How Will India’s Urban Future Affect Social Identities?

Urbanisation ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devesh Kapur

Urbanisation is as much a social process as it is an economic and spatial process. Cities are sites of social change that offer possibilities for social mobility by disrupting the social stratifications of rural societies. If so, what does India’s rapid urbanisation mean for social identities and social cleavages in the country? The article examines some of the principal mechanisms that will determine whether India’s urban future lies in a burgeoning cosmopolitan sensibility or in sharpening social cleavages. These include new and varied occupations and patterns of employment, the nature of housing and transportation and, crucially, the nature and role of the middle class. If urbanisation’s promise in transforming social identities in India is to be realised, the pattern of urbanisation and urban governance must fundamentally change. India needs many more large cities, which are also better funded and governed, which is unlikely to happen unless the promise of the 74th amendment to the Indian Constitution empowering urban local bodies is realised. The degree to which this will occur will have profound effects on India’s urban trajectory—and with it, the very nature of Indian society and its social cleavages.

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 665-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brück ◽  
Alex Davies

Bronze Age metal objects are widely viewed as markers of wealth and status. Items of other materials, such as jet, amber and glass, tend either to be framed in similar terms as ‘prestige goods’, or to be viewed as decorative trifles of limited research value. In this paper, we argue that such simplistic models dramatically underplay the social role and ‘agentive’ capacities of objects. The occurrence of non-metal ‘valuables’ in British Early Bronze Age graves is well-documented, but their use during the later part of the period remains poorly understood. We will examine the deposition of objects of amber, jet and jet-like materials in Late Bronze Age Britain, addressing in particular their contexts and associations as well as patterns of breakage to consider the cultural meanings and values ascribed to such items and to explore how human and object biographies were intertwined. These materials are rarely found in burials during this period but occur instead on settlements, in hoards and caves. In many cases, these finds appear to have been deliberately deposited in the context of ritual acts relating to rites of passage. In this way, the role of such objects as social agents will be explored, illuminating their changing significance in the creation of social identities and systems of value.


2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Indrė Gražulevičiūtė-Vileniškė ◽  
Vilma Karvelytė-Balbierienė

