of democratic governance in changing conditions of contemporary modernity. Specifically, these are the concepts of "simulative democracy" by Ingolfur Blühdorn and "decentered democracy" by Helmut Willke. Within the German academia, both social theorists are respected personalities; meanwhile in the Czech environment, their conceptualizations reaching beyond the normative borders of liberal democracy have not yet been reflected. The question whether liberal democracy is an adequate form of political self-organization of a society at its current stage of development is approached by each of the authors from a different analytical perspective: Blühdorn critically analyzes traditional intentions of the post-enlightenment democratization and its ambition towards the formation of emancipated and responsible citizen. He considers the evaluation of modern emancipatory processes as a necessary step before assessing prospects for an authentic and environmentally sustainable democratic order. The starting point for Willke's reflections on democratic forms of...

Despite the increase in awareness of the plight of the third world and NGOs attempting to deal with poverty, international development projects continue to be alarmingly hit and miss. The problematic effectiveness of international development has led to an intense theoretical debate seeking to examine what exactly leads some projects awry. These criticisms often focus on the fundamental assumptions that underlie international development projects and occasionally relate them to the epistemological and ontological assumptions of modernity. In this thesis, I use Heidegger and Nietzsche to deepen the criticism of the epistemological and ontological assumptions of modernity that in turn support the most common approaches to international development. Often these assumptions are so fundamental to western, scientific thinking that they are not apparent and left unarticulated. By making the water the fish swims in more transparent to the fish, I encourage a more flexible, even "fuzzy" approach. The thesis thus seeks to undermine the confidence in the methods developed in modernity in order to replace the abstract models and harmful universal approaches with sensitive, local oriented development projects.

This study focuses on the Welfare Party elite's conceptualisation of modernity during the party's last 4-5 years before its closure in 1998. Since the party was the most important Islamist organisation in Turkey. it was at an important point of interaction between Islamism and modernity. The study tries to determine the significance of the WP discourse on key modernisation issues by answering such questions as how the WP elite conceptualised modernity; how this conceptualisation was formulated, constructed and what was modernity's relationship with the West in their view. It argues that, the WP elite had a distinct (Islamist) understanding of modernity which, despite its differences in its approach to some basic issues (e. g. secularism) overall remained within modernity by sharing most of its major characteristics. The WP elite, similar to many other Islamist movements, advocated a more Islamic (less secular and less Westernising) route to modernity; and they could not be considered as anti-modernists. The study contributes towards a better understanding of the critical role that a version of Islamism plays in Turkey's politics and process of modernisation and provides insights about the impact of Western modernity on the sizeable Islamist section. The study employs important concepts such as secularisation, nationalism, the modern state, economic development (science, technology, industrialisation), capitalism and democracy as important components of modernity. (It also provides a general analysis of Islamism in the Middle East vis-ä-vis modernity through these concepts). An analysis of the views of the WP elite with regard to these concepts and processes serves to better understanding the Islamist stance towards the particular path of modernisation in Turkey, modernity in general, and also the West. / Osmangazi University, Turkey / Additional content files accompanying this thesis are not available on Bradford Scholars, but are available from the British Library Ethos Service: https://ethos.bl.uk

