Search

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper describes the shared ideas around feminism and social work profession. Based on the theoretical discourses, it attempts to contextualise the practice framework for feminist social work. It seeks to present few efficacious initiatives in the form of case studies from Indian grassroots and highlight various success stories based on social work practice from a feminist perspective. The central idea of the paper is to explore learning insights from the field based on successful practice based models and how these can be amalgamated to develop an indigenous framework for the practice of feminist social work in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike prevailing research methodologies in the interdisciplinary field of global health, feminist methodologies allow researchers to unsettle the premises and assumptions of the field. This paper describes how we mobilize transnational feminist ethnography in our research on HIV in India and postabortion care in Senegal. Transnational feminist perspectives enable us to re-embed HIV prevention and post-abortion care in the politics of gender and sexuality and in postcolonial histories of health governance. They consider the role of gender and sexuality not just in terms of gendered health inequalities, but also in terms of how global health problems are defined, managed, measured, and contested. We outline how our projects put this lens into practice by pushing the methodological boundaries of time, scale, and scope and through a historicized, multisited, and multiscalar approach that triangulates multiple sources of data. Feminist ethnography requires that we turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, reflecting on multiple and shifting personal and professional positionalities during and after fieldwork and our ethical commitments to our interlocutors. While acknowledging the significant personal, institutional, and professional challenges of using feminist methodologies, especially given the dominant modes of research in global health, we urge greater consideration, among both advanced and early scholars, of the possibilities they offer for studying global health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the empowerment literature, "freedom of movement" or "mobility" are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self‐help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft‐lauded benefit. This has been especially pronounced as the empowerment agenda's prerogative to collectively transform power structures became co‐opted by a neoliberal focus on fostering responsible financial subjects with entrepreneurial savvy. In this paper, I draw on multi‐year ethnographic research of women's SHG interventions in eastern and central India to critically explore the ways different mobile practices intersect with empowerment goals. I contend it is necessary to examine mobility as more than physical movement and also to analyse it as a meaning‐laden and embodied practice intimately bound up in the neoliberal development agenda. Using this analytic, I find that although newfound mobility is often experienced positively by women, it is far from "free," and remains embedded in power relations where women continue to engage on unfavourable terms – exemplified in women's inability to leisurely tour/wander. I conclude by reflecting on how empowerment interventions might more productively engage mobility less as a practice of increased economic and political participation and more as a site where women can experiment with new forms of being. Women's spatial mobility is seen as central to empowerment, yet remains undertheorised in critical and mainstream literature. This paper builds on scholarship examining how women navigate normative spaces of development through creative forms of self‐fashioning by analytically unpacking how mobility is central to these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young caste‐class privileged gender justice workers in Delhi navigate several relations of power—with Euro‐American feminisms, and with less privileged feminisms and recipients of development work within India. Their experiences reveal that decolonial politics in India cannot be conceptualised without consideration of other axes of inequality including caste and religion. There is thus a need to broaden decolonial and intersectional analyses to include multiple spatial scales, from the transnational to the most granular interpretations of the local. By bringing intersectional analyses into greater dialogue with postcolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates that patterns of "outsourcing patriarchy" are observable at many scales, and that these patterns at different scales are co‐produced, each in turn shaping the other. Such a framework also explains how young caste‐class privileged gender justice workers outsource patriarchy and reproduce "mainstream" feminisms even as they seek to avoid doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the various ways in which organizational structures of the corporate university are imbricated in racial hierarchies underlying global immigration, with particular reference to non-immigrant precarity in US academia. Moving beyond critiques focused on curriculum and pedagogy, I argue that as an epitomizing product of capitalism, the corporate university must be dismantled to decenter global knowledge creation itself. We must view the generation of critical social science research in context of interactions between the colonizing structure of global immigration laws and Global North's academic institutional hierarchies. The paper begins by theoretically framing corporate university, its co-option of diversity and equality as the cornerstone of contemporary neoliberalism and its entanglements with