Dr. Bonnie Huskins is currently working on a monograph which profiles an 18^th-century British Royal Engineer named William Booth.[i] Born in London in 1747, William Booth was commissioned as an ensign in the Corps of Engineers in 1771, and from there was posted to Gibraltar (1779-83), to Halifax Nova Scotia (August 1785-October 1786), to Shelburne Nova Scotia (1786-89), and to Jersey in the Channel Islands (1799-1800). Traditional biographies tend to focus on personal details and local particularities, but : Dr. Bonnie Huskins will be using the framework of “social biography,” a social history approach to world history which traces the connections between the “profoundly local and individual” and the “global and world historical.”

By viewing world developments through the eyes of individual human agents such as Booth, social biographies also have the potential to challenge accepted generalizations in world history, and thus help us to “better appreciate the limits as well as the power of world historical processes.”[ii]  Moreover, this monograph situates itself squarely within the paradigm of the “new world history,” which presents “local histories in a global context and gives and overview of world events as seen through the eyes of ordinary people.”[iii] While William Booth was an ordinary person, he was also somewhat exceptional in the sense that he has left behind traces of himself in the form of military and genealogical records, correspondences and memos, paintings and sketches, and most notably two journals which he kept while posted to Shelburne and Jersey.

In 2008 the Shelburne County Archives and Genealogical Society published a transcribed and annotated version of Booth’s Shelburne journal.[iv] Anecdotes from this journal have appeared in histories of Shelburne and in accounts of the American Revolutionary War loyalists’ experiences in Nova Scotia.[v] There is also a three-page biographical overview of Booth written by archivist Barry Cahill for the published version of the journal. However, there is currently no book-length work on Booth’s life or career.

In order to highlight the world historical processes embedded within William Booth’s life and career, I propose breaking this social biography into four sections:  war, the slave trade, mercantile trade, and social support networks. .

This grant enabled Dr. Gül Çalışkan to interview specific individuals in Istanbul and Ankara, during July and August 2014.

Summary of project: 

The protests, which took place during the summer of 2013 in Turkey, made use of artistic symbols and humor as expressions of popular culture, and as acts of participatory citizenship. Protest music, performance art, or street and digital art have become increasingly integral to everyday activism, whether in the form of individual claims or as part of larger public causes. The Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and the Ankara student protests produced some of the most vibrant examples of symbols and humor used as significant artistic expressions of contemporary culture. With the help of social media, such symbols and humor found a vast, interactive audience in both the global and local domains during the summer of 2013.

As the world followed these protests, people grew familiar with a series of iconic figures, including the Woman in Red, Reading Man, the Pots & Pans Orchestra, Guitar Hero, Standing Man, Woman in Black, Vedat the Drummer, Dancing Man, and Aunt Vildan, just to name few. The humor and artistic drama these figures conveyed crossed cultural boundaries, demonstrating a new kind of “global-local nexus,” and a “glocal” culture. Such “glocal” expressions erupted simultaneously across cities and national boundaries. By “glocality,” we refer to “[t]he myriad forms of connectivity and flows linking the local (and national) to the global – as well as the West to the East, and the North to the South” (Steger, 2013 p. 2).

There has been a growing body of work in the field of globalized movements for justice (Amoore, 2005; Benhabib, 2011; Kurasawa, 2009; Robinson and Tormey, 2009), including investigations of performance arts as forms of resistance, rehumanization and reconciliation (Cohen, Varea, and Walker, 2011). However, more research is needed on the role of symbols and humor in the creation of an emerging global civil society.

Through narrative analysis of the symbols and humor created during the Gezi protests, Dr. Gül Çalışkan want to explore the challenges this movement brought to modern notions of citizenship, activism, and social justice. I propose to analyze the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and the Ankara student protests that took place during the summer of 2013 in Turkey. Dr. Gül Çalışkan will examine the symbols and humor used in these events to discern their significance as expressions of popular culture and as acts of citizenship.

To do this, Dr. Gül Çalışkan intends to meet and interview the individuals who created these artistic expressions, during July and August 2014. Istanbul and Ankara will be the locations/site of the study. In her analysis, Dr. Gül Çalışkan will be drawing on a diverse body of evidence collected through online research and my interviews with the individuals who shaped the protests with their art.

