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The data privacy debate in India has evolved with respect to the government's biometric identity programme, Aadhaar that enrols welfare-dependent, poor populations to grant them access to government benefits. While legal challenges to Aadhaar by civil society groups argued that the biometric identity infrastructure creates conditions of mass surveillance and violation of individual privacy, the Indian Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that the government was justified in restricting individual privacy for the collective good of providing welfare in a transparent and corruption-free manner. Given the disproportionate burden on these populations to prove their identities to the state, this paper draws on a close reading of legal and policy texts, and activist documentation to argue that there is a need to move beyond the narrative of mass surveillance as privacy violation. Data privacy interests of the welfare-dependent emerge in the moment of biometric authentication, which creates anxieties of recognition when their authentication attempts fail or are deliberately falsified. Often, to have better social mobility, they are compelled to be physically mobile in order to enrol or update their records under conditions of physical disability and meagre socioeconomic means. These anxieties illuminate their privacy interests through a compromise of dignity or dignified living, a formulation articulated in the 2018 Aadhaar verdict. The paper makes a critical contribution to the global conversation on data privacy through a discussion of the Indian case that demonstrates the privacy-recognition nexus in local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schoolchildren's embodied subjectivity has often been understood as a bio-political tool to 'clean up' and modernize poor and marginalized communities. In many post-colonial contexts, school uniforms frequently appear as visual symbols of a child's clean, schooled body and democratic access to education. Through ethnographic research with 10–14-year-old schoolchildren in urbanizing areas in northern Tamil Nadu, my paper asks how children inhabit and co-construct the school uniform code's cleanliness discourse in their everyday lives. Studying plural school uniforms through a spatial lens, I explore schoolchildren's embodied and relational work in negotiating with the equalizing school uniform codes within the schools and the circulation of multiple school uniforms in the community outside. Engaging with a shifting visual aesthetic of embodied cleanliness in a context of class segregated schooling. I argue that school uniforms are discursive sites where exclusions of class and gender, with undertones of caste and age, are simultaneously reinforced and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides one of the most accurate estimates of the size of the Indian middle class, using an eclectic set of variables rooted in three major theories of class; Marxist, Weberian, and Bourdieuian. Using this original and theoretically inclusive method offers a solution to the problem of capturing the conceptual complexities of the middle class and provides a holistic examination of its composition. Through statistical analysis of the India Human Development Survey II (2011–12), the paper reveals three significant findings: firstly, it calculates the size of the middle class to be 28.05% of the urban and rural population in India. Secondly, it demonstrates that despite the occupational diversity that exists among middle classes, a large proportion of the middle class are salaried employees. Thirdly, and most importantly, it demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions in the growing literature on the middle class, a considerable segment of the Indian middle class resides in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of service and submission in Mughal India was starkly different from modern times. The rhetoric of complete submission to the person of the Emperor guided the social relations of all orders. A reflection of this must have been experienced at the level of the household service gentry. Important elements in this service class were chelas (freed male slaves), sahelis (freed slave-girls) and khwajasaras (eunuchs). All three sections had an ambiguous placement in the social order. The chelas and sahelis were in principle free but their social realities and the nature of their services were similar to that of slaves. Eunuchs, on the other hand, provided widely varied services, ranging from administrative duties to mere harem attendance. The conditions of all these groups depended largely on the interactions between them and their immediate masters. The paper explores the dynamics of the varying nature of social realities and mobility experienced by these different sections, locating them within class and gender contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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How do employees in "new services", such as coffee baristas and gym trainers in India, see their jobs? In this paper, we build on extensive fieldwork in gyms and coffee chains that cater to the emerging Indian middle classes. Our research highlights the importance of respect and recognition in making service interactions more meaningful for new service workers. Generally hailing from the lower middle classes, new service work offers important opportunities to interact with and learn from English-speaking upper middle-class customers and clients. Besides the opportunity to interact and learn, the acknowledgement they receive for their skills and (bodily) accomplishments make such professions attractive as well. Even if this holds the potential for upward socioeconomic mobility, our findings also point at the resilience of social hierarchies. Drawing on literature on service interactions and new middle-class formation in India, this paper provides important insight into how young Indians navigate and negotiate the opportunities and pitfalls that come with the country's changing socioeconomic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, incidents of rape, sexual discrimination, honour killing, acid attacks and sex-related murders in Indian cities have come under much media and public scrutiny, significantly impacting conceptions of