scholarly journals People’s Relational Agency in Confronting Exclusion in Rural South India

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arora, Saurabh Arora, Saurabh ◽  
Ajit Menon ◽  
M. Vijayabaskar ◽  
Divya Sharma ◽  
V. Gajendran
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Rural India ◽  
Relational Agency ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Religion And Ethnicity ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
Relations Of Power

Social exclusion is considered critical for understanding poverty, livelihoods, inequality and political participation in rural India. Studies show how exclusion is produced through relations of power associated with gender, caste, religion and ethnicity. Studies also document how people confront their exclusion. We use insights from these studies – alongside science and technology studies – and rely on life history narratives of ‘excluded’ people from rural Tamil Nadu, to develop a new approach to agency as constituted by two contrasting ways of relating: control and care. These ways of relating are at once social and material. They entangle humans with each other and with material worlds of nature and technology, while being mediated by structures such as social norms and cultural values. Relations of control play a central role in constituting exclusionary forms of agency. In contrast, relations of care are central to the agency of resistance against exclusion and of livelihood-building by the ‘excluded’. Relations can be transformed through agency in uncertain ways that are highly sensitive to trans-local contexts. We offer examples of policy-relevant questions that our approach can help to address for apprehending social exclusion in rural India and elsewhere.

Dalit Women and Water: Availability, Access and Discrimination in Rural India

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swarup Dutta ◽  
Ishita Sinha ◽  
Adya Parashar
Keyword(s):  
Drinking Water ◽  
Physical Abuse ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Water Availability ◽  
Rural India ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Limited Access ◽  
Common Resources ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Dalit Women

The present study identifies the multiplicity of issues and challenges faced by dalit women in accessing water from common, often distant sources of water, across five Indian states. Their reality of poor availability of drinking water was worsened by limited access to common resources due to their caste identity. On account of their social exclusion, dalit women suffer from physical as well as mental anguish. Discrimination against them is rampant on account of untouchability, and verbal and physical abuse accompanied with violence, which is a very real part of their everyday lives.

Battling the Buddha of Love

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Marie Falcone
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Rural India ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Resistance Movement

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

Conclusions

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
Juliette R. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Potential Application ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Practitioner Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Fitness For Purpose ◽  
Relational Agency ◽  
Performance Constraints ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Administration Of Justice

The Conclusions discuss the theoretical models put forward in this interdisciplinary practitioner research project on outsourced legal translation, and their potential application in order to enhance the fitness-for-purpose of translated texts. Emphasis is placed on the need for comprehensive briefing due to serious ensuing risks with consequent effects on the outcomes of litigation, the proper administration of justice, and the fight against crime. A review of legal translation performance constraints on textual agency and relational agency that have emerged from the data is provided. A number of avenues for future research are sketched out, and the importance of translator professionalization is foregrounded, as is bidirectional dialogue between clients and translation practitioners, in the performance of what, in the light of this extensive market survey, proves to be an arduous and highly sensitive task.

Impact of Climate Change on Women in Rural India

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nibedita Khuntia
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Rural India ◽  
Future Plan ◽  
Impact Of Climate Change ◽  
Women Groups ◽  
Secondary Data Sources ◽  
Work Done

This article analyses the disproportionate impact of climate change on women residing in rural parts of India. Using secondary data sources and other literature, it argues how women are at higher risk socially, economically and on account of health. However, despite this vulnerability, women are important change makers and are leading the fight against climate change at the grassroot level. It highlights the work done by two such women groups based in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. It also briefly comments on the future plan of action to create a gender-sensitive approach to mitigating climate change.

scholarly journals Witch Hunting: A Form of violence against Dalit Women in India

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Tanvi Yadav
Keyword(s):  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Rural India ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Cultural Violence ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Legal Mechanism ◽  
Women In India

Abstract The Caste system is a social reality in India, despite the Constitutional rights of equality, protection from discrimination, and the ban on untouchability, the discrimination against Dalit communities or Schedule Castes, still persists. Outside the caste and within the caste, Dalit women are placed at the very bottom in gender hierarchy, which caused double discrimination based on caste-and-gender, and violence against Dalit women. Declaring a Dalit woman as Witch, accuse her of witchcraft and persecute her as witch-hunting, is one of the most common weapons, in a patriarchal society of rural India, to maintain the suppression against Dalit women. Grabbing property, political jealousy and personal conflicts, getting sexual benefits or settling the old scores have been found the most common reasons to declare a woman as a witch and most of the victims are notices as single, old or widow. Victims of witch-hunting face physical, economic and cultural violence from social exclusion to burning alive. This paper analyses the violence against Dalit women in the form of witch-hunting and the failures of legal mechanism and judicial institutions in eradicating the menace of witch-hunting.

scholarly journals Slipping on Banana Skins and Falling Through Bars: “True” Comedy and the Comic Character

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-121
Author(s):  
Jack Black
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Insight Into

From Basil Fawlty, The Little Tramp and Frank Spencer; to Jim Carey, Andy Kaufman and Rowan Atkinson… comedy characters and comic actors have proved useful lenses for exploring – and exposing – humor’s cultural and political significance. Both performing as well as chastising cultural values, ideas and beliefs, the comic character gives a unique insight into latent forms of social exclusion that, in many instances, can only ever be approached through the comic form. It is in examining this comic form that this paper will consider how the ‘comedy character’ presents a unique, subversive significance. Drawing from Lacanian conceptions of the subject and television ‘sitcom’ examples, the emancipatory potential of the comedy character will be used to criticize the predominance of irony and satire in comic displays. Indeed, while funny, it will be argued that such comic examples underscore a deprivative cynicism within comedy and humor. Countering this, it will be argued that a Lacanian conception of the subject can profer a comic efficacy that not only reveals how our social orders are inherently inconsistent and open to subversive redefinition, but that these very inconsistencies are also echoed in the subject, and, in particular, the ‘true comedy character’.

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