The Sociological Bulletin最新文献

{"title":"Situating Development in a Culture Sensitive and Eco-Conscious Framework: A Roadmap for Policy and Practice","authors":"R. Indira","doi":"10.1177/00380229221136255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221136255","url":null,"abstract":"Environment has entered sociological discourse, both at the micro and macro levels, as an issue that affects human wellbeing. Finding a meaningful solution to the struggle for restoring the environment, while at the same time restructuring the economy, is one of the serious challenges being faced by our times. Development policies that have ignored issues of environmental sustainability have actually destroyed livelihood bases of a large number of people who are poor and dependent upon natural resources with which they have developed a sense of affinity. This is where an understanding of the cultural beliefs and practices of people comes into the fore. In many popular debates on development, culture and development are presented as if they are diametrically opposed to each other because culture is perceived as something that blocks development. This idea needs to be contested. The cultural ethos of many groups promote practices that actually have simple and viable solutions to conserve the environment and prevent the kind of irreversible loss to human life and life sustaining resources that many development projects impose. A sensitive sociological analysis would also show how environmental catastrophes such as climate change, for example, caused by profit-centric development programmes, are actually affecting vulnerable groups more severely than the elite groups who, in reality, control a major share of the resources in all societies. Even the policies that are often totally insensitive to the kind of damage that they could do to the environment need to be re-visited and recast in a pro-people model.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"72 1","pages":"7 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48345950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Political Work and Social Reproduction in India and Beyond","authors":"Isabelle Guérin","doi":"10.1177/00380229221134622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221134622","url":null,"abstract":"This commentary aims to show how the concept of ‘political work’ suggested by Kaveri Haritas (Haritas, 2021, In search of home: Citizenship, law and the politics of the poor) applies to a wide range of contexts and goods and services supposedly provided by the State in India but also elsewhere. The objective is also to outline the contributions of the concept of political work to feminist studies from the perspective of social reproduction theory.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"72 1","pages":"97 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42665897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Holding the State Accountable: Feminising Work and Responsibility","authors":"Kalpana Karunakaran","doi":"10.1177/00380229221134616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221134616","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses an increasingly commonplace phenomenon whereby women take on the formidable challenge of holding state actors accountable for the survival and well-being of their working class and land-poor communities. Women provide the bottom-up pressure, be it through negotiations or agitational collective action, that pushes the state to fulfils its commitment to provide water, subsidised food, essential household commodities, public transport and sanitation facilities. This article argues that this labour is both skill-building and exhausting and points to its ‘irreducibly political’ nature. The article also discusses the parallels with the women members of self-help groups relentlessly conducting complex negotiations with multiple institutional actors in order to realise their policy entitlements of bank linkage and anti-poverty loans. While some forms of women’s action vis-à-vis state actors are collaborative in nature, others are more conflictual and confrontationist, depending on local contexts and conditions.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"72 1","pages":"104 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41810468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Farm Bills and Farmers’ Resistance to Neoliberalism","authors":"Satendra Kumar","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116994","url":null,"abstract":"The farmers’ movement of 2020–2021, which lasted for more than a year has been one of the largest in the history of independent India. It marked a spectacular success in its resistance to neoliberalism and the corporatisation of Indian agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of farmers marched to and camped at the borders of Delhi, India’s capital, and forced the union government to repeal the three farm laws, which were understood to be a likely ‘death warrant’ for farmers. The three controversial farm laws were designed to liberalise India’s agriculture markets, but farmers’ unions and other critics alleged that the three laws would offer an advantage to big corporations at farmers’ expense. In the thick of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, farmers sustained their more than yearlong protests and finally forced the neoliberal, hard-right Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to back down. It seems that the farmers’ movement has put a check on the march of neoliberalism, though temporarily, and brought back the farm issues and agrarian polity to the forefront of national politics after three decades. The trigger for the farmers’ mobilisation was the repealed three laws, which were passed in September 2020 by the union government and expected to bring ‘revolutionary’ changes to agriculture: The Farmers’Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, 2020; The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020, and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, 2020. Together, these laws were designed to change the existing regulatory framework of agriculture. However, the farmers accused the government of avoiding its responsibility to ensure farm produce is acquired at the minimum support price (MSP). Farmers feared that these so-called reforms would leave them at the mercy of corporations that could now enter India’s farming sector with no government safeguards in place. Farmers also feared that they would ultimately lose their land, which was not only their most important asset but also the basis of their identity, heritage and self-esteem. Clearly, farmers and farmers’ unions saw these laws as an attack on their livelihoods and identity.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"71 1","pages":"483 - 494"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42516141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contemporary Farmer’s Movements in India: Hybrid Political Agenda and Modernisation of Protests","authors":"Sudhir Kumar Suthar, Manish Kumar","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116981","url":null,"abstract":"This study attempts to argue that the farmer’s encirclement of Delhi in 2020–2021 was not merely a sporadic form of protest or agitation as widely argued. Instead, it indicates the emergence of a new form of farmer movement in contemporary India. Formation of a hybrid political agenda is at the core of this movement. Temporally, organisationally and ideologically, this movement has been able to bring agrarian politics to the forefront of Indian politics after a gap of three decades. Temporally, there has been a continuity of protests by farmers since 2017 involving diverse issues which concern the rural economy and society. Organisationally, farmers adopted traditional as well as modern forms of mobilisation. Coming together of farmer unions from various parts of India is also an indicator of the innovative organisational methods. Ideologically, the current movements are an outcome of a hybrid agrarian politics that includes formation of an inclusive agenda, and a participatory form of farmer identity. The three sections of the article deal with each of these indicators.