gender, risk and women's safety in urban spaces. The city itself has become a dominant trope for underscoring the anxieties, discourses and exegeses of sexual violence, as exemplified in the oft-cited designation of Delhi as the 'rape capital of India'. This introduction to the themed section critically engages with 'the urban' in its attempts to understand sexual violence in India, and focuses on the multiple public (workplace, leisure, street lives) and private (domestic, intimate) arenas of urban life where sexual violence is encountered, and the resources they provide to counter it. The co-editors engage with the interdisciplinary research papers by contributing authors that show how sexual violence is '(en)countered' in women's right-wing politics, processes of cultural production, community health activism, experiences of aggressive relationships, and men's growing anxieties about women's self-determination in Indian cities. With a specific ethnographic emphasis on women's experiences, rhetoric, representation and resistance to harassment, the theme section analyses sexual violence through the lens of urban, social and spatial transformations in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studies have investigated inequalities in child nutrition along single axes of social power such as, gender, caste and class, there has not been any study that has examined the intersection of the different axes in determining nutritional outcomes of children. This paper examines the intersection of gender, class and caste in determining children's nutritional outcomes for rural north, rural south and rural India as a whole. The paper investigates the intersectionality of the three axes in rural India and focuses on regional differences. The results show that children with particular disadvantageous group affiliations often find significant compensatory benefits from other beneficial identities. Class inequality dominates caste inequality and caste inequality dominates gender inequality in rural North India for all levels of stunting. In contrast, caste inequality dominates class inequality which in turn dominates gender inequality for severe stunting in rural South India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, this paper describes the emergence of ‘international’ schools that are only accessible to upper-middle class and elite families and provide forms of cultural capital increasingly important for middle-class employment – ‘communication skills’, ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘exposure’. The role of these schools in the educational strategies of my informants reveals the limitations of education as a route to social mobility in the context of differential access to social, economic and cultural resources, as well as the ways in which local people engage with their position within a globalised economy as they make educational choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many, a defining feature of the colonial Indian city is the high rate of segregation of its European and Indians residents. Building on recent work that explores the messy realities of social and spatial relations, this paper argues that the social geographies of the colonial city were built on the social relations of place—the network of social relations that are bound up with a particular material setting. The result was that social spaces were centred on overlapping geographic patterns, intense negotiations over space, and heterogeneous lived-in spaces. In this paper, these points are examined through the case of Bombay's Modern Town at the turn of the twentieth century. Modern Town was supposedly the home of the city's European population and it stood in sharp contrast to the city's Native Town. However, Modern Town did not conform to the spatial topographies described by most writers. While formal residential segregation existed, social and economic articulation and interaction ensured that the district's social spaces were meshed in differentiated and complex ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the century following their conquest of the province, the British in Punjab erected an administrative apparatus that, like those of precolonial regimes, relied heavily upon the support of the province's landed class. The relationship between the landed class and the colonial state was one of mutual benefit, with the latter using the former to ensure the maintenance of order and collection of revenue in exchange for state patronage. In this paper, it is argued that this administrative framework gave rise to a path-dependent process of institutional development in Punjab, allowing for the different fractions of the province's landowning class to increasingly entrench themselves within the political order in the postcolonial epoch. This paper outlines the mechanisms underlying this process of institutional development, focusing, in particular, on the strategies adopted by the landowning class to reproduce its power. This paper also considers the potentialities for institutional change in Punjab, allowing for the creation of a more democratic and participatory politics in the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successive Indian governments have attempted to tackle the formidable task of creating a clean India, with varied results. With the country's rapidly growing middle class eager to participate in a sanitised global consumer capitalism, many Indians are becoming frustrated with the ‘unruly’ nature of their urban landscape, its dirty streets and public spaces. This is particularly discernible amongst India's middle-class youth, who seem impatient with the state's apparent inability to manage waste and disorder, and it is clear that several civil society campaigns designed to promote a clean India explicitly target Indian youth. In this paper, I explore what the ideological premise of cleansing initiatives reveals about the aspirations, needs and anxieties of India's youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on approaches to class emphasising the multiplicity of labour relations at work under capitalism, and from feminist insights on oppression and social reproduction, this paper illustrates the interconnection between processes of class formation and patriarchal norms in globalised production circuits. The analysis emphasises the nexus between