Borders of the Public Sphere

Sitting in a seminar today on borders and non-state actors, one of many seminars with a similar focus over the last year, while Ian Tyrell has been Harmsworth Professor. Of course there's a lot of room for play with 'borders' as a metaphor. I guess it should be noted that 'borders' in the sense of edges of states are also metaphorical too. Borders are hard to define or pin down, which is kind of the point. But what if you're not interested in borders per se: what studying borders (or borderlands) could possibly do is help to delineate the thing inside them. Is that the point of border studies, or totally the opposite of the point? I don't know!

But anyway, my study of Federalism has developed a sort of theoretical framework around the idea of 'borders' of the public sphere. It started with my interest in "coming of age", the border (duh!) between childhood and adulthood, kind of a (or one of the) border(s) between being outside and inside civil society. My work on education is the descendent of that, and I want to combine that with various different angles on Americans entrance into civil society, the public sphere. This is a border that is permeable, movable, and policed, just like other borders.

Next year I want to work on retirement, considered as the process of leaving the public sphere - either temporarily or permanently, or in a variety of ways. What motives and processes are there for retirement, or for preventing retirement? If people take on responsibilities with coming of age, at what point or in what ways can they lay them down again? Do they in fact have a responsibility to quit, some time - so, when?

There's kind of an obvious bridging issue between these two projects, which is inheritance - that's something I want to look closely at too. But in the seminar, talking about the slave-ships and the contested nature of the sea as a gigantic borderland, I remembered (realised?) that there is another, less temporal, border of the public sphere, which is the points where certain groups or people are excluded from it. I think this is a field that has been ploughed many times in different ways (Roget Smith's Civic Ideals comes to mind, and Carol Smith-Rosenberg's This Violent Empire). Nonetheless, I think there may be interesting points to make, linking to the rest of my argument, about Federalist anti-slavery, as well as Federalist ideas about the poor, women, children, Indians, maybe also the insane, the disabled, and so on. If anything, it seems like an important rounding out of the thesis - and, not insignificantly, a criterion for publication and employment in the US history academy...