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In 2000, the United Nations hosted the Millennium Summit, billed as the “largest gathering of world leaders in history” (UN Millennium Project). This delegation defined The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as the primary set of metrics that serve as benchmarks against which development, the world over, is to be measured. Of these eight goals, one focuses specifically on education and four relate to women and girls’ empowerment.This study of identity formations among Maasai schoolgirls in southern Kenya, then, is designed to shed some new theoretical light on life as a target of these goals. In this dissertation, I consider the lived experience of development in the form of formal schooling from the subjective point of view of Maasai primary schoolgirls. The study explores the textured variation of identities within the single social category, “schoolgirl,’ in an effort to uncover the on-the-ground meanings of development imperatives focused on recruiting girls to school, keeping girls in school, and supporting their achievement. Designed as an ethnographic case study focused on the nine government co-ed primary day schools in Keekonyokie Central Location, Ngong Division, Kajiado District, Kenya, interviews were conducted with 98 Maasai girls aged 12-20, enrolled in primary school at the time of the interviews. Additionally, interviews were conducted with some of the schoolgirls’ mothers and teachers, along with 8 secondary schoolgirls from the immediate area (Lood-ariak). Along with ethnographic data, policy documents and overlapping literatures were reviewed in order to ascertain education-as-development imperatives articulated by local, national, and international development institutions. The purpose of the research is an attempt to capture the complex interrelations between formal schooling, multi-scalar development imperatives, and individual everyday life worlds within the changing economic and social context of postcolonial Kenya in the age of globalization. My research suggests that “the schoolgirl” has emerged as a historically new and profoundly salient social category in contemporary Maasai life that has implications for gender dynamics and iii social forms like marriage, family and household structure and maintenance, and labor relations. I argue that the “schoolgirl” as a category has been created by the collusion of local and global discourses that define girls’ education as a singular and primary development imperative. Moreover, Maasai schoolgirls themselves deploy the discourse of development in their use of the schoolgirl category which enables them to negotiate and redefine who a girl is and can be in Maasailand today vis-à-vis education. Based on literature reviews prior to the research in Kenya, I went to Kajiado expecting to hear stories of the problems associated with the schooling imperative combined with the pressures of adolescence as a biosocial process that can make staying in school a perilous passage for rural African girls. While many participants did describe the obstacles they faced in their pursuit of schooling, I also found that nearly every girl my translator and I spoke with marshaled a poignant and pronounced sense of agency in their use of the schoolgirl category as both discursive tool and practical fact. Deployed and employed by schoolgirls and others on their behalf, the schoolgirl category gives Maasai girls unprecedented room to negotiate current realities and future trajectories. This positive finding not withstanding, the theoretical implications of my research also suggest that the schoolgirl subject position has been (and perhaps could have only been) forged in the particular crucible of the market-driven economic development context defined in recent year by neoliberal ideology, and because of this, there are structural limits to the autonomous and independent existence modern development ideology predicts and requires for and of agents. As I argue, the Maasai schoolgirl subject-position is made—produced, constructed—by and within an intricate matrix of forces, including the discourse(s) employed and deployed by Maasai schoolgirls themselves about their own circumstances. This exposition of Maasai schoolgirls is embedded in a history, political economy, and a symbolic universe. Therefore, the arguments forwarded here must go beyond the mechanical dissection of discourse; they must illuminate the lived realities, contextualized histories, and meaning systems that are enacted and embodied by the storylines and characters that give shape to the arguments themselves. Thus, the earliest chapters (1-3) are dedicated to Maasai subject formation through Kenyan history along with the paradoxical relationships many Maasai have had with formal schooling through out this history, as well as a broader context for girls’ education in selected Sub-Saharan African contexts. By focusing on African schoolgirls as creators of knowledge around their own experiences and highlighting that experience, this study’s findings contribute to at least two broad literatures: iv 1) the critical feminist theoretical literatures that are concerned with the construction of gendered subjects in late capitalism and 2) critical development literatures (both conceptual and practical) that are concerned with the contradictory processes of development and their gendered, and gendering, impacts. As Chapter 5 and my conclusions suggest, feminist development interventions must squarely account for these contradictions rather than be seduced by reductive rhetoric that empties gender analysis of its critical edge. In so doing, development scholars, local practitioners, and everyday people may be better equipped to confront the real gendered effects of institutional changes based on sex, such as recruiting and retaining more girls in school. My ultimate goal is to expand and localize the working knowledge of gender in development contexts so that we might face the matrix of complexity of life in the development zone and thus, perhaps, craft more reasonable, just, and gender-centered interventions aimed at transformative and positive change for all, not just girls. / Ph. D.