the commodification and exploitation of women’s labour, and how it structures gendered wage differentials, labour control and the high ‘disposability’ of women’s work. The analysis develops these arguments by exploring the case of the Indian garment industry and its gendered sweatshop regime. It illustrates how commodification and exploitation interplay in factory and home-based realms, and discusses how an approach on class premised on social reproduction changes the social perimeters of what we understand as labour ‘unfreedom’ and labour struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India's agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another's religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the way in which the working world of contract labourers in a public-sector Indian steel plant is differentiated from that of its regular workforce. The two kinds of workers regard themselves as distinct kinds of people and are now best seen as distinct social classes. While the sociology of India has broadly accepted the manual/non-manual labour distinction as the crucial marker of the boundary between the working and the middle classes, what is suggested here is that that betweennaukri(secure employment) andkam(insecure wage labour) – which cuts right across that distinction and is broadly congruent with that between formal- and informal-sector employment – is a more important marker of difference. At work, the two kinds of workforce are sharply distinguished by the material rewards of their jobs and by their security and conditions of employment; outside it by differences in life-style and attitudes – a gap that has grown with the liberalization of the Indian economy. The composition of the work groups to which the two kinds of labour characteristically belong are sharply differentiated by gender, by regional ethnicity and by urban or rural residence. Interactionswithinthe work group are again very different, while interactionsbetweenregular and contract workers are largely confined to the work itself. Outside it they are kept to a minimum, testifying to a shared sense that socially the two kinds of workforce are profoundly different. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines waiting, caste and politics through reference to the cultural and political practices of educated unemployed young men in India. We show through ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh how a shared sense of young male limbo sometimes erodes caste divides. While waiting in poorly provisioned north Indian universities, young men develop novel cultures that bridge caste, class and religion. They also collaborate across class, caste and religious boundaries in protests against the state and university bureaucracies. At the same time, some students have responded to a sense of ‘waiting’ by developing collusive relationships with local government and university bureaucrats. Waiting emerges not as a passive condition but as a seed-bed for new cultural and political forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper conceptualises the culture of corruption and clientelism in panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh. The discussion is based on a year of field research on the strategies adopted by power-holders to monopolise these local bodies. The study found that patronage, influence and intimidation are used by the dominant factions to retain considerable control over the panchayats. While this in itself is not especially new, the study demonstrates the ways in which government initiatives to ensure greater transparency and representation of marginal groups—lower castes and women, in particular—through reservations continue to be cleverly subverted. A successful pradhan (headman) establishes a network of supporters and alliances, which he nurtures and rewards by brokering and embezzling funds through the institutions that he controls, instead of neutrally devolving funding to the needy sectors of the village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators contemplating the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat swing between anxiously wondering whether it shows where the rest of the country is headed and complacent insistence that it is exceptional. Against the background of a wider understanding of the main drivers of Hindutva, and the pattern of its differential advance in the States and regions of India, this paper argues that the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat can be explained by a combination of three factors: aspects of its inherited caste and class structure; the levels and patterns of capitalist development; and the patterns of social polarisation their combination has produced. Given the historic fragmentation of its upper castes, Gujarat's specificity in providing exceptionally fertile ground for the growth and stabilisation of Hindutva can be attributed to the fast pace of its capitalist development and consequently fast economic advance of its middle castes and their social and political assimilation into the formerly Savarna ruling bloc through Hindutva. Given that the differences of inherited social structure and culture are differences of degree and not quality, and that capitalist and neo-liberal development is not questioned, indeed is zealously pursued everywhere in India, and given that social polarisation is considered an acceptable cost of development, Gujarat could well be the image of India's future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where 'progressive' privileged parents choose 'diverse' schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education policy are similarly undermined by seemingly well-intentioned privileged actors. India's Right to Education Act of 2009 requires private schools to educate disadvantaged children for free. The architects of this policy imagined that it would not only provide access to quality education for disadvantaged children, but also desegregate schools. Beneficiaries of the policy share the policymakers' vision of desegregation. However, various elite and middle-class actors prioritise access over integration, and assert that segregated classrooms may be in the best interests of underprivileged children. This highlights how desegregation policies can fail not just as a result of direct opposition but also through discourses of