Download or read book Undervalued Dissent written by Manjusha Nair and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses two case studies to demonstrate how neoliberal reforms in India have de-democratized labor politics. Historically, the Indian state has not offered welfare and social rights to all of its citizens, yet a remarkable characteristic of its polity has been the ability of citizens to dissent in a democratic way. In Undervalued Dissent, Manjusha Nair argues that this democratic space has been vanishing slowly. Based on extensive fieldwork in Chhattisgarh, a regional state in central India, this bookexamines two different informal workers movements. Informal workers are not part of organized labor unions and make up eighty-five percent of the Indian workforce. The first movement started in 1977 and was a success, while the other movement began in 1989 and still continues today, without success. The workers in both movements had similar backgrounds, skills, demands, and strategies. Nair maintains that the first movement succeeded because the workers contended within a labor regime that allowed space for democratic dissent, and the second movement failed because they contested within a widely altered labor regime following neoliberal reforms, where these spaces of democratic dissent were preempted. The key difference between the two regimes, Nair suggests, is not in the withdrawal of a prolabor state from its protective and regulatory role, as has been argued by many, but rather in the rise of a new kind of state that became functionally decentralized, economically predatory, and politically communalized. These changes, Nair concludes, successfully de-democratized labor politics in India.
Download or read book Undervalued Dissent written by Manjusha Nair and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2018 Global Division Book Award presented by the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Historically, the Indian state has not offered welfare and social rights to all of its citizens, yet a remarkable characteristic of its polity has been the ability of citizens to dissent in a democratic way. In Undervalued Dissent, Manjusha Nair argues that this democratic space has been vanishing slowly. Based on extensive fieldwork in Chhattisgarh, a regional state in central India, this book examines two different informal workers' movements. Informal workers are not part of organized labor unions and make up eighty-five percent of the Indian workforce. The first movement started in 1977 and was a success, while the other movement began in 1989 and still continues today, without success. The workers in both movements had similar backgrounds, skills, demands, and strategies. Nair maintains that the first movement succeeded because the workers contended within a labor regime that allowed space for democratic dissent, and the second movement failed because they contested within a widely altered labor regime following neoliberal reforms, where these spaces of democratic dissent were preempted. The key difference between the two regimes, Nair suggests, is not in the withdrawal of a prolabor state from its protective and regulatory role, as has been argued by many, but rather in the rise of a new kind of state that became functionally decentralized, economically predatory, and politically communalized. These changes, Nair concludes, successfully de-democratized labor politics in India.
Download or read book Bringing Global Governance Home written by Laura A. Henry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's problems--climate change, epidemics, and the actions of multinational corporations--are increasingly global in scale and beyond the ability of any single state to manage. Since the end of the Cold War, states and civil society actors have worked together through global governance initiatives to address these challenges collectively. While global governance, by definition, is initiated at the international level, the effects of global governance occur at the domestic level and implementation depends upon the actions of domestic actors. NGOs act as "mediators" between global and domestic political arenas, translating and adapting global norms for audiences at home. Yet the role of domestic NGOs in global governance has been neglected relatively in previous research. Bringing Global Governance Home examines how NGO engagement at the global level shapes domestic governance around climate change, corporate social responsibility, HIV/AIDS, and sustainable forestry. It does so by comparing domestic reception of global standards and practices in the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). These newly emerging global powers, representing a range of regime types, aspire to become global policy makers rather than mere policy takers and have banded together through periodic summits to devise alternative approaches to economic development and global challenges. Nevertheless, these countries still engage the world primarily through existing global governance institutions that they did not create themselves. Ultimately, this book explores the interplay of international and domestic factors that allow domestically-rooted NGOs to participate globally, and the extent to which that participation shapes their ability to mediate and promote global governance perspectives within the borders of their own countries with varying regimes and state-society relations.