This study traces the history of how farmers have used technologies from the eighteenth century to the present to form identities, not simply as ways of making greater economic profits. Using technologies becomes a way to 'perform' a person's sense of him or herself. This insight serves historians because it suggests that users, not just important inventors, drive technological change. My study also suggests that the relationship people have with technology (and how they use it to form their identities) has historical genealogies. Engineers and business people will also find my history useful because the notion of 'performative use' means that people's views of themselves can influence the way they adopt and employ technologies. Policy scholars will gain from my study because I show that the way people use technology to understand themselves has consequences in determining how they participate in controversies over science and technology policy. This narrative begins in the eighteenth century by analyzing how elites like Benjamin Rush viewed the agricultural practices of German farmers, regarded by many in the upper classes as backwards. I show how observances of German farmers by elites created a pattern repeated throughout American history where rural people would use technology to perform their identities for an outside observer. In addition, I describe an identity, which I call 'German agrarianism,' and contend that this rural self-image migrated to the Midwest when German farmers moved westward. German agrarianism had several important features including the association of morality with family-based production practices, an obsession with owning personal property, the inclusion of women in farming and land ownership, and the practice of performing identity through the use of material objects. Next, I describe a rural identity with English origins, one that other scholars have named 'Jeffersonian agrarianism.' This Jeffersonian identity saw farmers as heroes who conquered the frontier, preserved American democracy, and supported less moral urban dwellers. I argue that Jeffersonian agrarianism in the nineteenth century began to reject technological and social change and that this view of rural people as anti-modern has influenced the way observers of rural life have viewed farmers up to the present. This study then analyzes the rural-urban conflict of the 1920s, contending that farmers used technologies to develop their own rural modern identity, which I call 'rural capitalistic modernity.' Farmers used technology this way to combat a version of modernity, which I name 'urban industrialism.' This modern identity, arising from the cities, advocated improving rural life by making farms resemble urban factories. This factory model threatened German and Jeffersonian rural identities that existed prior to the 1920s because it removed the family as the center of production and advocated work processes that took control and property ownership away from farmers. In addition, urban industrialism saw farmers as backward and in need of reform, which offended farmers who saw themselves in heroic terms as a result of Jeffersonian agrarianism. I argue that many rural people in the 1920s used technology to perform an identity of rural capitalistic modernity as a means of combating these urban efforts to restructure farms as factories and stereotype farmers as 'yokels' or 'rubes.' This rural modern identity became reinforced during the Cold War because the farmer saw Soviet collectivized agriculture as posing the same threats as previous urban industrialism. In addition, the way farmers used technology to reinforce their views of themselves as modern became valuable to government actors in the United States who saw increased agricultural production as a weapon in defeating the Soviet Union. By the 1970s, farmers formed an identity called 'rural ultramodernity' in which they began to think of themselves as more modern than urban dwellers because of their design and use of advanced technologies and their role as producers in the global food network. This ultramodern identity incorporates aspects of previous rural identities, including an obsession with combating urban stereotypes of farmers as 'hicks.' In addition, this rural ultramodern identity views farmers as having an inborn modernity inherited from previous generations of farmers. I argue that this ultramodern way farmers think of themselves explains why rural people in the Midwest have embraced the erection of wind turbines, unlike residents of other regions in the U.S. From a policy perspective, this study also contends that debates over science and technology, such as efforts to render agriculture more sustainable and organic, are impacted by unexpressed fundamental views about nature and morality. Statements about these controversies often take the form of proxy arguments that sound 'rational' but mask these unstated ideas, and they often alienate those with opposing views. Current debates over genetically modified organisms, from a rural perspective, are actually unspoken clashes over rural ultramodern and organic identities hidden by 'objective' points made by both sides involving science or economics. This study also challenges the common notion that technology and production are male domains by showing how both men and women have used technology to construct their identities as producers on Midwest farms. This insight illustrates how disagreements over gender roles underlie current policy debates about agriculture. Farmers view organic discourse as threatening rural women's identities as modern producers by framing farming as an immoral, industrial, and male domination of a moral and female nature. Rural people view organic discourse as carrying on the tradition of urban industrialism, which saw farmers as backwards and farm women as unhappy and occupying an exclusively domestic sphere. This study suggests that any effort to reform agriculture must include farmers and incorporate the way rural people use technologies to form and reinforce their identities. At the same time, the conclusion advocates for a new rural identity that avoids farmer's tendencies to view all technologies as 'progress' regardless of their environmental or social impacts. / Ph. D.

This thesis explores the notion of "black modernity" in the context of the Liberia at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite Liberia's recognition by the international community as a sovereign nation, Liberia fell subject to the imperial ploys of the European powers in the Scramble for Africa. Americo-Liberians, the governing elite of Liberia, toiled to preserve Liberia's status as an autonomous nation and the only self-governed black republic in Africa. This thesis examines the complexities of Liberia's sovereignty crisis, highlighting the ways in which Americo-Liberians used methods of "modernity" for their own purposes. Using Liberia as a case study, this thesis argues that the concept of "black modernity" hinges on contextual factors such as the plight of the people, pending circumstances, power structures, and understanding of self in relation to these variables. Americo-Liberians, unlike most black people at this time, were protected from race-based oppression by the state. Thus, when Liberia's sovereignty was in jeopardy, Americo-Liberians diligently fought to ensure that the Republic of Liberia maintained its sovereignty by using methods of colonialism and diplomacy. While these methods mirrored those of the European imperialists, Americo-Liberians employed these methods to preserve Liberia and, accordingly, challenge the prevailing notions of black inferiority. / Master of Arts