Contemporary South Asia: Call for papers
Call for papers for a special issue of Contemporary South Asia: Gendered and social consequences of innovations in South Asia
Gender relations in South Asia are considered as a major developmental challenge of the area. Technological, social and organizational innovations have potential for improving living conditions and supporting people’s active participation but they may as well work against the better interests of the disadvantaged.
Here, we are interested in technical, social and organizational innovations that have a particular developmental role in South Asia, such as mobile phones, use of ultrasound for sex detection, micro credit, or social business strategies. Here, we will look at innovations as social phenomena: they are never merely commercial or technical ventures or products. They are necessarily socio-cultural projects, put into practice and created by socially-situated individuals and groups. Thus the interest lies more on the process than on the end result of innovation.
The idea of an innovation entails a taken-for-granted positive and useful goal – improving wellbeing by adopting something new or doing something differently than before. We would like to forward a call for papers examining whether the implementation or creation of an innovation actually manages to transform social structures of inequality, particularly gender relations, in South Asia. Or do innovations socially reinforce existing inequalities while benefitting only some particular actors?
This special issue seeks contributions that do not see innovations merely as economic or technological ventures but also as socio-cultural projects that have important gender-specific and cultural frames and consequences. In order to strengthen our understanding on how social and other innovations work in starkly hierarchical societies of South Asia, positioned, contextualized and culture-specific micro-level analyses are needed.
Guest editors: Minna Säävälä (Population Research Institute, Helsinki) & Sirpa Tenhunen (University of Helsinki)
Article manuscripts analysing primary data are sought. Please send a synopsis of maximum 500 words to the guest editors minna.saavala@vaestoliitto.fi and sirpa.tenhunen@helsinki.fi by 31th Jan 2012. The special issue is scheduled to be published in 2014.
cfp: Pakistan Workshop 2011: The Politics of Space
The Lake District, 7th-9th May 2011
Although the use of space has been implicitly a part of many academic works, it is important to question how it is defined and reproduced. As a dynamic category, it is constantly divided, regulated and negotiated. In Pakistan, the division between the spaces of the private and the public, the visible and the invisible, between the rural and the urban, the legal and illegal, have in some places blurred and in others rigidified. The concept of space allows for an understanding of these and other categories on a concrete, literal and symbolic way. Some of the categories that emerge from within this realm include (but are not limited to):
- the increasing visibility of regional demands for greater autonomy
- the different and competing expressions of religiosity as well as of politics in space
- the sites at which gender is given meaning and reproduced
- the space of the home/domestic/private as opposed to the external / world /public
- changing and overlapping patterns of spatial segregation, communication and transport in the urban areas
- changing social realities and migration networks between urban and rural areas
- overlapping spheres of control occupied by the military, bureaucracy and elite groups
- spaces of resistance and protest
- diaspora
full details: PakistanWorkshop2011_CFP
Violence Against Women in South Asian Communities: Issues for Policy and Practice
Edited by Ravi K Thiara and Aisha K Gill, Foreword by Professor Liz Kelly CBE
‘This book is powerful, challenging and inspirational, and is an important contribution to debates on the complex intersections between ethnicity, gender and inequality, as well as on human rights and violence against women. Thiara and Gill and the contributors to this text skillfully unpick the flawed thinking and policy initiatives directed at gender-based violence over the past 30 years and especially in the post 9/11 period community cohesion and anti-terrorism initiatives.’
- Dr Lorraine Radford, Head of Research, NSPCC
‘This is a stimulating and provocative collection which explores the difficult concepts of ‘multiculturalism’, ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘secularisation’ in relation to gendered violence. The authors challenge myths and stereotypes about the ‘Asian’ experience in relation to interpersonal violence without oversimplifying or homogenising black and minority ethnic (BME) women’s experiences. Despite cataloguing the ongoing struggles against racism and misogyny, and the intersection of both, the editors conclude the text with optimism; an additional reason to recommend this text to all policy makers, practitioners, academics and students, as well as those interested in the provenance of BME anti-violence organisations and current UK policy.’
- Dr Melanie McCarry, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol
Sikh Diaspora – Call for Contributors
I was recently approached by one of the editors of Brill’s History of Religions Series about the possibility of producing an edited volume on Sikh diaspora. As many of your know, the Brill series is a well-established and prestigious one. Nevertheless, a volume on Sikhism is notably absent from its long series list. A book on Sikh diaspora would begin to fill this gap.
I am issuing a call for contributors for such a volume. I am seeking papers with not only substantive content, but those that offer some theoretical or methodological reflections (broadly construed). I welcome contributions from a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives – from history to urban planning, from gender studies to performance studies, from comparative religion to the psychology religion, or from ethnomusicology to ethnographic studies. Papers of a theoretical nature dealing with the conceptual categories such as “diaspora” or “trans-nationalism” as they relate to Sikh diaspora are also welcome.
If you have a paper you are looking to publish, or have a conference paper you plan to develop for publication, please consider contributing to this project.
If this is something to which you would like to contribute, please let me know the general subject matter of the proposed paper. I would like to get a sense of the level of interest and participation in this project before proceeding further.
Dr. Michael Hawley, Associate Professor and Coordinator, Religious Studies, Mount Royal University, Email: mhawley@mtroyal.ca
CFP: Contemporary Amritsar: Society, Economy, Polity
Department of History, DAV College, Amritsar
Venue: Seminar Hall, DAV College, Amritsar
Date: 30 November 2009 to 01 December 2009
Time: 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Interested scholars who wish to present a paper should submit their work address, provisional paper title and one page abstract of around 500 words to the organising committee at contemporaryamritsar@gmail.com by 30th October 2009.
Further details:Seminar Schedule and Seminar- Concept Note
Interview with Tej Purewal on Son Preference
The Sunday Tribune Sunday, May 17, 2009 The daughter’s case by Nonika Singh
Punjab is a readymade topic for researchers,” quips academician author, a lecturer in development studies, University of Manchester. Documenting the obsession of Punjabis with a male child in a book titled Son Preference, this proud Punjaban is dismayed with the social inequalities that criss cross the social fabric of the state. “When it comes to social equilibrium, Punjab is a total disgrace”, she says. Born and brought up in the US, studying Punjab wasn’t a natural choice for Purewal. Till the early 1990s it didn’t even blink on her radar. It was only when she co-authored Teach yourself Panjabi with her father-in-law Surjit Singh Kalra, a well-known Punjabi writer, and did her doctoral thesis on Amritsar (it later became a book — Living On The Margins) that she became aware of the strong currents of Punjabiyat in her being.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090517/spectrum/book2.htm
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