Download or read book Words and Distinctions for the Common Good written by Gabriel Abend and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about it Social scientists do research on a variety of topics—gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in this provocative book, they can’t agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences. Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions it should accept and work with. Second, there’s no fact of the matter about either. Instead, they’re practical reason questions for a community, which aim at epistemically and morally good outcomes. Abend calls on social science communities to work together on their words, distinctions, and classifications. They must make collective decisions about the uses of words, the acceptability of distinctions, and the criteria for assessing both. These decisions aren’t up to individual scholars; the community gets the last word. According to Abend, the common good, justice, and equality should play a significant role in the logic of scientific research. Gabriel Abend is professor of sociology at University of Lucerne and the author of The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton).
Download or read book Sociology of South Asia written by Smitha Radhakrishnan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume moves the study of South Asia to the center of sociological analysis, bringing together recent scholarship across sites in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as in Ethiopia and the USA. This book situates the project of decolonizing the discipline within a rich transnational intellectual legacy and reveals how South Asia offers a uniquely generative site from which to rethink sociological practice. Recognizing local and global influences at their specific sites, the contributing authors highlight the historical ravages of colonialism and imperialism, modernization projects of the postcolonial era, and the kaleidoscopic ways in which gender, caste, class, and sexuality structure everyday life under neoliberalism today. The sociology of South Asia centers the voices and experiences of those marginalized by local and global systems of power in order to produce knowledge that advances interconnected projects of liberation.
Download or read book Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work written by Rina Agarwala and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines how gender shapes the varying and intersecting dynamics of informal/precarious worker struggles in two gender-typed sectors - domestic work and construction. Drawing upon cases across the global North and South, it explores how gender is intertwined into collective organizing efforts, why gender is addressed and to what end.
Download or read book Global Agenda for Social Justice 2 written by Glenn W. Muschert and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Global Agenda for Social Justice provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes practicable international public policy responses to those problems. Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), chapters examine topics such as education, violence, discrimination, substance abuse, public health, and environment. The volume provides recommendations for action by governing officials, policy makers, and the public around key issues of social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates, journalists, and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems, and the pursuit of social justice.
Download or read book Agenda for Social Justice 3 written by Kristen M. Budd and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-08-07 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Agenda for Social Justice 3: Solutions for 2024 provides accessible insights into some of the most pressing social problems and proposes public policy responses to those problems. Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), the book offers recommendations for action by elected officials, policymakers and the public regarding key issues for social justice. Chapters include discussion of social problems related to criminal justice, the economy, food insecurity, education, healthcare, housing and immigration. The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems and the pursuit of social justice.
Download or read book India written by John Harriss and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India has been catapulted to the centre of world attention. Its rapidly growing economy, new geo-political confidence, and global cultural influence have ensured that people across the world recognise India as one of the main sites of social dynamism in the early twenty-first century. In this book, research leaders John Harriss, Craig Jeffrey and Trent Brown explore in depth the economic, social, and political changes occurring in India today, and their implications for the people of India and the world. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters seeks to answer a key question: Is India’s democracy under threat? Can India’s Growth be sustained? How are youth changing India? Drawing on a wealth of scholarly and popular material as well as their own experience researching the country during this period of major transformation, the authors draw the reader into key debates about economic growth, poverty, environmental justice, the character of Indian democracy, rights and social movements, gender, caste, education, and foreign policy. India, they conclude, has undergone some extraordinary and positive changes since the early 1990s but deeply worrying threats remain: increasing authoritarianism, growing inequality, entrenched poverty, and environmental vulnerability. How India responds to these crucial challenges will shape the world’s largest democracy for years to come.
Download or read book Seeking Middle Ground written by Sanjoy Chakravorty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land is a subject of great conflict and debate in India. Over the last decade, it has influenced electoral verdicts and political fortunes and remains one of the most persistent challenges facing the nation. This book argues that the focus on politics and land acquisition has deflected attention from the possibilities of market-oriented approaches that are becoming relevant because of booming, but diverse, land markets. It aims to nudge the discussion towards a better understanding of the complementary strengths of state- and market-led approaches to the many problems of land in rural and urban India. Featuring original essays from leading analysts, this book examines the agrarian crisis and urbanization, laws and policies, displacement and compensation, factories and housing, cooperation and conflict, and other vital issues affecting land at the regional and national level. These multiple lines of enquiry make this book a critical and objective commentary on contemporary India and its ongoing economic, socio-political, and legal struggles with land.
