Suchergebnisse

Preface of the Book: As a researcher in India, I was looking for some answers for my research. I started to look for the answers and reached a point where the answers were in big dusty files and computer systems lodged in some corner of a building where entry was prohibited for the commoners. In an attempt to reach the authorities, I tried many options. I tried going to the office, tried using acquaintance to reach resource persons and even tried to approach these people through social media and email. Kept waiting for answers. Never got replies. In some cases, there were replies, but no information. This went on for a while. Then Eureka! I filed a request using The Right to Information Act, 2005 and my inbox had answers. Signed and certified by the same people who didn't reply earlier. Here am I presenting this technique for researchers in India. So? Are you in a Research Program in India? Or studying about India? Well, you will be surprised to know that there exists a method for researchers to obtain information from Government Departments in India using a law called the Right to Information Act, 2005. This law is mostly used in India for public advocacy and transparency, but this book brings forth a promising use of the law by researchers researching on areas from across the disciplines. This book frees the mind of the researcher to look at the RTI Act as a tool to obtain information which otherwise would be very difficult to obtain from the Government Departments. A step by step guide filled with important practical suggestions for you to successfully draft your first application in a way that the Public Authority gives you the information that you require for your research. Written by a researcher in India who had used the RTI act a decade ago. Used then for social activism, knowing very little that he would use it later for important research in Disease Spread in the Built Environment. If you are a researcher in India, of any stream or discipline, you must read this book, designed like a manual, as an ...

AbstractIn late 2012 the first civil marriage in Lebanon and, at the end of the following year, the first Lebanese baby to be not registered as belonging to a community, were officially recognized months after administrative delay and legal argumentation. These recognitions unsettled the Lebanese consensus that all citizens belonged to one of the communities of Muslims, Christians, or Jews that, moreover, had long held exclusive jurisdiction over the marriages of their members. A space seemed to have opened up in which a secular alternative could be pursued in the conduct of matters of state and personal life. Based on an analysis of the constitutive processes of this recognition, I trace the lineaments of a distinctively Lebanese secularism, which, I argue, consists of the assumption that marriage and identity are joined together in a mutually dependent relationship. I show that although the recognition of civil marriage and non‐belonging may seem to drive a wedge between marriage and identity, they are in fact a different way of rearticulating this assumption and the attitudes, norms, and practices that sustain it. Far from securing their stable separation, the recognition shifts their point of tension from the community to the individual, and from legal to administrative power.

This article examines the relationship between humanitarian aid and ecologically unequal exchange in the context of post-disaster reconstruction. I assess the manner in which humanitarian aid became a central part of the reconstruction process in India's Tamil Nadu state following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This article focuses on how the humanitarian "gift" of housing became a central plank of the state's efforts to push fishers inland while opening up coastal lands for various economic development projects such as ports, infrastructure, industries, and tourism. As part of the state and multilateral agency financed reconstruction process, the humanitarian aid regime provided "free" houses as gifts to recipients while expecting in return the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast. The humanitarian "gift" therefore helped depoliticize critical issues of land and resources, location and livelihood, which prior to the tsunami were subjects of long-standing political conflicts between local fisher populations and the state. The gift economy in effect played into an ongoing conflict over land and resources and effectively sought to ease the alienation of fishers from their coastal commons and near shore marine resource base. I argue that humanitarian aid, despite its associations with benevolence and generosity, presents a troubling and disempowering set of options for political struggles over land, resources, and social entitlements such as housing, thereby intensifying existing ecological and economic inequalities.

AbstractLike most modern institutions in nineteenth-century non-Western states, modern school systems in 1870s Japan and Egypt were initially mimetic of the West. Modeled on the British South Kensington method and on its French equivalent, drawing education in Japanese and Egyptian schools was taught not as an art but as a functional technique that prepared children for modern professions like industrial design. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Kensington method of drawing education had lost its popularity in Europe, but more than a decade before its decline Japanese and Egyptian educators began teaching children genres of drawing that did not exist in European schools. In 1888 drawing education in Japan saw the replacement of the pencil with the brush, which was recast from the standard instrument of writing and painting of early modern East Asia to an instrument that came to represent Japanese art. In 1894 drawing education in Egypt saw the introduction of "Arabesque designs" as the Egyptian national art. This transformation of drawing education from a functional method that undergirded industrial capitalism into an art that inscribed national difference marked the end of the mimetic moment. On one hand, a national art served to make the nation into an autonomous subject that could claim a national culture in what was becoming a world of cultural nations. On the other, a national art helped to make the nation into an aesthetically seductive core whose magnetic appeal could bring together the national community.

Within the wide range of research and studies about Palestinian development, especially in the past twenty years, a new school of literature has recently emerged, drawing on heterodox economic and social science, settler-colonial studies, and the widening critique of neoliberalism. Studies in this issue of JPS are a selection of the intellectual output of a younger generation of scholars who have challenged the thrust of preceding literature produced by international and donor organizations, academics, and Israeli and Palestinian research projects. This new body of research critiques and proposes alternatives to scholarship that placed study of Palestinian economy and society within the parameters of the peace process, premised upon the supposed benefits of globalization and liberalization and more recently, reform and state-building as a precursor to national liberation.