Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Allan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 1994-1998

1994-1995

Christopher Rhomberg, History: The Consequences of Collective Action: Ethnicity, Class, Race, and Social Movements in Oakland, California, 1920-1970. This dissertation focuses on American ethnic, class, and racial formation through an historical study of urban social movements. The city of Oakland, California, serves as a case study for three distinct nationwide social movements of the twentieth century. The first case is from the 1920s, a time of increased ethnic and racial prejudice after the First World War. A white nativist movement developed in many American cities, and in Oakland the Ku Klux Klan emerged as a powerful actor in local politics. Twenty years later, Oakland was transformed by the onset of World War II and the mass in-migration of black and white defense workers. Immediately after the war, long-standing tensions between downtown business elites and organized labor escalated into a city-wide confrontation, erupting in the 1946 Oakland General Strike. Finally, the wartime black migrant generations formed much of the communal basis for the local civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s. Racial mobilization continued through the decade in conflicts surrounding welfare programs, urban renewal, and relations with police, and ultimately Oakland emerged as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. With this research, Mr. Rhomberg hopes to achieve three objectives: 1) an analysis of the ways movement conflicts and solidarities have shaped the contours of American class and racial/ethnic group formation; 2) an explanation of the apparent discontinuity between movements based on these social identities; and 3) an assessment of the long-term consequences of such episodes of collective action for our social and political history.

1995-1996

Marya Arfer, History: Healing the Patient, Serving the State: Medical Service and the Great War in Germany and Great Britain 1854-1921 The Hippocratic oath, since antiquity, and the Hague Convention and the Red Cross in modern times, all emphasize the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship and the role of medicine as a service to humanity. Yet when war arises, the state enters as a third party with its own interests that can supersede, dictate, and at the very least, make claims upon the doctor that are not in the best interest of the patient. In times of war, the dyadic relationship between doctor and patient is expanded and radically altered by outside forces. War brings to the fore the conflict between the universal, humanitarian aspects of medicine and a doctor's duty to the nation state. This dissertation examines this conflict by contrasting two very different medical communities, the German and the British. Comparing how German and British medical practitioners constructed personal and professional standards to bridge these seemingly unreconcilable trajectories, Ms. Arfer also considers the larger question which each medical community faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: whom--and in what circumstances--did the doctor or nurse regard as their client: the patient or the state? The research will look at both sides of this dilemma by using two comparative cases that stand at opposite ends of European physicians' involvement with the state. Although British physicians were tied to the government through insurance, welfare, and industrial schemes, they were largely an autonomous body, set apart by the British Medical Association, the private educational system, and fee-for-service payment. The German medical profession was quite different: the public university system, government-sponsored medical associations, and state insurance schemes all created far closer ties between the profession and the state. The social and cultural traditions of these two professions prepared them in distinctly different ways for the dilemmas of war.

1996-1997

Elizabeth Oglesby, Geography: Politics and Agrarian Restructuring: The Reorganization of Work on Guatemalan Sugar Plantations How are we to incorporate the interplay between global market forces and local socio-political contexts in current theories of agrarian transition? Contrary to theories of a "new political economy of agriculture," in which the world of plantations is said to be reconfiguring itself into new social and spatial divisions of labor in the wake of global market shifts, Guatemalan sugar enterprises have doubled production since the 1980s. The explanation for this apparent anomaly lies not in an overview of changing market imperatives; rather, Ms. Oglesby argues that the strategies which have enabled the sugar plantations to survive are responses to local social conflicts and they reflect the exercise of social and political power waged at multiple levels. Specifically, she argues that the ways in which the Guatemalan sugar industry has reorganized and reinserted itself into the global economy reflect particular social relations of production, the playing out of bitter and protracted local conflicts. The example of the Guatemalan sugar plantations points to what is increasingly identified as a neglected dimension in the agrarian restructuring literature, that is, the role of class and local class struggles in shaping trajectories of agrarian change. In the case of Guatemala, the critical difference is the existence of a enduring national agrarian elite able to exercise its power at multiple levels, from influencing state policies to deepening its command over workers and the labor process. Lastly, she will address the question of "agricultural exceptionism" by examining how the efforts of Guatemalan sugar producers to completely rationalize production through systems of industrial labor control are in conflict with their continual reliance on semi-proletarian migrant laborers from the Guatemalan highlands.

1997-1998

Oz Frankel, History: Discovering Society: The Politics, Culture and Rituals of Social Investigations in Britain and the United States, 1830-1870. This dissertation explores the emergence of two essential features of modern political culture: the social "investigation" as a public ritual and the social "report" as a unique type of document. Both were, Mr. Frankel argues, at the center of a new form of politics, based on the accumulation, presentation, publication, analysis and manipulation of facts about society. As he demonstrates, these practices and texts were important vehicles of modernity, by anchoring politics in printed texts, and undermining local ties and intermediate knowledge in favor of national (or international) communities of decision-makers, experts and readers. Drawing upon a range of case studies in both countries, Mr. Frankel follows the rituals of investigative work and the experience of investigators: philanthropic "tourism" to factories, inspection of mines and prison cells, or field trips to remote Indian tribes and the reconstructed South. He also researches the production of reports -- the process through which information was "digested," printed and disseminated. Indeed, at the center of this project is the history of the social report as a distinctive political-discursive form that, he argues, pre-dates and coexists with professional social sciences.