contemporary immigration regimes such that it emerges as a site for non-immigrant precarity. I then discuss how seemingly critical fields of inquiry such as academic feminism are institutionally arranged within corporate universities to sustain racialized precarity for non-immigrants in academia, through hiring, research, and pedagogical practices. I conclude by drawing on two grassroots education models in India as means for (re)imagining decolonial possibilities with subversive philosophies of education and spatial alternatives, which are crucial for feminist research to be meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth and development with least harm to the environment is one of the biggest challenges for the human. Mining which is considered to be the most inherently unsustainable industry, is at the same time, plays key role in the development process in India and across Globe. It occupy primary position in the supply chain, contributing to the foreign direct investment, exports, government taxes, GDP (National Income) and provide huge labour employment. This paper studies industrial elimination of women, prolong industrial patriarchy, impetuous production, rising demand pressure has added to the quadrupling problems of land degradation, disposal of over burden/waste discharge, deforestation, pollution(air, water, and noise), and damage to forest flora and fauna, occupational health hazards and extreme global environmental damage in a rapid, continuous manner. These continuous and multilayered problems are giving us reason to re-visioning steps, where we went wrong. Theoretical foundation of eco-feminism traces that negligence and suppression of women in general and in the mining industry, is one of the probable cause that hit environment fiercely. With this in mind, this paper suggests theory of eco-feminism into male centric mining industry as a perspective which is more likely to lead to industrial sustainability, making it more responsible and may provide pro-environmental solutions to the industry. This feminist concept extending it from individualistic level into mining organisations proposes as one of the alternative to combine ecology and commerce to envision sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The #Metoo movement spread globally to include women in India who were employing social media platforms to discuss their experiences in sexual abuse and harassment. This paper investigates through literature review and data collection, why #MeTooIndia demonstrates a non-inclusivity towards marginalized, and gendered bodies and narratives on the Twitter platform. This exclusion is primarily the product of increased attention to issues of sexual abuse among the Indian elite including Bollywood celebrities, journalists, politicians, and well-known media personalities who employ Twitter as a space for "coming-out." Secondly, non-inclusivity is evidenced through lack of discussion on the question of sexual abuse, and harassment in the daily lives of Dalit, trans women, women of lower caste and class, and other marginalized and gendered communities that have vastly different experiences of sexual abuse than the elite, urban woman. Finally, exclusion is exposed through the sparsity of personal narratives under the same hashtags owing to masculine toxicity as well as the creation of unsafe spaces for gendered minorities to recount their experiences. This research employs theory of intersectionality to ultimately rethink how to design and organize feminist movements online in order to create safer, more inclusive, and intersectional spaces for feminist activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper captures how a women's protest offered resistance to the ethnonationalist state's exclusionary citizenship policy that seeks to disqualify Muslims from citizenship rights and entitlements in postcolonial India. Since the pre‐pandemic period, Muslim women have been contesting this ideological play of the sovereign state power through various cultural and political framing of counter‐narratives through various art forms, including poetry, poetic practices, and graffiti. We argue that this arts‐based resistance has significant implication for how grassroots feminist movements discursively mobilizes theory and practice to build feminist consciousness and solidarity among this minority community as well as create coalitions and networks with broader communities of different faiths. Poetry, poetic practice, and graffiti provide the communicative platform to voice against injustice and violence by those in power. We contribute to the debates on writing differently by integrating the poems and graffiti as an empirical source that brings forth collective experiences to engender empathy and the hope to resist structures of hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 'voices' of Muslim girls reported in a purposive sample of media, this research presents Muslim girls' responses to the impossible choice between right to education and vs. religion, following the hijab ban in the colleges in Karnataka, India. Their narratives do not fit conventional understandings of 'being' political or 'doing' politics. Instead, they are situated in a continuum of new-forms of political protest and agency emerging among young Muslim women in India following nation-wide Muslim women-led protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (2020). Muslim girls' voices in this research suggest their attempts to regenerate democracy by offering an alternative political vision of India to the authoritarian vision currently in power. This paper suggests that to understand Muslim girls' political agency in authoritarian and Hindu majoritarian India there is a need to recalibrate our understanding of politics and political agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]