Browsing by Subject "Publicity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Beauty and a Broken City: women and their publicity in Tianjin, 1898-1911.
    (2011-04) Qin, Fang
    My dissertation is an attempt to explore the ways in which the global-local network impacted diverse women's lives and experiences at the turn of the twentieth century Tianjin, a coastal city in north China. I will especially emphasize two aspects of their experiences in cities: the ways in which women emerged as a public presence in the urban landscape, and the ways in which women's issues became a social phenomenon under the public observation and discussion. To be specific, I focus on three most-debated issues in Tianjin: women's physical body (footbinding), women's education, and women's performance. The three themes had for a long time been rooted in Chinese society and culture and symbolized the normative womanhood or its opposite side. When it came to the modern era, the themes of publicizing women's deformed feet, the transition from private inner chambers to public women's schools, and the extreme publicity of actresses on and off the stage became social issues in Tianjin, with which the city had never dealt before, or at least not to this extent. All the discussions, debates, arguments, and reforms of these issues affected groups of women such as missionary women, educated women, and actresses and dramatically changed their life styles and their identities in the city. New definitions of social and gender norms were forming to discipline women's behaviors and spheres. It is the negotiation between women and the forming norms that a space was created between layers for these women to actually lived with flexibility and agency. Meanwhile, it was also through the discussion, translation, and adaptation of these issues in Tianjin that people were able to articulate and consolidate their own identity as Tianjin natives.
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    The Community Speaks out in Support of the U's Aspirations
    (University of Minnesota, 2005) University of Minnesota: University Relations
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    Toward “free trade” from Kant's cosmopolitan ideal
    (2012-09) Deng, Yi
    My dissertation aims to present a coherent Kantian justice in terms of Kant's publicity principle. The theoretical construction arises from inquiries about the case of China's soybean market shift after its accession to the WTO, and holds the practical aims of diagnosing injustices and prescribing individuals', states' and global institutions' responsibilities in rectifying injustices. Specifically, I advocate for publicity as negotiable consent, which could entail active citizenship and moral politicians. By appealing to publicity as negotiable consent, I argue that the Chinese soybean case involves injustice, and provide corresponding expansions of Kant's cosmopolitan right, republicanism, and a federalism of free states as conditions for justice. The puzzling relationship between the WTO and federalism of free states suggests the need to address connections between trade liberalization and cosmopolitan ideal. By appealing to the I-Ching, I present the dynamic balance of Yin and Yang as a model for the interaction between capital and labor in the context of global justice. The interdependent yin-yang indicates that the discrepancy between theoretical predictions from the WTO and empirical evidence in the Chinese soybean case has resulted from the WTO's neglect of mobility differentiations among the factors of production. At the end of my dissertation, an appropriate capital-labor relation prescribed by yin-yang leads to practical suggestions for the WTO. Emphasizing a mixture of bottom-up and top-down restrictions, both "publicity as negotiable consent" and yin-yang energize an account of Kantian justice as a dynamic theory which is continually responding to the uncertain, complicated, but practical issues.