Differences in Workers' Narratives of Contention in Two Central Indian Towns

2011 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manjusha Nair
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Foreign Capital ◽  
Central India ◽  
Industrial Area ◽  
Contract Work ◽  
Contract Workers ◽  
Neoliberal Policies ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
Maoist Movement

AbstractContract work in India, though legally regulated by a 1970 Act, is widespread and mostly unrecognized. With the implementation of neoliberal policies in India since the 1990s, contract work has become the norm. There are now few spaces in which contract workers can get redress through the legal system. Using oral history narratives of contract workers' participation in a labor movement, this article shows how narratives of contention differ in the rendering of agency, success, and future, between one group of contract workers employed in the 1970s in a state-owned mine and another employed in the 1990s in an industrial area owned by private and foreign capital. The evidence for the article is ethnographic, collected in Chhattisgarh region in central India. This article suggests that these workers' narratives show the transformation in practices of citizenship, resistance, and militancy in India over time. Such differences are essential in understanding phenomena like the resurgence of the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh.

scholarly journals DUST FALL RATE AND ITS COMPOSITION IN CHANDRAPUR INDUSTRIAL CLUSTER, CENTRAL INDIA

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 96-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Kamble
Keyword(s):  
Central India ◽  
Sampling Period ◽  
Industrial Cluster ◽  
Ambient Air ◽  
Industrial Area ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Water Soluble ◽  
Fall Rate ◽  
Dust Fall ◽  
Sampling Locations

  Dust is one of the significant air pollutants in ambient air of Chandrapur industrial cluster. A study was carried out to ascertain the dust fall rate in four sampling locations in the Chandrapur industrial cluster of Chandrapur district, central India. The sampling was carried out by dust fall jar method in winter season (2014-2015) and dust fall rate was estimated gravimetrically. Maximum dust fall rate was recorded in Nakoda 246.67 MT sq km-1 month-1 (industrial area, downwind direction), followed by CSTPS colony 171.77 MT sq km-1 month-1 (industrial area, downwind direction) whereas minimum concentration was found in Babupeath 55.54 MT sq km-1 month-1 (residential area, downwind direction) for December-January. Whereas, during sampling period of February-March maximum dust fall rate was observed to be 278.14 MT sq km-1 month-1 at Babupeath (residential area, upwind direction) and minimum dust fall rate was observed at Ballarpur 173.74 MT sq km-1 month-1 (industrial, upwind direction). The results indicated that dust fall rate for the sampling period of December-January in industrial cluster region was higher as compared with residential region. It has been also observed that upwind direction sampling locations had lesser dust fall rate as compared with downwind direction. The composition of dust fall from study area was dominated by water soluble components. Water insoluble components were comprised of inorganic insoluble and volatile matter. Total inorganic component per cent by weight was maximum in dust.International Journal of Environment Volume-4, Issue-3, June-August 2015Page: 96-110

Socialist Modernisation in Mongolia as Narrated after Socialism

Inner Asia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuki Konagaya
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
View Point ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
History Narratives

AbstractIn this article I introduce our collection of oral histories composed of life histories recorded between 2001 and 2006. First, I discuss some devices implemented in the process of collecting life histories, which was to make oral histories 'polyphonic'. I then suggest that oral history always has a 'dual' tense, in that people talk about 'the past' from the view point of 'the present'. This is illustrated by six cases of statesmen narrating their views about socialist modernisation. Finally, using one of the cases, I demonstrate the co-existence of non-official or private opinions along with official opinions about the socialist period in life-history narratives in the post-socialist period. I call this 'ex-post value'.

scholarly journals Examining Supportive Evidence for Psychosocial Theories of Aging within the Oral History Narratives of Centenarians

Societies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Heinz ◽  
Nicholas Cone ◽  
Grace da Rosa ◽  
Alex Bishop ◽  
Tanya Finchum
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Supportive Evidence ◽  
Theories Of Aging ◽  
History Narratives

Spatial and architectural memory in oral histories of working life

Hot Metal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Adams Stein
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Memory ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Industrial Site ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Built Heritage ◽  
Spatial Environment ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
Space Architecture

