scholarly journals Behl, Natasha. Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India. Oxford University Press, 2019.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-20
Author(s):  
Noreen Naseer

Natasha Behl’s Gendered Citizenship is a fresh and rich contribution to the emerging literature of gender studies. She focuses on the gender-aspect of the concept of citizenship, especially in the context of Indian democracy. She juxtaposes the high claims of democracy of the Indian state with the local realities of culture, religion, and caste system. Beginning with a cold-blooded incident of rape of a young woman traveling on a local bus, Behl employs the ethnographic methodological approach to demonstrate the lived experiences, meaning-making processes, and self-reflexivity of women in the public spheres of the country.

2019 ◽  
pp. 259-280
Author(s):  
Mridu Rai

Mridu Rai discusses the location of Kashmiri Muslims in India after the BJP’s electoral win in 2014, identifying how Kashmiri Muslims are made to serve as contrapuntal symbols for constructing a mythical Hindu nation – of terrorist violence, illegitimate religious impulses and sedition. Rai argues that the evocatory purpose Kashmiris serve is so essential to Hindutva that it dissipates the possibility of resolving the Kashmir question under the Modi-led BJP. The preference for militaristic modes of dominance has allowed India to eschew its responsibility of administering Kashmir through democratic engagement and of seeking negotiated settlement with all segments of the public. This governance confines Kashmiris to a reality of daily atrocities, including shootings, mass graves and gendered violence. The study of the mistreatment of Kashmiris by the Indian state and Hindu nationalists is important, as similar repressive strategies are being deployed in the heartland of India against other minority groups.


2019 ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Natasha Behl

Chapter 3 focuses attention on women’s unequal experience of the Indian state through an examination of the debates surrounding the 2012 gang rape. Chapter 3 examines both the progressive political opening and the retrenchment of patriarchal norms following Jyoti Singh’s murder, and argues that this opening and retrenchment are emblematic of the Indian state’s radical promise of equality and its horrific failure to achieve this equality. An analysis of politicians’ responses demonstrates how gendered norms operate to exclude women in the name of inclusion. This analysis highlights the difficulty of eradicating gendered violence through legal reform, demonstrates the unpredictability of the political process, and shows how gendered norms operate in the public sphere to undermine and frustrate progressive change. The chapter outlines the difficulty of turning to the law as a liberatory strategy in a liberal democracy and shifts attention to other spheres of life as potential sources for more egalitarian social relations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Wright ◽  
Ruth Patrick

Punitive welfare conditionality, combining tough sanctions with minimal self-directed support, is a defining feature of contemporary UK working age social security provision. This approach has been justified by policy makers on the basis that it will increase the numbers in paid employment, and thereby offer savings for the public purse that are also beneficial for individuals who are expected to be healthier and better off financially as a result. In this article, we aggregate two qualitative longitudinal studies (Welfare Conditionality, 2014–17; and Lived Experience, 2011–16) that document lived experiences of claiming benefits and using back-to-work support services. In both studies and over time, we find, contrary to policy expectations, that coercion, including sanctions, was usually experienced as unnecessary and harmful and that poverty was prevalent, both in and out of work, tended to worsen and pushed many close to destitution. Conditionality governed encounters with employment services and, perversely, appeared to impede, rather than support, transitions into employment for participants in both studies. These constitute ‘shared typical’ aspects of lived experiences of welfare conditionality. We propose Combined Study Qualitative Longitudinal Research as a new methodological approach to extend inference beyond the usual study-specific confines of qualitative generalisation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 316-328
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Susca

Contemporary communicative platforms welcome and accelerate a socio-anthropological mutation in which public opinion (Habermas, 1995) based on rational individuals and alphabetic culture gives way to a public emotion whose emotion, empathy and sociality are the bases, where it is no longer the reason that directs the senses but the senses that begin to think. The public spheres that are elaborated in this way can only be disjunctive (Appadurai, 2001), since they are motivated by the desire to transgress the identity, political and social boundaries where they have been elevated and restricted. The more the daily life, in its local intension and its global extension, rests on itself and frees itself from projections or infatuations towards transcendent and distant orders, the more the modern territory is shaken by the forces that cross it and pierce it. non-stop. The widespread disobedience characterizing a significant part of the cultural events that take place in cyberspace - dark web, web porn, copyright infringement, trolls, even irreverent ... - reveals the anomic nature of the societal subjectivity that emerges from the point of intersection between technology and naked life. Behind each of these offenses is the affirmation of the obsolescence of the principles on which much of the modern nation-states and their rights have been based. Each situation in which a tribe, cloud, group or network blends in a state of ecstasy or communion around shared communications, symbols and imaginations, all that surrounds it, in material, social or ideological terms, fades away. in the air, being isolated by the power of a bubble that in itself generates culture, rooting, identification: transpolitic to inhabit


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 638-657
Author(s):  
James N. Druckman ◽  
Katherine Ognyanova ◽  
Matthew A. Baum ◽  
David Lazer ◽  
Roy H. Perlis ◽  
...  

Concerns about misperceptions among the public are rampant. Yet, little work explores the correlates of misperceptions in varying contexts – that is, how do factors such as group affiliations, media exposure, and lived experiences correlate with the number of misperceptions people hold? We address these questions by investigating misperceptions about COVID-19, focusing on the role of racial/ethnic, religious, and partisan groups. Using a large survey, we find the number of correct beliefs held by individuals far dwarfs the number of misperceptions. When it comes to misperceptions, we find that minorities, those with high levels of religiosity, and those with strong partisan identities – across parties – hold a substantially greater number of misperceptions than those with contrasting group affiliations. Moreover, we show other variables (e.g., social media usage, number of COVID-19 cases in one’s county) do not have such strong relationships with misperceptions, and the group-level results do not reflect acquiescence to believing any information regardless of its truth value. Our results accentuate the importance of studying group-level misperceptions on other scientific and political issues and developing targeted interventions for these groups.


2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.


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