Rachel Sturman
Biographic Data
| ID | 214013 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Sturman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Sturman |
| SIGNATURE | STURMAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bowdoin College |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-5086-1847 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Materializing Land
In the current context, marked by relentless natural resource extraction, environmental risk, and innovative instruments of financialization, land is being thought anew. This essay introduces the special section on “Materializing Land” through an examination of three critical frameworks that the essays open up and that each pose a core question about processes of abstraction and materialization that have been integral to situating land within glo…
Technologies of a humble natural resource
Like many other natural resources, sand has become integral to technologies that symbolize modernity and development, but that depend upon an imperative of low cost. In India, sand began to be commoditized in the early twentieth century as an input in a powerful new building technology, reinforced cement concrete (RCC). With the expansion of cities and major infrastructure projects since independence and especially since the 1990s, sand mining ha…
Skill as Problem-Space in the Contemporary Mumbai Construction Industry
The ubiquity of building construction in contemporary Mumbai is transforming everyday urban life and landscape. This article examines one facet of the building construction industry: its organization of labor through distinctions of skill. Distinctions among skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled labor shape the everyday work of building, yet these terms only partially map onto hierarchies of embodied capacities and know-how. At least two vectors ar…
R ohit D e . A People’s Constitution
In this eloquent and far-reaching book, Rohit De offers an important intervention into legal history while also providing a new understanding of the understudied subject of India’s Constitution. A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018) shifts our gaze from the courtroom and its legal specialists, showing how, in the first decades after independence, the Indian Constitution took shape in the minds of everyday…
Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes
Map
From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to British understandings of Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyzes the system of personal law in colonial India through a reexamination of its emphasis on women’s rights. Foc…
The Government of Social Life in Colonial India
From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it c…
Gender and the Human
This forum offers critical perspectives on the intersection between gender and the politics of the human. The three articles that comprise it showcase dilemmas that have produced an impasse in feminist politics, as well as the possibilities that feminist analysis offers for rethinking the politics of humanity. The introduction traces the historical intertwining of gender and the human, beginning with the paradox of Enlightenment universalism and …
Specters of Mother India
Subject Siam
Reviewed by: Subject Siam: Family, Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand by Tamara Loos Rachel Sturman Subject Siam: Family, Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. By Tamara Loos. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Tamara Loos’ Subject Siam offers an engaging, multifaceted study of the role of law, and especially family law, in the forging of Thai modernity. Law in this account provides a critical framework that enables Loos to interve…
Property and Attachments
Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third wa…
The Government of Social Life in Colonial India
From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it c…
Property and Attachments
Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third wa…
Gender and the Human
This forum offers critical perspectives on the intersection between gender and the politics of the human. The three articles that comprise it showcase dilemmas that have produced an impasse in feminist politics, as well as the possibilities that feminist analysis offers for rethinking the politics of humanity. The introduction traces the historical intertwining of gender and the human, beginning with the paradox of Enlightenment universalism and …
Property and Attachments
Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third wa…
Subject Siam
Reviewed by: Subject Siam: Family, Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand by Tamara Loos Rachel Sturman Subject Siam: Family, Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. By Tamara Loos. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Tamara Loos’ Subject Siam offers an engaging, multifaceted study of the role of law, and especially family law, in the forging of Thai modernity. Law in this account provides a critical framework that enables Loos to interve…
Specters of Mother India
Gender and the Human
This forum offers critical perspectives on the intersection between gender and the politics of the human. The three articles that comprise it showcase dilemmas that have produced an impasse in feminist politics, as well as the possibilities that feminist analysis offers for rethinking the politics of humanity. The introduction traces the historical intertwining of gender and the human, beginning with the paradox of Enlightenment universalism and …
Map
From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to British understandings of Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyzes the system of personal law in colonial India through a reexamination of its emphasis on women’s rights. Foc…
The Government of Social Life in Colonial India
From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it c…
Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes
Skill as Problem-Space in the Contemporary Mumbai Construction Industry
The ubiquity of building construction in contemporary Mumbai is transforming everyday urban life and landscape. This article examines one facet of the building construction industry: its organization of labor through distinctions of skill. Distinctions among skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled labor shape the everyday work of building, yet these terms only partially map onto hierarchies of embodied capacities and know-how. At least two vectors ar…
R ohit D e . A People’s Constitution
In this eloquent and far-reaching book, Rohit De offers an important intervention into legal history while also providing a new understanding of the understudied subject of India’s Constitution. A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018) shifts our gaze from the courtroom and its legal specialists, showing how, in the first decades after independence, the Indian Constitution took shape in the minds of everyday…
Technologies of a humble natural resource
Like many other natural resources, sand has become integral to technologies that symbolize modernity and development, but that depend upon an imperative of low cost. In India, sand began to be commoditized in the early twentieth century as an input in a powerful new building technology, reinforced cement concrete (RCC). With the expansion of cities and major infrastructure projects since independence and especially since the 1990s, sand mining ha…
Materializing Land
In the current context, marked by relentless natural resource extraction, environmental risk, and innovative instruments of financialization, land is being thought anew. This essay introduces the special section on “Materializing Land” through an examination of three critical frameworks that the essays open up and that each pose a core question about processes of abstraction and materialization that have been integral to situating land within glo…
Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Colonialism (3 works) · Geography (3 works) · History (3 works) · History (3 works) · Politics (3 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (2 works)