This chapter recovers the architectural and spatial qualities of so-called ‘ordinary’ factory buildings. Focusing on the modern building that housed the Gov, it explores spatial and architectural memory through an integration of archival research, oral testimony and photographs. This examination is informed by an awareness of how the oral history process contributes to a co-construction of spatial memory, developing between the interviewee and interviewer. Focusing on the built heritage of an industrial site can tell us only limited things about labour, technology and working life, and without oral history narratives, archives and photographs, the remnant built heritage can be historically misleading. Given this book’s broad argument that one can do both – that is, explore material and embodied histories and human stories of working life – it is necessary to consider closely the physical and spatial environment in which the print-workers laboured. This chapter is about those matters of place, space, architecture and embodied experience.

Investing in Independent Contract Work

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Occhiuto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Work Schedule ◽  
Schedule Control ◽  
Independent Contractors ◽  
Taxi Drivers ◽  
Contract Work ◽  
Contract Workers ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Work Arrangement

New York City “yellow” taxi drivers work as independent contractors. Like many independent contract workers, taxi drivers engage in economically precarious work—or work that is economically uncertain, unpredictable, and risky. This article explores how taxi drivers make sense of the economic risks they face each workday. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic data, it finds that taxi drivers made sense of their work by expressing a sense of control over their work schedule, which is significant given the self-conceptions that drivers bring with them to this particular work arrangement. As a result, this sense of schedule control serves as a mechanism for worker investment in the structure of independent contract work.

scholarly journals Oral history as a tool of legal analysis: women in the margins of Israeli society

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-350
Author(s):  
Shimrit Lee
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Legal Attitudes ◽  
Development And Evolution

Researchers in the field of legal consciousness have traditionally relied on surveys, ethnographies, or in-depth interviews to gauge the ways in which individuals engage, avoid, or resist the law. This paper explores how oral history is able to enrich the study of legal consciousness in ways inaccessible to other methodologies. Oral history offers an intertemporal perspective, allowing researchers to trace the development and evolution of legal attitudes and interactions over time. To illustrate the unique function of oral history, I examine the oral history narratives of three Palestinian-Israeli women as they relate their experience with the law over the course of their lifetime. I suggest that combining the oral history technique with the more targeted approach of in-depth interviewing can most aptly capture individual legal consciousness. Research through oral history can further be used in the field of critical legal theory by drawing attention to collective historical grievances of marginalised groups.

Digital Media and the Changing Nature of Labor Action

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faiz Ullah
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Labor Strikes ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Neoliberal Policies

Precarious working conditions resulting from neoliberal policies of the Indian state have placed an overwhelmingly young and mobile industrial workforce under a lot of duress. Traditional forms of organizations and modes of resistance such as labor strikes that were thought to be effective are now increasingly seen as inadequate against the speed and complexity of contemporary production processes, forcing the workers to devise commensurate responses. In this article, I discuss some of the newer strategies of resistance gaining prominence among industrial workers, especially as they are mediated through digital media. Focusing on online self-work underpinning worker agitations, I argue that contemporary labor movement should devise creative strategies using new media tools, to which the millennial worker has unprecedented access, in addition to their traditional rank and file struggles, to counter contemporary challenges.

Negotiating ungovernable spaces between the personal and the political: Oral history and the left in post-war Britain

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Interpersonal Relationship ◽  
The Political ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Post War ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Oral History Interviews

In this article, I consider the value and challenges of using oral history interviews to access and interpret narrative memories of men and women who became active in the left network around Britain’s anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. I focus in-depth on the individual stories of one man and one woman who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined far left Trotskyist organisations. The stories reveal a two-fold search for past revolutionary and current selves. Reading between the shifting layers of past and present, the article will explore what deeper insights interviewing offers into the complex ways in which activists shaped subjectivities both in their far left groups and in the interview itself. It engages with the concept of inter-subjectivity to reflect on the interpersonal relationship between interviewer and interviewee in the oral history encounter. It thus considers the meeting of particular subjectivities and the role they played in shaping the oral history narratives. Through careful attention to my own internal state at the time of interviewing, and to how the interviewees’ stories made me feel, I seek to understand unconsidered political, social and emotional gendered experiences of life on the British far left around 1968.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document