Activism and Agency in India

Activism and Agency in India
Author: Supurna Banerjee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351972901

This book is the first interdisciplinary and intersectional work examining the nature of victimhood and agency among women workers on tea-plantations in North Bengal, India. The author views tea plantations as social spaces, rather than only economic units of production. Focusing on the lived experiences of the workers from the perspective of their multiple identities, including caste, gender, ethnicity, religion, location and kinship, the author uses the everyday as the entry point for understanding the exercise of agency, the negotiations of different spaces, gender roles and norms therein, as well as acts of protest.

Mobilizing Religion and Gender in India

Mobilizing Religion and Gender in India
Author: Nandini Deo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2015-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317530675

Religious nationalists and women’s activists have transformed India over the past century. They debated the idea of India under colonial rule, shaped the constitutional structure of Indian democracy, and questioned the legitimacy of the postcolonial consensus, as they politicized one dimension of identity. Using a historical comparative approach, the book argues that external events, activist agency in strategizing, and the political economy of transnational networks explain the relative success and failure of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement rather than the ideological claims each movement makes. By focusing on how particular activist strategies lead to increased levels of public support, it shows how it is these strategies rather than the ideologies of Hindutva and feminism that mobilize people. Both of these social movements have had decades of great power and influence, and decades of relative irrelevance, and both challenge postcolonial India’s secular settlement – its division of public and private. The book goes on to highlight new insights into the inner dynamics of each movement by showing how the same strategies - grassroots education, electoral mobilization, media management, donor cultivation - lead to similarly positive results. Bringing together the study of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Religion, Gender Studies, and South Asian Politics.

Doing Democracy

Doing Democracy
Author: Bill Moyer
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2001-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780865714182

An empowering guide to understanding the strategies behind successful social movements.

Women's Activism, Feminism, and Social Justice

Women's Activism, Feminism, and Social Justice
Author: Margaret A. McLaren
Publisher:
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190947705

A wide range of issues besieges women globally, including economic exploitation, sexist oppression, racial, ethnic, and caste oppression, and cultural imperialism. This book builds a feminist social justice framework from practices of women's activism in India to understand and work to overcome these injustices. The feminist social justice framework provides an alternative to mainstream philosophical frameworks that promote global gender justice: for example, universal human rights, economic projects such as microfinance, and cosmopolitanism. McLaren demonstrates that these frameworks are bound by a commitment to individualism and an abstract sense of universalism that belies their root neo-liberalism. Arguing that these frameworks emphasize individualism over interdependence, similarity over diversity, and individual success over collective capacity, McLaren draws on the work of Rabindranath Tagore to develop the concept of relational cosmopolitanism. Relational cosmopolitanism prioritizes our connections while, crucially, acknowledging the reality of power differences. Extending Iris Young's theory of political responsibility, McLaren shows how Fair Trade connects to the economic solidarity movement. The Self-Employed Women's Association and MarketPlace India empower women through access to livelihoods as well as fostering leadership capabilities that allow them to challenge structural injustice through political and social activism. Their struggles to resist economic exploitation and gender oppression through collective action show the vital importance of challenging individualist approaches to achieving gender justice. The book is a rallying call for a shift in our thinking and practice towards re-imagining the possibilities for justice from a relational framework, from independence to interdependence, from identity to intersectionality, and from interest to socio-political imagination.

Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia

Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia
Author: Gita Rajan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135701598

Transnational feminism has been critical to feminist theorizing in the global North over the last few decades. Perhaps due to its broad terminology, transnational feminism can become vague and dislocated, losing its ability to name specific critiques of and responses to empire, race, and globalization that are emboldened by its transnational remit. This volume encompasses an expansive engagement and exploration of transnational South Asian feminist movements, networks, and critiques within the context of the popular and the diaspora in South Asia. The contributing authors address key issues in a global context, especially as they operate both in a situated and the diasporic imaginary of South Asia. While the idea of the popular in South Asia has often been circumscribed by the spaces and cultural politics of Bollywood, this interdisciplinary volume takes an innovative turn to examine how academics, advocates, activists, and artists envision the inroads and consequences of nationalism, globalization and/or empire, which continually remake communities and alter needs and allegiances. Through ethnography, literature, dance, cinema, activism, poetry, and storytelling, the authorsd analyse popular and social justice using a focused, multidisciplinary gendered lens. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Queer Activism in India

Queer Activism in India
Author: Naisargi N. Dave
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822353199

This book examines the creation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s through the early 2000s and explores the everyday practices that comprise queer activism in India.

Farmers, Subalterns, and Activists

Farmers, Subalterns, and Activists
Author: Trent Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108425100

In theory, chemical-free sustainable agriculture not only has ecological benefits, but also social and economic benefits for rural communities. By removing farmers' expenses on chemical inputs, it provides them with greater autonomy and challenges the status quo, where corporations dominate food systems. In practice, however, organisations promoting sustainable agriculture often maintain connections with powerful institutions and individuals, who have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. This book explores this tension within the sustainable farming movement through reference to three detailed case studies of organisations operating in rural India.

Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India

Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India
Author: Ajay Gudavarthy
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0857289462

‘Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society’ critically unpacks the concept of ‘political society’, which was formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in the postcolonial context. The volume’s case studies, drawn from across India and combined with a sharp focus on the concept of political society, provide those interested in Indian democracy and its changing patterns with an indispensable collection of works, brought together in their common pursuit of highlighting the limitations of different core concepts as formulated by Chatterjee. Centred around five themes – the relation between the civil and the political; the role of middlemen and their impact on the mobility of subaltern groups; elites and leadership; the fragmentation and intra-subaltern conflicts and their implications for subaltern agency; and the idea of moral claims and moral community – this volume re-frames issues of democracy and agency in India within a wider scope than has ever been published before, and gathers ideas from some of the foremost scholars in the field. The volume concludes with a rejoinder from Partha Chatterjee.

Gender, Ethnicity and Political Agency

Gender, Ethnicity and Political Agency
Author: Shaminder Takhar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135009600

This book examines how South Asian women’s collective agency is operationalized through civic organizations in the UK. Drawing on black feminist theory and third world feminism, it shows the complexity of political agency and its relationship to identity and subjectivity, and uses empirical research to demonstrate how women are empowered to resist domination. The historically racialized image of the South Asian woman as lacking in political agency is challenged through their long history of activism on the Indian subcontinent. The creation of "critical spaces" by South Asian women in the diaspora places them as active agents who have successfully influenced social policy on important issues such as forced marriage, domestic violence and sexuality. The engagement with the empirical data demonstrates the significance and impact of race, racism, sexism and religion on the lives of the women. The book brings to the fore the pursuit of equality, rights and justice, including multiculturalism and the often debated emancipatory role of religion.

The Light of Knowledge

The Light of Knowledge
Author: Francis Cody
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0801469015

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody’s ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at an increasingly important area of social and political activism, The Light of Knowledge brings tools of linguistic anthropology to engage with critical social theories of the postcolonial state.