Publication Type: Session Presentation
Abstract: French cinema has often portrayed France’s contemporary social climate, from La Haine to Exils, presenting a fragmented French youth in the midst of redefining its identities, oscillating between revolt and desire for integration in a changing culture. This session helps teachers engage students with these delicate topics, often misrepresented in American media.

Publication Type: Session Presentation
Abstract: This session, conducted in French, explores social aspects of contemporary France as they have been depicted in the media, songs, and films. Topics include the marginalized ghetto populations ("banlieusards") and issues pertaining to the educational system, such as "laïcité," the Muslim scarf, and academic achievement. Handouts will be provided.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the long-distance or "extra-systemic" political participation of immigrant communities in Europe. As opposed to primordialist, statist-institutionalist or globalization explanations for transnational political activities, the paper proposes a model of transnational political mobilization by non-state political entrepreneurs to account for this phenomenon. Transnational mobilization by non-state political entrepreneurs involves the formation of a transnational constituency, the extraction of material resources from that constituency, and the building of transnational networks and organizations. Two case studies of transnational mobilization are examined: the Algerian FLN in France and the Kurdish PKK in Germany. The paper demonstrates the utility of building a bridge between the world systems literature on global migration processes and the state-based literature on immigrant incorporation and participation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper investigates the origins of national consumer protection regulation in France and Germany during the formative period from 1970 to 1985. Consumer protection appeared at the time as an entirely new area of public policy for both countries. Three different models for consumer protection ? information, protection, and negotiation ? set the terms of an intensive political conflict over the appropriate regulatory response. What strategy was eventually adopted depended on the way in which consumer and producer interests were organized in the country. As a result of this conflict, Germany adopted the information strategy of protection, in which consumers use accurate product information to make wise product choices. France adopted the protection strategy, in which state policy and legal norms work to insulate consumers entirely from product-related risk. The paper suggests ways in which these different policies may drive divergent product market strategies in the two countries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, modern print media shape our collective imagination as a political community, then feminist press organs may be understood as contributing to a--politically potent--"imaginary sisterhood" (Anderson 1983; Werbner 1999). This conference paper examines how the feminist press made reproductive freedom a mobilizing issue for the feminist movement in postwar France. Particularly, it elucidates how its political contestation over "body politics"--the regulation of bodies for social purposes--has become so crucial for modern theories of citizenship rights.
In the French case, women sought recognition of their civil status throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they did not receive full citizenship rights until after World War II. Crucially, for French women, the winning of formal political rights, i.e. full active citizenship, was a precondition for claiming and obtaining equality in civil rights, including the control over one's body (Batiot 1986; Duchen 1986, 1994; McBride Stetson 1987; Vogel 1988; Mossuz-Lavau 1991; Picq 1993). This study examines the political struggle over abortion exerted by the feminist press, which developed during the height of the women's liberation movement (M.L.F.) in the 1970s.
As press organs of a larger social movement, these journals negotiated a social space for women between traditional feminine expectations and the promise of consumer culture. A close reading of these journals reveals women's specific need for information and expression on the controversial issue of reproductive rights, on the one hand, and their contestatory position in the political struggle over abortion on the other. This paper suggests that, like their commercial counterparts, these journals harbor an explicit ideological dimension. As the cornerstone of an autonomous democratic movement, the editors and authors of the feminist reviews created and "imagined sisterhood" as they wanted to represent and to speak for all "women."