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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.

Amid growing calls for education to be more globally oriented, scholars have asked how best to educate for global citizenship and what truly cosmopolitan learning looks like. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in middle-class Hyderabad, India to highlight the overlap between the cosmopolitan competencies promoted in schools and upper middle-class cultural capital, and to question whether it is possible to legitimate and institutionalize cosmopolitanism as merit within education systems without furthering class reproduction.

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.

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]

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]

Peer education has become a popular strategy for promoting gender equality in recent years in response to calls for more participatory forms of development and thanks to the growing popularity of 'social norms change' within the development industry. However, there is some evidence that the main benefits of peer education programs are accrued by the peer educators themselves, with little change evident among the target group. This essay draws on research with peer educators working in the 'gender and development' sector in Delhi to make two arguments. First, peer educators expressed a sense of enhanced agency and aspirations as a result of the participation in these development initiatives. However, consistent with critiques of other forms of 'information-centred development', the primary outcomes of these programs were tied to the material conditions of employment for peer educators rather than entitlements for intended beneficiaries or indeed the knowledge that peer educators had received and were disbursing. Second, in addition to the the absence of structural change and collective political action, the limited outcomes of peer education programs for intended beneficiaries might also reflect the binary created within information-centred approaches to development between the changed and the unchanged. This binary resonates with the dislocations described by scholars of development categories and postcolonial feminist scholars, suggesting that the intended beneficiaries of these programs might feel alienated by their purported peers when development is conceptualized in terms of norms to be changed through information programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledges that claim to end oppression and marginalization frequently end up feeding the same hierarchies that produce those oppressions. In the academy and in the development industry, it is not uncommon for 'local' or 'subaltern' knowledges to be positioned as 'raw data' to be utilised by the formally certified intellectual or expert, and even presented sometimes as obstacles to development goals that may have been imported from elsewhere. This introduction serves as an opening to a 'conversation' among five scholars who have different yet overlapping engagements with the complex terrain of knowledge-making on sex and gender, based on their long-term work in India. The conversation interrogates the knowledge hierarchies that are implicit in the way gender, sex, sexuality and empowerment are conceived, presented and pursued by scholars and practitioners in development studies. Through four essays, each of them followed by a written exchange among authors, we jointly consider the terrain of knowledge production by engaging variously with critical scholarly engagements that have sought to reimagine, reclaim, or theorize 'local knowledge.' This involves pausing, centering, and lingering with those tales, life histories, songs, epics, and other forms of narrative practices that have often been pushed aside in scholarly engagements. In thus challenging the universality that is valorised, we engage historical-material diversities of gendered practices and experiences and recognise the fluidities and multiplicities of the positions from which knowledges about sex, gender, and empowerment emerge, define, and reshape our worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As efforts to engage men and boys in gender justice work have proliferated across the globe, so too has evidence of the potential for this work to reinforce rather than deconstruct gender inequalities, resulting in calls to assess the assumptions that underpin this work. Although a significant amount of male-based gender justice work is based in the Global South, analytical literature on efforts to engage men and boys and on pro-feminist men has been largely confined to the Global North. This article responds to the need for a better understanding of how the tensions and risks of involving men in gender justice work are dealt with in the Global South, with an exploration of the narratives of fifteen male and one assigned male at birth (AMAB) middle-class young people working to promote gender equality in New Delhi, India. I demonstrate that there is great diversity in perspectives and approach among male and AMAB gender justice workers in Delhi. While many identified as feminists, felt the need to be accountable to women's organizations and critiqued the idea of men as victims of patriarchy, others distanced themselves from the "radical" and "political" nature of feminism, expressed concerns about the centrality of women in gender justice work and framed men as equal victims of patriarchy. I argue that the latter approach is underpinned by a focus on "mind sets" and individuals as the locus of change. In the absence of discussion of power, the structural and the political, a focus on the personal risks creating room to question the extent of female oppression and male privilege, undermining feminist goals in the interests of a more "inclusive" approach to gender justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of violence against women in Australian news and information media. We draw on Judith Butler’s concept of ‘grievability’ to question the frames through which violence against women is made to ‘matter’ in media representations. Through an intersectional feminist lens, we explore how victims, perpetrators and the violence as a whole are represented in three relatively high profile cases of sexual violence and homicide. In the case of Jill Meagher, discourses of the victim’s ideal White femininity and the perpetrator’s deviant underclass morality frame the murder as tragic. In the case of Lynette Daley, stereotypes of deviant aboriginal sexuality and abject motherhood frame the case as ‘wild sex’ gone wrong. And in the case of Jyothi Singh, Indian society as a whole is condemned for the attack, distancing male violence from White, Western morality. We argue that while gendered discourses do indeed saturate the representations of each case, racialised and classed discourses are integral to constructions of who is a ‘grievable’ and, conversely, who is a ‘killable’ victim of male violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unique sampling techniques have generated a new understanding regarding the fate of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in phytoremediation systems. Tissue sampling and diffusion traps were used to determine how VOCs are transported in and diffuse from vegetation, particularly woody species. These techniques were then utilized to observe how plants interact with different contaminated media, showing transport of contaminants occurs from the vadose zone (vapor phase) as well as the saturated zone (aqueous phase). Data was gathered in laboratory studies, in native vegetation, and in engineered phytoremediation systems. The findings reveal that diffusion from the xylem tissues to the atmosphere is a major fate for VOCs in phytoremediation applications. Linking VOCs' fate with groundwater hydraulics, mass removal rates from contaminant plumes can be estimated. These techniques were also utilized to observe the impact of engineered plant/microbe systems, which utilize recombinant, root-colonizing organisms to selectively degrade compounds and subsequently alter the fate of VOCs and other organic compounds. The genetically enhanced rhizoremediation methods pose a novel approach that may allow for biodegradation of compounds that formerly were considered recalcitrant.