benevolence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English, initially being a language of imperial leaders and later of upper caste elites after independence, continues to remain an elitist language in India. Over the course of time and for various reasons, the need for English language learning has rapidly increased. English is also believed to promote social mobility for the people of backward communities. However, the history of social disparity in India has problematized the position of English in the country. On one hand English produces varied possibilities for economic growth and social change. On the other hand, its elitist and exclusively selective nature negatively impacts Indian society by alarming the public education sector which the most backward communities rely on even today. Even though someone from a backward community succeeds in learning English they would inevitably step into a more complex/hierarchical zone by positioning themselves in the complexity of a class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates on emissions and climate change are dominated by inter-country inequalities, usually ignoring within-country inequalities. In this paper, we address the question of carbon space sharing in India across different classes after economic reforms were introduced in 1991. We establish using household consumption surveys that the elites in India are major polluters both in an absolute sense as well as in per capita terms. We find that inter-class component of emissions now explains 28.5% of total inequality compared to a mere 2.5% in 1994 at the onset of market-oriented reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Minimum support price (MSP) is posed as a remedial response to the distress condition of Indian farmers. This essay dissects MSP and the debate regarding it from the class-focused theory of surplus labor. The analytical tool of class sets shows the limited scope of MSP compared to the disaggregated nature of the Indian agricultural sector and shows that the MSP policy debate is blind to class questions and their consequences. Bringing in various overdetermining and contradictory effects of class-related production and circulation processes, value theory is applied to unravel the dissimilar crisis conditions of agrarian enterprises. Once MSP is combined with class and other nonclass processes, it follows that the MSP outcome will not have uniform effects across enterprises and will not secure its self-proclaimed objective of redressing farmer distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal globalisation has resulted in the bypassing of agrarian transition-led industrialisation and classic proletarianisation, and class-for-itself class struggles are rare. Drawing on analyses of class relations, racism and other forms of social oppression, this contribution explores how processes of ‘conjugated oppression’ are central to the spread of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on India and on how the co-constitution of class relations and social oppression based on caste, tribe, gender and region is entrenching Dalits and Adivasis at the bottom of social and economic hierarchies. The analysis has deep-seated consequences for how we think about political struggles, in this case ones that foreground caste and tribe and focus on both labour and land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary, South Africa space continues to remain highly racialised despite shifts and changes brought about by the end of apartheid in 1994. The recreational space of the Blue Lagoon, the focus of this study, and in close proximity to the Indian Ocean was historically demarcated for the use of Indians only. In this article, the ways in which a selected group of Indian men in Durban give meaning to the changing face of Blue Lagoon are examined. By drawing on focus group discussions, the article highlights the interaction between race, space and the construction of masculinities through which male power is expressed and inequalities are produced. The study finds that the Blue Lagoon is an important space through which Indian masculinities are produced and consolidated. However, the Blue Lagoon functions to express race and class inequalities through the investment made in the car and the construction of a racialised other. The article concludes with some implications for challenging inequalities and the exclusion it supports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to ‘move up the ladder’ is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-market believers have long held. It is as much an outcome of collective political bargaining, privileges that dominant class and caste status affords, access to resources and, indeed, occasional luck. Two propositions follow. First, we suggest that the state remains albeit as a reluctant enabler of social mobility in the age of markets. Second, the participation in the new economy hinges also upon one’s ability to ‘dress up’ for the part, to be able to craft one’s look as if one belonged to spaces – work or leisure – that one desires to inhabit. The work of appearances, we suggest, does not operate at individual levels alone, it also encompasses the nation’s spectacular projection of itself in the global political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the combination of education and affirmative action in challenging historic inequalities faced by adivasis, or indigenous peo-ples, living in a remote region of Eastern India. We show how the com-bined effects of education and affirmative action can act as a 'contradictory resource'. On the one hand, policies of affirmative action are enabling young educated adivasis - the children of subsistence farm-ers and manual labourers - to benefit from the creation of new, rural state jobs. We show how without affirmative action, such jobs may well have been monopolised by a local elite of higher castes. On the other hand, we argue several conservative processes have accompanied these changes. First, the reserved jobs secured by adivasis are relatively badly paid and insecure. Second, these jobs have not enabled relative progress for adivasis vis-à-vis traditional elites who are moving out of rural areas and diversifying their livelihoods. Third, young educated adivasis have begun to emulate the norms, values and ways of life