Rural areas cover the largest part of the territory of Lithuania as well as that of the whole Europe. Rural settlements are also the most abundant category in the settlement system of the country. Therefore, their social, economic, and cultural viability- as well as ecologic sustainability playan important role striving towards the goals of sustainable development. During the last years projects promoting various aspects of sustainability are implemented not only in large cities and towns, but also in smaller municipalities, nevertheless many rural settlements still are not influenced by these trends. The tendency of decrease of the population of the country, emigration, migration of young and qualified persons to larger cities and towns, poverty and unemployment cause the threat to the most fragile elements of the rural settlement system, such as steadings, manor residencies and ethnographic village settlements. In order to stop these processes it is necessary to search for means to sustain the social and economic viability of rural settlements. During the last decade significant role of cultural heritage in implementing strategies of sustainable development was universally recognized. It is acknowledged that sustainable preservation, maintenance, and use of cultural heritage, especially immovable, positively influence the social, economic, cultural and even environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Sustainable development opportunities provided by immovable cultural heritage are essential for small rural settlements which are not distinguished by important natural resources or favorable location. In this instance social and cultural viability is as much essential for preservation of immovable cultural heritage of these settlements, as immovable cultural heritage is essential for sustention of their social and economic viability. Nekilnojamojo kultūros paveldo įtaka darniam kaimo gyvenamųjų vietovių vystymuisi Santrauka Didžiąją Lietuvos, kaip ir visos Europos, teritorijos dalį sudaro kaimo vietovės, o didžiąją dalį gyvenamųjų vietovių – kaimo gyvenamosios vietovės, taigi jų socialinis, eko nominis ir kultūrinis gyvybingumas bei eko loginis tvarumas atlieka lemiamą vaidmenį siekiant šalies darnaus vystymosi tikslų. Pastaraisiais metais darnų vystymąsi skatinantys projektai jau įgyvendinami ne tik didžiuosiuose Lietuvos miestuose, bet ir mažesnėse savivaldybėse, tačiau daugelio kaimo gyvenamųjų vietovių šis procesas kol kas nepaliečia. Bendro šalies gyventojų skaičiaus mažėjimo tendencija, emigracija, jaunų ir kvalifikuo tų žmonių migracija į didžiuosius šalies miestus, skurdas ir nedarbo grėsmė kelia sunykimo grėsmę patiems jautriausiems ir kultūriniu požiūriu vertingiausiems šalies kaimo gyvenamųjų vietovių sistemos elementams, tokiems kaip vienkieminės sodybos, buvusių dvarų ir palivarkų sodybos ar etnografinės kaimų gyvenvietės. Siekiant sustabdyti šiuos neigiamus socialinius, eko nominius bei kultūriniu procesus, būtina ieškoti būdų, kaip užtikrinti kaimo gyvenamųjų vietovių socialinį bei eko nominį gyvybingumą. Pastaraisiais metais pasaulyje vis aiškiau suvokiamas kultūros paveldo vaidmuo darnaus vystymosi kontekste. Visuotinai pripažįstama, jog kultūros paveldo, ypač nekilnojamojo, apsauga, priežiūra bei naudojimas turi teigiamos įtakos darniam vystymuisi socialinėje, eko nominėje, kultūrinėje ir kt. dimensijose. Nekilnojamojo kultūros paveldo teikiamos darnaus vystymosi galimybės itin reikšmingos nedidelėms, išskirtinių gamtinių išteklių neturinčioms bei patogia geografine padėtimi nepasižyminčioms kaimo gyvenamosioms vietovėms. Jų socialinis ir eko nominis gyvybingumas kultūros paveldui išsaugoti yra toks pats svarbus, kaip ir kultūros paveldas socialinio ir eko nominio šių gyvenamųjų vietovių gyvybingumo palaikymu.


Author(s):  
Zachary Henkel ◽  
Jesus Suarez ◽  
Vasant Srinivasan ◽  
Robin R. Murphy

AbstractThis article reports observations from a field study in which medical responders used a social telepresence robot to communicate with participants playing the role of a trapped victim in two search and rescue exercises. The interaction between the robot, victims, and responders suggests the coexistence of two distinct social identities for the robot. One which is a pure conduit for the remote medic, and another in which the robot is treated as an independent social actor. Participants acting as victims demonstrated fluidity in interacting with each identity. The social identify of a robot has important implications for the development of future telepresence systems, particularly in the healthcare domain. Since victims in the exercises gave attention to both the robot and the remote medic, it is possible that the robot’s social actor role may divert attention from the remotely connected individual. The work provides a starting point for investigation of role conflict between a remote medical professional and the robot they are using to assist a patient.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
Devika Mittal

Caste has been a persisting form of stratification that continues to evade equality and social justice in Indian society. Among the routes to tackle the menace of caste has been the education system. In this regard, the National Curriculum Framework 2005 came with a resolute to engage the students with different issues, including that of caste with a critical and empathic eye. This paper locates the challenges to this curriculum by focusing on the pedagogy and reception of the curriculum. In doing so, it argues that the challenges emanate from the social identities and lived realities of the students and the teachers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (48) ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Biljana Mišić Ilić ◽  