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"71 1","pages":"495 - 511"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45854703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Standardised Foods and Compromised Consumers: Can the Repeal of the Three Farm Laws Turn the Clock Back?","authors":"Richa Kumar","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116933","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the repeal of the farm laws and even meeting the demand of the protestors to reduce corporatisation of agriculture and enhance the role of the state through expansion of guaranteed procurement is unlikely to bring significant positive transformation for farmers or consumers. Indian agriculture was remade through an industrial logic by harnessing science and technology, not by corporations but by the might of the state in the 1960s during the Green Revolution. Beyond its well-known negative environmental and livelihood impacts, I show how this logic also transformed diets and damaged the health of people. Challenging the tropes of food security, modernisation, efficiency and quality that have been used to justify the perpetuation of this logic, I argue that only by tracing the relationships that have led to the present, can we begin to unravel them and reimagine a healthier and more sustainable agrarian future.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"72 1","pages":"38 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42183779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Khaps in the Making of Farmers’ Protests in Haryana: A Study of Role and Fault Lines","authors":"Shamsher Singh","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116937","url":null,"abstract":"The farmers’ movement against the three farm-laws in India often brought together conflicting forces and entities to put up a collective fight to safeguard the peasantry. The protests though mainly located at various border points of the national capital penetrated the immediate local communities over the duration. In the state of Haryana, these protests saw an unlikely participant, the khaps, playing an active role in sustaining the agitation. This article examines the role of khaps from a sociological perspective, discussing the nature, forms and ways of their participation in the protests. The discussion attempts to underline the limitations of their participation and the social fault lines that emerged as a result of it. The research argues that participation of khaps led to a consolidation of assertion of the dominant communities and resulted in restricting the potential and ambit of the movement to forge larger solidarities among the rural masses.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"71 1","pages":"534 - 550"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44595471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Protesting the Present: Memory, Affect and Infrastructure in the Farmers’ Movement, India, 2020–2021","authors":"E. Sidana, S. Kaur","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116929","url":null,"abstract":"What kind of protest cultures became visible in the farmers’ movement? What modes of resistance did the movement draw upon in the context of Punjab, the Northern part of India? Did the resistance present a response to the neoliberal ethos of the current political and economic environment? Tracing the rituals of resistance in Punjab through the songs, print and digital material, this paper shows that the movement was a response beyond the call to repeal the farm laws, claiming a higher moral ground based on the passion for farming and military service; and an expression and mobilisation of the past through the affective registers of despair, enthusiasm and betrayal. In doing so, the movement (2020–2021) generated enriched meanings and imaginaries of traffic that otherwise only comprised sites of speed and singular mobilities. Traffic became an intersection of history and memory embodied through performance mapping the ‘non-place’ infrastructures creating temporarily ‘settled places’.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"71 1","pages":"512 - 533"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44034063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"India’s Evolving Neoliberal Regime of Dispossession: From the Anti-SEZ Movement to the Farm Law Protests","authors":"Kenneth Bo Nielsen, A. Nilsen","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116932","url":null,"abstract":"What do the protests against the farm laws of the Modi regime tell us about the trajectory of neoliberalisation in India? In this article, we address this question through a comparative analysis of the farm law protests and movements against land dispossession that mushroomed in many parts of India in the wake of the passing of India's SEZ Act in 2005. Both movements have explicitly targeted neoliberal policies that aggressively sought to remove obstacles to capitalist accumulation. However, the two movements are separated by roughly 15 years, and in effect target two distinctly different forms of dispossession—one predominantly coercive, the other predominantly market-driven. This begs questions as to whether the emergence of the farm law protests is indexical of new shifts in Indian neoliberalism? We argue that the answer to this question is a qualified yes. Through comparison and discussion of anti-dispossession struggles and the anti-farm laws protests, carried out in dialogue with the literature on regimes of dispossession, we develop a heuristic periodisation of Indian neoliberalisation and argue that the now-repealed farm laws and the strong farmers' resistance to them are indexical of India moving towards a 'rollover' form of neoliberalism.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"71 1","pages":"582 - 600"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43939666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agriculture and New Farm Laws in India: A Study of Probable Impacts on Marginal and Small Farmers","authors":"G. Sahay","doi":"10.1177/00380229221116930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221116930","url":null,"abstract":"The insistent push towards privatisation of the agrarian sector is epitomised in the now repealed farm laws, and field data from thirteen Bhojpuri villages in Bihar, reveals that they would have further weakened the vulnerable position of marginal and small farmers. These laws would have enabled private traders and the corporate sector to manipulate the agriculture market in their favour. This article states that the new farm laws, rather than bringing about positive changes in agriculture, as proclaimed by the government, would aggravate rural conditions further and enhance the process of de-peasantisation.","PeriodicalId":39369,"journal":{"name":"The Sociological Bulletin","volume":"71 1","pages":"566 - 581"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47859614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}