of the local elite. This 'culture of emulation' is fostering new inequalities between edu-cated adivasis and their poorer kin, who face increasing proletarianisa-tion. The contradictory resource, we argue, concerns not only inequalities in accessing certain jobs, but also the creation of new forms of differentiation among historically marginalised people. We conclude by setting these findings within the wider complex relations emerging between caste, ethnicity and class in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay we seek to trouble the easy conflation of sexual and economic liberalism in contemporary India. Even as new regimes of consumption connect narratives of economic freedom with sexual freedom, there remain many constraints on women's ability to express sexuality in creative and autonomous, rather than obligatory and scripted, ways. Focusing on two recent episodes – proposals to ban cheerleaders in cricket performances in Maharashtra and the vigilante attacks in pubs and streets on women in southern Karnataka – we analyse reactions across varied political positions, including those of official women's organizations. Our goal is to bring theories of spectatorship to bear on understanding the politics of these episodes. We emphasize distinctions between the contexts of performance and reception, and argue that women's attire and conduct can be read in heterogeneous ways. Our aim is to seek a more effective feminist response to such controversies, and to articulate a vision of sexual autonomy that is not necessarily linked to hegemonic consumer behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Darjeeling hills in northern West Bengal, India are being demanded as a homeland for the Gorkha community living in India. While the origin of Darjeeling is steeped in the imperial legacy of the British Raj, the Gorkha, a colonial construct is ironically used as a means to challenge the contemporary political regression and neo-colonisation of Darjeeling. Although the Gorkha identity is deemed as representative of the Nepali community residing in India, it acquires special meaning and importance in the Darjeeling hills, where majority of the people suffer low wages, unemployment, underdevelopment and poverty. In spite of a large working force in the tea estates, economic underdevelopment and political disempowerment is voiced through the assertion of ethnic rather than a class-based identity. Through an examination of the interaction between class and ethnicity, the Gorkha identity will highlight the malleability of ethnicity to extend itself to any situation and the emergence of an ethnic identity from class relations and grievances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines representations of skin color and its symbolic affiliations with discourses of gender, class, and caste in the Amar Chitra Katha (immortal pictorial stories) comic series, the first indigenous children's comics to be published in postcolonial India. We draw on the concept of colorism as defined by Black scholars in the United States to explore the lessons on gender and skin color that these comics may communicate to Indian children. Our analysis shows that Amar Chitra Katha's stories of gods, goddesses, kings, demons, and historical events associate light-skinned masculinity with divinity, strength, virtue, compassion, and upper caste status. Comic book illustrations code dark-skinned masculinity through the semiotics of violence, brutality, stupidity, bestiality, and low caste status. Fashioning a similar set of symbolic oppositions, these pictorial stories link light-skinned femininity to beauty, wholesome family life, and happiness, whereas dark-skinned femininity manifests through embodiments of grotesque physical appearance, anger, promiscuity, and deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the United Nations Millenium Declaration of 2000, the establishment of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) has been identified as a significant strategy in addressing the alarming levels of poverty and marginalisation that have accompanied global development. SHGs are small, voluntary associations of people from the same socio-economic background that have been established for the purpose of solving shared social and economic problems through self-help and mutual help. Such grass-roots commonality, it has been assumed, will promote community empowerment and prevent economic marginalisation. Such an assumption is largely based on the global, neo-liberal agenda of seeing the withdrawal of the State from social provisioning. SHGs have been widely adopted in India, especially to eliminate the social exclusion of poor women and improve their access to health. This article reviews the scope and limitations of SHGs in improving women's health, focusing on their implementation in the State of Bihar in India. It critically assesses the extent to which SHGs can be involved in attaining better health for women and children by exploring the crucial role of caste and class in access to health services. The article concludes that solutions such as SHGs, which emanate from international policy circles, fail to capture local structural contexts such as caste and class and, as a result, develop instrumentalised approaches that are unlikely to produce equitable health services provision to poor and marginalised people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analysing a visit to Ramoji Film City, a theme park in Hyderabad, by a group of youths, this essay examines how transterritorial flows of imagery are socially contextualized by India's new middle classes. A theme park is a spatial arrangement thatincorporatesimaginary worlds and makes them available to experiencein a contextless ‘here-and-now’. As such, the theme parkis a stage where the fragileidentity of India's new middle classes is put on trial. Despite the appeal of the theme park for potential middle-class visitors, the visitors I followed appeared largely uninspired by the imagery of the far away and past in Film City, and they found it difficult to incorporate their visit to the theme park as a meaningful social practice. The case of Ramoji Film City shows how the social situatedness of the subject determines the significance of the imagination in the transnational world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]