An ethnography of NGO practice in India

An ethnography of NGO practice in India
Author: Stewart Allen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2018-08-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526127555

Through an ethnographic study of the ‘Barefoot College’, an internationally renowned non- governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success.

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.

Perceptions of Climate Change from North India

Perceptions of Climate Change from North India
Author: Aase J. Kvanneid
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2021-03-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000359042

Perceptions of Climate Change from North India: An Ethnographic Account explores local perceptions of climate change through ethnographic encounters with the men and women who live at the front line of climate change in the lower Himalayas. From data collected over the course of a year in a small village in an eco-sensitive zone in North India, this book presents an ethnographic account of local responses to climate change, resource management and indigenous environmental knowledge. Aase Kvanneid’s observations cast light on the precarious reality of climate change in this region and bring to the fore issues such as access to water, NGO intervention and climate information for farmers. In doing so, she also explores classic topics in the study of rural India including ritual, gender, social hierarchy and political economy. Overall, this book shows how the cause and effect of climate change is perceived by those who have the most to lose and explores how the impact of climate change is being dealt with on a local and global scale. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the anthropology of climate change, environmental sociology and rural development.

Into the woods

Into the woods
Author: Meritxell Ramírez-i-Ollé
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1526141000

This book is a detailed exploration of the working practices of a community of scientists exposed in public, and of the making of scientific knowledge about climate change in Scotland. For four years, the author joined these scientists in their sampling expeditions into the Caledonian forests, observed their efforts in the laboratory to produce data from wood samples and followed their discussions of a graph showing the evolution of the Scottish temperature over the past millennium in conferences, workshops and peer-review journals. This epistemography of climate change is of broad social and academic relevance – both for its contextualised treatment of a key contemporary science, and for its original formulation of a methodology for investigating expertise.

Hydrohumanities

Hydrohumanities
Author:
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-12-21
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0520380460

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse. This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid identities, and cultural currencies. The first section deals with the properties of water and the ways in which water challenges human plans for control. The second section explores how water (or lack of it) shapes human collective and individual identities. The third engages notions of value and circulation to think about how water has been managed and employed for local, national, and international gains. Contributions come from preeminent as well as emerging voices across humanities fields including history, art history, philosophy, and science and technology studies. Part of a bigger goal for shaping the environmental humanities, the book broadens the concept of water to include not just water in oceans and rivers but also in pipes, ice floes, marshes, bottles, dams, and more. Each piece shows how humanities scholarship has world-changing potential to achieve more just water futures.

What Anthropologists Do

What Anthropologists Do
Author: Veronica Strang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2021-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100018238X

Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter working life? This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology. Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand people’s beliefs and values, and how these guide the different lifeways that these create. This accessible book presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and conceptual frameworks can be employed in a very wide range of fields, from environmental concerns to human rights, through business, social policy, museums and marketing. This updated edition includes an additional chapter on anthropology and interdisciplinarity. This is an essential primer for undergraduates studying introductory courses to anthropology, and any reader who wants to know what anthropology is about.

Divorcing Traditions

Divorcing Traditions
Author: Katherine Lemons
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501734784

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls "spiritual healing"—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.

Research Methods in Human Rights

Research Methods in Human Rights
Author: Bård A. Andreassen
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2024-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1803922613

In this thoroughly revised second edition editors Bård A. Andreassen, Claire Methven O’Brien and Hans-Otto Sano advance contemporary discussions on human rights methodology, bringing together an array of leading scholars to offer instruction and guidance on the methodological approaches to human rights research.

Disciplined agency

Disciplined agency
Author: Patrícia Matos
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1526135000

This book introduces the concept of disciplined agency as a valuable explanatory tool vis-a-vis new forms of labour exploitation in service realms of production and the material and moral insecurities of capitalism under neoliberal governance.

Practices of Ethics

Practices of Ethics
Author: Fernanda Menéndez
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2013-07-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1443850853

This book is intended for social sciences researchers, in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, sociolinguistics, psychology, gerontology, and ethnography, who, during all stages of their research, be it quantitative or qualitative, are confronted with ethical dilemmas. As such, the chapters in this book provide the reader with examples of ethical reflection within the research process. The selection does not cover all the possible ethical issues they may face, but all of the chapters deal with the complex and unexpected, but fundamental, ethical questions that arise before, during and after fieldwork, and which do not always find clear guidance from the professional ethical codes they submit to. The studies in this book contribute to the present debate on ethical issues in social sciences research, in addition to problematizing a normative approach to ethics in social sciences research, and highlighting the importance of considering the social character of research activities when applying ethical guidelines or Research Ethic Committees’ prescriptive procedures. These essays document researchers’ practical moral reasoning in carrying out their research activities and in complying with the relevant legislation in relation to protecting research participants. Practices of ethics are identified and made describable; they are made the object of empirical documentation. This book shows that a new empirical approach to ethics as a discipline is emerging, having practices of ethics as its specific object of study.