Jennet Kirkpatrick

Fighting to be fired (but only with just cause): The unionization of nontenure-track faculty

In the last thirty years, the share of nontenure-track faculty appointments in higher education has increased dramatically. According to the American Association of University Professors, 96 percent of all new faculty appointments in U.S. colleges and universities in 1969 were tenure-track; by the 1990s, only half of new appointments were tenure-track, and only half of these positions were full-time.

Walking Away with Thoreau: The Pleasures and Risks of Exit

Much of the political theory literature on Thoreau is divided, with one camp focusing on resistance and civil disobedience, while the second concentrates on withdrawal. This bifurcation is not borne out in Thoreau’s texts, and it can lead to a mischaracterization of Thoreau as an essentially instrumental thinker and an idiosyncratic political actor. In this article I argue against this bifurcation of withdrawal and resistance, maintaining that Thoreau’s exit was simultaneously a mode of resistance. His “resistant exit” has double political significance because it was instrumental and expressive. In addition to the change that it can produce in the individual, Thoreau’s resistant exit is consequential because the action itself symbolizes opposition.

Exit out of Athens? Migration and Obligation in Plato’s Crito

A prevailing theme of the scholarship on Plato’s Crito has been civil disobedience, with many scholars agreeing that the Athenian Laws do not demand a slavish, authoritarian kind of obedience. While this focus on civil disobedience has yielded consensus, it has left another issue in the text relatively unexplored—that is, the challenges and attractions of leaving one’s homeland or of “exit.” Reading for exit reveals two fundamental, yet contradictory, desires in the Crito: a yearning to escape the injustice of the homeland for self-preservation and freedom (voiced by Crito) and a deep-seated need to honor one’s obligations and attachments to the homeland (voiced by the Laws). By exposing the conflicted nature of leaving one’s native land, Plato’s Crito enriches an understanding of the meaning and consequences of an exit for the individual.

Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays on Politics, Community, and Democracy by Martha A. Ackelsberg

Readers familiar with the work of Martha A. Ackelsberg will welcome her latest work. Resisting Citizenship, a collection of 12 essays written by Ackelsberg over the course of 25 years, contains her well-known essays from the 1980s, including “Communities, Resistance, and Women’s Activism” and “Women’s Collaborative Activities and City Life.” In addition to nine previously published essays, there are three new essays. The more recent works reveal Ackelsberg’s growing interest in policy, her focus on care, families, and care work, and her development of communalist anarchist thought. “Broadening the Study of Women’s Participation” and “Rethinking Anarchism/Rethinking Power” stand out as particularly thought-provoking contributions. Ackelsberg provides a candid and personal introduction that charts the trajectory of her scholarship and explains her awakening insight that her activism within feminism and social justice movements could and should inform her scholarship within political theory. This is a short but compelling piece of writing that will be of particular interest to young feminist scholars. Ackelsberg evocatively conveys her early frustration with political science, a field which hewed to overly narrow definitions of key political terms like participation, citizenship, and democracy and which focused primarily on the contributions of men and male thinkers. Ackelsberg sets out to correct these failures by examining what has been persistently overlooked: a grassroots, community-oriented form of political participation that is largely the province of women. In so doing, Ackelsberg embarks on an ambitious and influential project of constructing a new methodology within political theory. Taking novel and unusual approaches, Ackelsberg effectively inverts traditional political theory methodology. Rather than beginning with the theories of men, Ackelsberg begins with practices of women. Thus, instead of turning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, or John Locke to better understand a fundamental political concept like citizenship, Ackelsberg gains insight into citizenship by turning to women involved in contemporary or historic struggles. She focuses, for example, on the National Congress of Neighborhood Women

Come A Little Closer: Citizens, Law, and Identification

What should the relationship between citizens and the law in a liberal democracy look like? The idea that citizens should be associated with the laws that govern them is a cornerstone of democratic theory. Yet the specific nature of this relationship has varied widely in theory and practice. I examine one conceptualization of this relationship: the notion that democratic citizens should substantively identify with the law and see their preferences, will, or morality in it. This kind of civic identification with the law is suggested in Carl Schmitts The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Schmitts text points both to the seductive appeal of civic identification with the law and to its pernicious potential.

Book Review: Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947

added)), international human rights are descriptive as well as normative. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, ‘‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’’ (emphasis added). Insofar as descriptive or declaratory formulations command greater moral authority, human rights norms may be more readily invoked and mobilized than the principle of equality. Furthermore, unlike the principle of equality analyzed in Elusive Citizenship, human rights have been expressly codified in international covenants that explicitly recognize the limits to the principle of national sovereignty. What recent events have shown is that whether or not the principle of equality may gain ascendancy will likely depend on the extent to which notions about moral desert and human rights can be successfully mobilized and integrated into the public understanding about immigration. That is, the principle of equality may always remain subservient to the principle of national sovereignty unless undocumented immigrants can be successfully recast as morally deserving individuals whose rights are grounded in already well-established international norms within global governance. Park asks in Elusive Citizenship, ‘‘On what grounds can liberal nation-states deny the claim and needs of persons, who, by accident of birth, were not ‘born’ as members?’’ (11). The answer that many Americans offer as selfevident truth is often quite simple: protection of the cultural values and economic interests of those who already belong. What Park shows is that such an answer cannot be easily reconciled with the other important principle to which liberal nation-states profess commitment, that of equality. Although it may not be possible to reconcile these two competing principles, broadening the inquiry outside the domain of liberal political theory may afford opportunities for a greater understanding of why and how one principle may come to prevail over the other. Elusive Citizenship is a timely book that will speak to anyone interested in the historical and philosophical underpinnings of American immigration law, as well as those grappling with questions about citizenship and inequality.