The following research questions will addressed: What hybrid forms of resistance have these expressions created? What are the implications they bring for the way we understand solidarity? How fleeting or long lasting are their effects on society? How do these expressions combine the logic of collective and personal action? What kind of citizenship has been articulated?

Gül Çalışkan

The Crisis of Regional Leadership and Legitimacy in the Asia Pacific

This project asks the question: what constitutes legitimate leadership in the emerging Asia Pacific region? The key hypotheses are that the United States and China are both losing “hard” and “soft” power in the Asia Pacific. Therefore, the legitimacy of both countries as regional leaders is in question.

It is possible that other powers and maybe even the smaller states of the region may step into this emerging vacuum. If this is the case, then theories of international society must be developed and modified to account for these developments.

This project will develop the concept of “legitimate leadership” as it applies to the Asia Pacific region. The major objective of the study is to examine the proposition that the traditional concept of legitimate leadership in international society, as established during the Cold War era, no longer applies in the Asia Pacific. (Masciulli, Molchanov and Knight, 2009; Brezinski, 2012) The study argues that the dominant powers of the Asia Pacific, the United States and China, have each seriously undermined their ability to exercise legitimate leadership in the region.

As a result, the door has opened for emerging powers and the smaller states of the region to play more important roles in defining the normative and political structures and rules of regional conduct. If this is the case, it indicates the need to radically reform IR theories of international society, which tend to focus on the roles of the most powerful states in shaping the global system. A second, less theoretically oriented objective is to understand the evolving political, strategic and economic environments of the AP as more powers become active and influential in the regional dynamic.

Shaun Narine

Dr. Horgan’s current project on the ‘political’ use of prorogation has three goals: first, to identify Australian precedents analogous to a recent Canadian case; second, to identify the factors that conduce to the use of prorogation as a partisan political tool; third, to examine the Crown representatives’ actions in these cases, the rationales for those actions, and the reaction of the UK Colonial/Dominions Office to the representatives’ actions, in order to better establish the extent of representatives’ discretion regarding the reserve power to deny advice to prorogue a parliament.

The initial work on the state of New South Wales is largely complete, the results having appeared as: Prorogation as Partisan Political Tool: The New South Wales Experience; Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law 6 (1) 2012: 161-94. The search for further cases in other Australian states has proceeded over the past eight months. Several of these have been identified and the details investigated, while for others the latter continues. Some initial comment on these cases was presented at the CPSA Annual Conference 2012 in June, when Dr. Horgan was invited to take part in the Roundtable entitled The Prerogative Powers of First Ministers. Two further papers resulting from the research project have been submitted for presentation at the APPSA Annual Conference 2012, to be held at St. Thomas University in September.

Dr. Horgan is currently (July-August 2012) on the research trip supported by the GISI research grant. The Colonial Office and Dominions Office collections of original correspondence with colonial/state Governors is being studied at the UK National Archives in London. The purpose is to determine these Offices’ reactions to decisions made by Governors regarding the prorogation of colonial/state parliaments, and thereby to gauge the extent of these Crown reprentatives’ discretion regarding such decisions. The initial results of this work will be incorporated in the presentations at the September APPSA Conference.

The grant enabled Dr. Cross to perform research on-site in Australia and in Aboriginal County in the months of March and April of 2012. This research is part of a larger monograph/book project on aluminum in world history in a multi-national framework.

Title of project:

After the Bauxite is Gone: A History of Land Rehabilitation in Transnational Perspective (Australia, and the Yolngu and Yirrkala Aboriginal Countries)

Summary of project:

This project is one piece of a larger comparative and international history that examines some of the environmental and social experiences of people using, living on or living near former bauxite mines.  Multinational aluminum companies extended a global reach to secure bauxite ore reserves in order to make an array of aluminum products. Bauxite-rich lands were frequently home to many host- society peoples whose territories subsequently became bauxite mines.  Land rehabilitation schemes employed in Australia (and on Aboriginal Countries) in the late 20th Century provide windows on to the contested and re-made landscapes where processes of globalization met local circumstances. This work is not focused on the mining process itself, but rather examines the history of mined land.

Dr. Cross’ research question was: “What happened to the land subsequent to mining?” as part of a larger comparative multi-national (Canada, Jamaica, United States, France, Australia, Guyana, so far) study that seeks to situate the histories of the places where aluminium ore was extracted within a comparative framework.

Dr. Cross plans to integrate this research project as a case study with previous and continuing historical research.

Bradley Cross