By Alexander Obermüller
Securing emergency medical care, firefighting and other public emergency services has been a continuous challenge for towns and cities since the end of the 19th century. By taking us to turn-of-the-century Vienna and its Voluntary Ambulance Association, Alexander Obermüller traces the history of these challenges, examining the class status of volunteers and asking if voluntary services always had to be unpaid. Read more in our recent post.
By Maria Framke
What motives led to voluntary humanitarian aid by Indians during the two world wars? What possibilities for voluntary engagement or charitable giving existed under colonial power relations, which often confounded or even obstructed those efforts? Historian Maria Framke, who specializes in modern South Asia, explores these questions in this blog post.
By Jürgen Martschukat
Since the seventeenth century, the idea of the human being as a self-owning, autonomous, voluntarily acting agent has become deeply embedded in liberal political thought. In the neoliberal age of the last fifty years or so, this notion has shaped political and everyday action more than ever before, becoming even more profoundly entrenched in the concept of ideal subjecthood. However, this so-called Lockean subject has come in for criticism…
