Whose Country Is Digital India? Unpacking Dominant Power Relations Mediated by the Digital India Campaign

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 164-189
Author(s):  
Anubha Singh
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
The Status ◽  
Empty Signifier ◽  
Individual Issue

Abstract This article unpacks the material and cultural implications of the Digital India programme’s rhetoric of social transformation and digital empowerment by asking the question ‘How and whom does digital empowerment seek to empower?’ Through an analysis of the discourse on the Digital India website, this article concludes that the recurring depoliticization and dehistoricization of social differences deliberately make the programme’s intended beneficiaries vague. By flattening structural differences among caste, class, gender, and ethnicity, Digital India’s technopolitics recasts empowerment as an individual issue and naturalizes the myths of meritocracy, castelessness, and genderlessness. Furthermore, in a Hindutva regime, Digital India’s depoliticized technopolitics becomes a tool for managing citizenship that reinforces the status quo. This article argues that, by declining to define a process of empowerment that considers cultural complexities and structural hegemonies, Digital India’s call for digital empowerment remains an empty signifier.

Traditions and Transformations

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Regina Marler
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Female Role ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
The Status ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Octavia Hill

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

scholarly journals Do non-governmental organizations bring change or maintain the status quo in times of crisis? A case study of the Marikana massacre in South Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malose Langa ◽  
Steven Rebello ◽  
Linda Harms-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Psychosocial Interventions ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Humanitarian Assistance ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Crisis Events ◽  
The Status

Abstract This article reflects on the Marikana massacre of August 2012, subsequent violent strikes and responses by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a case study, and provides an analysis about whether these interventions bring transformative change or maintain the status quo in times of crisis. Events associated with Marikana are seen to be embedded in social structures of the time and part of deeper frictions and fractures of social transformation. The role that NGOs might play in this context must be interrogated as to their facilitation or hinderance of such social transformation. Interviews were conducted with representatives of NGOs intervening in Marikana that provided services of humanitarian assistance, and legal and psychosocial interventions and with mine workers and residents of Marikana about their experiences and views of these services. Findings from the study are illustrative of how NGOs were not primarily motivated to bring about lasting, transformative change but rather attempted to address immediate or short-term needs which, while important, did not account for underlying causes of the crises that they set out to address. Both ideological underpinnings of NGOs and structural conditions produced by state and capital impact on outcomes of interventions. Given these limitations, it is argued that there is a need for deep critical interrogation through praxis, for NGOs to intervene differently in times of crisis to bring ‘real’ change and transformation in the lives of those who are marginalized.

Old Tools and New Movements in Latin America: Political Science as Gatekeeper or Intellectual Illuminator?

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara C. Motta
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
State Form

AbstractThis article argues that social democratic and orthodox Marxist conceptualizations of politics are unable to “engage in solidarity” with many new forms of Latin American popular politics. Such movements challenge the politics of representation, the market economy, and the state form by reinventing territorialized experiments in self-government, which politicize place, subjectivities, and social relations. Developing a critique of these frameworks of political analysis, this article argues that conceptual categories combining the insights of autonomist or open Marxism and poststructuralism and the critical reflections and theorizations by Latin America's newest social movements enable a deeper engagement with such movements. This critique challenges academics committed to progressive social change to reexamine long-held notions about the nature and agents of social transformation and the epistemological categories that orient our research. It argues that if we fail to do this, then we risk becoming gatekeepers of the status quo.

Victimization and Asymmetric Gendered Power Relations: A Linguistic Investigation of Harassment Complaints Registered in Lahore

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Umara Shaheen ◽  
María Isabel Maldonado García
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
The Status ◽  
Gendered Power ◽  
Status Of Women

This paper presents an investigation of the linguistic choices employed in harassment complaints submitted to the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women and four police stations located in Lahore during 2017-2018. In a patriarchal society such as Pakistan’s, where a woman’s honour epitomizes the whole family’s honour (Atakav 2015, 52; Sharlach 2008, 96), sexual harassment, a stigmatizing issue is hardly ever reported (Ali and Kramar 2015, 241). This paper, using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis’s (Lazar, 2005, 2007) theoretical perspective of asymmetrical gendered power relations mirrored in harassment complaints, explores the form and severity of harassing practices which had prompted women in Lahore to report them. In order to unwrap the complex interplay of gender and power, linguistic features of the complaints are examined through Fairclough’s text analysis (1989, 1992), the first dimension of the 3D model which explores lexical choices such as adjectives, adverbs, culturally informed metaphors and metaphorical extensions, which are embedded in grammatical structure exemplified through transitivity analysis. In this paper, harassment complaints are analysed as important documents invested with socio-cultural gender ideologies that underline the need for dismantling gender oppression to achieve social transformation.

scholarly journals Female slam poets of francophone Africa: spirited words for social change

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 742-767
Author(s):  
Mirjam de Bruijn ◽  
Loes Oudenhuijsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
Popular Knowledge ◽  
The Status ◽  
Gendered Power

AbstractSlam poets in Africa are part of an emerging social movement. In this article, the focus is on women in this upcoming slam movement in francophone Africa. For these women, slam has meant a change in their lives as they have found words to describe difficult experiences that were previously shrouded in silence. Their words, performances and engaged actions are developing into a body of popular knowledge that questions the status quo and relates to the ‘emerging consciousness’ in many African urban societies of unequal, often gendered, power relations. The women who engage in slam have thus become a voice for the emancipation of women in general.

Political realism and moral corruption

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison McQueen
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Realism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and see realism as an antidote to this problem. Third, it proposes that Carr and Morgenthau can help us to recognise the particular ways in which realist arguments may nonetheless rationalise existing power relations and affirm the status quo by default, if not by design.

scholarly journals European Consensus between Strategy and Principle

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens T. Theilen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
European Consensus ◽  
European Court ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Critical Account

This study offers a critical account of the reasoning employed by the European Court of Human Rights, particularly its references to European consensus. Based on an in-depth analysis of the Court’s case-law against the backdrop of human rights theory, it will be of interest to both practitioners and theorists. While European consensus is often understood as providing an objective benchmark within the Court’s reasoning, this study argues to the contrary that it forms part of the very structures of argument that render human rights law indeterminate. It suggests that foregrounding consensus and the Court’s legitimacy serves to entrench the status quo and puts forward novel ways of approaching human rights to enable social transformation.

scholarly journals GÊNERO E SOCIEDADE: EXPLICAÇÕES DE SUAS RELAÇÕES E EFEITOS EDUCACIONAIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Alencar Zidani Manuel da Silva ◽  
Raul Aragão Martins
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Educational Organization ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship

This article works on Vygotsky’s (1987) conceptions of the relationship between thought and language from a perspective of influence on cognitive development and the formation of the view on gender proposed by the school. In this sense, we also noted the construction of stereotypes understood by Brunneli (2016) as major influences on social behavior and discourse, relating, from this perspective, and being able to explain actions and interactions that are studied by social psychology. Nevertheless, the studies of Cunha and Góes (2002), Xavier, Ribeiro and Noronha (1994) were used to understand how the formation of these stereotypes that were disseminated influenced the educational organization and cooperated to maintain the status quo, that is, inequality and its justifications. Also, to understand the new questions that arise about sexuality, it was necessary to analyze the studies of Louro (1997) and Oliveira e Santos (2012) to understand these new dynamics and perspectives that arise to think about a school concerned with the present, leaving aside your worries about yesterday. Therefore, it was perceived how these relations coexisted and fostered a social organization based on a purpose not only to justify hierarchical power relations, but also to maintain them using strategic sectors such as education and, consequently, the school.

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