The recent pragmatic turn in the research on language contact and linguistic borrowing emphasizes the role of discourse, the speakers’ motivations and the social context, along with the structural, semantic and pragmatic aspects. Following the theoretical framework postulated in Andersen (2014), Andersen et al. (2017), Peterson (2017), Peterson, Beers Fagersten (2018), and focusing on the borrowing of pragmatic markers from English into Serbian, this article discusses several, often interrelated phenomena, which have been identified as associated with pragmatic borrowing. They are the functional shift (in particular, the weakening of the illocutionary force and the narrowing of the scope of use of the borrowed pragmatic items), semantic bleaching, indexing of particular social identities, and licensing of certain linguistic and social behaviours, possibly unsuitable with the use of native Serbian pragmatic markers. The article provides numerous illustrative contextualized examples of English pragmatic markers borrowed into Serbian, extracted from various electronic sources of written Serbian. They include the politeness markers pliz and sori, the expletives shit, fuck and the related forms such as who/what the fuck, wtf, and the abbreviations omg and rip, which are examined in their pragmatic, semantic, and social aspects.


Author(s):  
Kirill Andreevich Cherkess

Youth non-profit organizations are described con-sidering their participation in the modern political life of Russian society and their role in the political socialization of young people. The author raises the problem of formation and development of social elevators in the context of ensuring social mobility of young people, as well as the possibility of access to this tool in modern Russia. As part of the study of youth non-profit organizations, the author gave a charateristics of the organizations operating on a national scale, which have a media reputation, and develop projects focused on the vertical mobility of their participants. Arguments are given in favor of individual and collective social elevators within the framework of youth non-profit organizations. The conclusions presented in the study allow us to eval-uate the activities of youth non-profit organizations as a mechanism for changing the social status of an individual in the stratification structure of society, a channel for vertical social mobility, and prospects for further development of non-profit organizations in this direction.


2021 ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Javier Aranzadi del Cerro

In this article, I approach the role of the firm as a social institution. I will do this by studying the firm from the personal interrelations that make it a social process. In this perspective, the social responsibility of the firm consists of enhancing the entrepreneurship of its employees. Instead of asking about individual creativity in isolation we should consider how to stimulate creativity in personal action, in entrepreneurial culture and in existing firms. In this view there is not only more welfare as we have more things but also as we have more possibilities for action. And I can venture a criterion of social coordination: Coordination improves if the process of creating culturally transmitted personal possibilities for action in firms is extended. The driving force of this social process is entrepreneurship understood as the deployment of the person’s creative capacity in the reality around her. Key words: Firm, Social Institution Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Social coordination. JEL Classification: B53; L20; L26; M14. Resumen: Este artículo presenta el papel de la empresa como institución social. En esta perspectiva, la responsabilidad social de la empresa consiste en fomentar, ampliar y desarrollar la empresarialidad de sus empleados. En lugar de hablar de la creatividad del genio individual deberíamos estudiar cómo estimular la creatividad de las personas dentro de las empresas. De esta manera el bienestar económico no se reduce a la posesión material, sino que el incremento de la riqueza económica se centra en el incremento de posibilidades de acción de las personas. Así, podremos avanzar un criterio de coordinación social. Dicha coordinación mejora si las posibilidades de acción personales ejecutadas en las empresas se amplían. El motor de este proceso social es la empresarialidad entendida como el desarrollo de la ca - pacidad creativa de las personas en el contexto social y cultural en el que viven. Palabras clave: Empresa, Institución Social, Creatividad, Empresarialidad, Ética, Coordinación Social. Clasificación JEL: B53; L20; L26; M14.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-80
Author(s):  
Imelda Chania ◽  
Haiyyu Darman Moenir

This research attempts to describe the role of UNICEF in preventing cases of trafficking of girls in India through the Country Program Action Plan (CPAP) 2013-2017. This is important because of the patriarchal culture in the social fabric of Indian society and the high level of poverty, which drives the trafficking of girls. Besides, this program is also the result of the collaboration between the Indian government and UNICEF in preventing the trafficking of girls in India. This study uses the concept of norm diffusion to answer research questions. A qualitative method with a descriptive-analytical approach applied in this research method. This research shows UNICEF's role in India as a forum to transmit the idea of ​​child protection to Indians, as well as to socialize the beliefs and norms of protecting girls to the Indian government so that rules and policies are in line with the ideas and norms.


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