Download or read book Adivasis and the State written by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.
Download or read book Classes of Labour written by Jonathan Parry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity.
Download or read book Sidewalks written by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban sidewalks, critical but undervalued public spaces, have been sites for political demonstrations and urban greening, promenades for the wealthy and the well-dressed, and shelterless shelters for the homeless. On sidewalks, decade after decade, urbanites have socialized, paraded and played, sold their wares, and observed city life. These uses often overlap and conflict, and urban residents and planners try to include some and exclude others. In this first book-length analysis of the sidewalk as a distinct public space, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht examine the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and trace conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. They discuss the characteristics of sidewalks as small urban public spaces, and such related issues as the ambiguous boundaries of their 'public' status, contestation around specific uses, control and regulations, and the implications for First Amendment speech and assembly rights. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples as well as case study research and archival data from five cities - Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle - the authors focus on how the functions and meanings of street activities have shifted and have been negotiated through controls and interventions. They consider sidewalk uses that include the display of individual and group identities (in ethnic and pride parades, for example), the everyday politics of sidewalk access, and larger political actions (including Seattle's 1999 antiglobalization protests), and examine the complex regulatory frameworks that manage street and sidewalk life. The role of urban sidewalks in the early twenty-first century depends, the authors conclude, on what we want from sidewalk life and how we balance competing interests.
Download or read book Democratizing Global Politics written by Rodger A. Payne and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that international institutions are becoming increasingly democratized.
Download or read book Walkable Cities written by Carlos J. L. Balsas and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gold Medalist, 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Transportation (Auto/Aviation/Railroad) Category Co-Winner of the 2020 Global Division Outstanding Book Award presented by the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Walkable precincts have become an important component of urban revitalization on both sides of the Atlantic. In Walkable Cities, Carlos J. L. Balsas examines a range of city scales and geographic settings on three continents, focusing on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), Latin America (Brazil and Mexico), and the United States (Phoenix and New York City). He explains how this "pedestrianization of Main Street" approach to central locations (downtowns and midtowns) has contributed to strengthening various urban functions, such as urban vitality, pedestrian and bicyclist safety, tourism, and more. However, it has also put pressure on less affluent, peripheral, and fragile areas due to higher levels of consumption and waste generation. Balsas calls attention to the need to base urban revitalization interventions on more spatially and socially just interventions coupled with sustainable consumption practices that do not necessarily entail high growth levels, but instead aim to improve the quality of city life.
Download or read book Literature and Dissent in Milton s England written by Sharon Achinstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-20 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Know Your Price written by Andre M. Perry and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing perceptions about the worth of African Americans and their communities Know Your Price establishes new means of determining value of Black communities. The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities, stemming from America's centuries-old history of slavery, racism, and other state-sanctioned policies like redlining have tangible, far-reaching, and negative economic and social impacts. Rejecting policies shaped by flawed perspectives, the book gives fresh insights on these impacts and provides a new value paradigm to limit them. In the book, noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes readers on a guided tour of five Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. Perry begins the tour in his hometown of Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh that, unlike its much larger neighbor, is struggling and failing to attract new jobs and industry. Perry gives an overview of Black-majority cities and spotlights four where he has a deep connection to--Detroit, New Orleans, Birmingham and Washington, D.C.--providing an intimate look at the assets residents should demand greater value from. Know Your Price demonstrates through rigorous research and thorough analysis the worth of Black people's intrinsic strengths, real property, and traditional institutions. All of these assets are means of empowerment, as Perry argues for shifting away from simplified notions of equality and moving towards maximizing equity.