Suchergebnisse

Abstract
With complex sociopolitical contours around the idea of ethnicity, identity and citizenship, communities are experiencing unprecedented violence and vulnerabilities. The life and circumstances of one of such contentious community, Rohingya, is a telling example of an assault on their identity, culture, and history. The state sponsored violence and persecution had forced them to flee Myanmar. Denied recognition, as refugee or asylum seeker anywhere in the world, more than a million people from the community has become 'stateless' and living in a precarious condition in the camps in Bangladesh. This article explains the process whereby a community's identity and citizenship were undermined, forcing them to become a stateless community. The article explores: what role identity, ethnicity, and politics play vis-a-vis minority communities at the 'margin'? What complex challenges does it pose for community work and how community work attempts to take on that challenge? The article explains how sociocultural specificity poses a challenge for community workers to rely on their received wisdom. Therefore, approaches, strategies, and skills require substantive modification and alignment. Drawing upon personal interviews with key informants (coordinators of humanitarian response, community leaders, camp residents, and host community) and analysis of the documentary sources, the article brings forth the nature and character of community work undertaken by people coming from the varied disciplinary background.

Based on the author's engagement with humanitarian response after massive floods in the Kosi region in Bihar, this article highlights that the disaster caused by floods is not an accidental interruption but is linked to the socio-political structure of the state. Through an examination of the processes of social exclusion in times of disaster, the article situates the role of state and society in the context of recent floods. This article deals with the discrimination and exclusion of weaker sections of the society during rescue, relief and rehabilitation process. Individual and communities' powerlessness, as was encountered immediately after floods, were put in the perspective of the structural situation in the region.

Abstract
The construction of migrant population across India–Bangladesh borders is premised on cultural affiliation, religious sentiments and the contingent political economy. With a history of partition in different phases, the subjective conceptions of identity of migrants are layered and complex. The article unravels how identities of migrants are shaped in everyday life through the frame of legality–illegality, religious–political and economic–social aspects. Drawing on previous research and empirical engagement, the article engages with the questions on citizenship, residency, identity, belonging, exclusion and inclusion. The field work in the borderland district of North 24 Parganas provides rich description about the life and circumstances of migrants at the threshold of security and insecurity, belonging and unbelonging around layers of caste and communal tangle. The article presents a grounded understanding on the politics of documenting and phenomenon of maintaining undocumentedness. To explain the social construction of identity, the article explores the role of Hindu nationalist ideas that influences the negotiation of migrant populations around religious lines; either accepted, ignored, patronized or kept insecure, susceptible to fear and exclusion.

Abstract
Social Policy is concerned with minimising poverty and inequality through redistribution of goods and services. In the twentieth century, after the Second World War, European parliamentary democracies enlarged its ambit by making social policy an important instrument to create equality setting the benchmark for other countries. For the new independent countries in the global South, such as India, social policy followed different trajectories. In the aftermath of independence, India relied on preventive instruments to address the effects of famine, de-industrialisation and high levels of deprivation. Despite achieving high economic growth and rapid poverty reduction in the following decades, its dependence on targeted poverty reduction programme has remained. Recently, there has been some attempt to replace these strategies by rights-based programmes supported by legal framework advocated by civil society groups. Through a case study of The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (referred to as FRA 2006), this article analyses the successes and failures in realising the goal of linking welfare provisions with the ideas of social citizenship and democratic rights. The article finds widening gulf in the interests of state actors and local community arising from the compromised interpretation of the social justice vision enshrined in FRA.

As countries shore up existing safeguards to address the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, India faces a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented proportions. Ninety per cent of the Indian workforce is employed in the unorganised sector; uncounted millions work in urban areas at great distances from rural homes. When the Government of India (GOI) announced the sudden 'lockdown' in March to contain the spread of the pandemic, migrant informal workers were mired in a survival crisis, through income loss, hunger, destitution and persecution from authorities policing containment and fearful communities maintaining 'social distance'. In this context, the article analyses how poverty, informality and inequality are accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of 'locked down' migrant workers. The article examines the nature and scope of existing social policy, designed under changing political regimes and a fluctuating economic climate, to protect this vulnerable group and mitigate dislocation, discrimination and destitution at this moment and in future.

AbstractThe growing informal nature of employment in the gig economy does not only merely provide employment for many but also causes exploitation, insecurity, and exclusion from social security because of its informal status. Workers in gig work often go through long working hours, low wages, fear of losing their job, and insecurity which result in their precarious life condition. They experience vulnerabilities related to their employment, residency status, and unfamiliarity with local frameworks—labor law, health, and safety hazards at work which certainly highlights precarious life situations. Besides precarity, gig workers from poor socio‐economic backgrounds often experience discrimination and exclusion because of their social positioning in society. Therefore, the article tries to unfold their experiences of exploitation and insecurity, struggles, and challenges. Further, the article also examines the contemporary agitation and resistance of gig workers against the exploitative policies of aggregators and state measures to address the problem of gig workers in India.

Through delineating the struggles and challenges of Dalits in making of the Dalit middle class, this article seeks to argue that the struggle and aspiration of Dalits to live a dignified life and urban as a space of 'liberation from caste' represents a high point in making of the new Dalit middle class. However, existing literature about the Dalit middle class revolves around identity, provision of reservation in education, employment and cultural assertion, but many unfolded narratives of the Dalit middle class exist. This article attempts to reveal the struggle and challenges of the new Dalit middle class to achieve the status of the middle class. Keeping this in mind further, this article aims to explore the transformations in everyday life of the new Dalit middle class regarding consumer behaviour and lifestyle. Besides this, the article provides a detailed narrative of the new Dalit middle class and about their experience of caste and class in the city.

This article explains the contemporary context that influences the policies and practices of community work in India. The transformation in the policy arena and welfare approach underlines the influence of neoliberal governmentality. We observe that neoliberalism as a political–economic approach is persuading socio-economic decisions and increasing market influence. Precisely, we are tracing the policy trajectory vis-à-vis informal sector workers who have adverse implications for their social security and social protection. By illustrating the current policy and legislative approach, we explain an uneasy relationship between neoliberalism, governmentality and welfare. The changes through new labour codes have restrained the minimal protection that was available to the workers. By granting significant flexibility to the employers at the cost of workers, neoliberal policies accentuate the predicament of precarity. Besides, recent policy changes have impacted community engagement with the poor and vulnerable. Through an analysis of neoliberal policies and strategies of governmentality, this article underscores the challenges for community engagements.

The increasing impact of neoliberalism across the globe means that a complex interplay of democratic, economic and managerial rationalities now frame the parameters and practices of community development. This book explores how contemporary politics, and the power relations it reflects and projects, is shaping the field today. This first title in the timely Rethinking Community Development series presents unique and critical reflections on policy and practice in Taiwan, Australia, India, South Africa, Burundi, Germany, the USA, Ireland, Malawi, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia and the UK. It addresses the global dominance of neoliberalism, and the extent to which practitioners, activists and programmes can challenge, critique, engage with or resist its influence. Addressing key dilemmas and challenges being navigated by students, academics, professionals and activists, this is a vital intellectual and practical resource

This book, the second title in the Rethinking Community Development series, starts from concern about increasing inequality worldwide and the re-emergence of community development in public policy debates. It argues for the centrality of class analysis and its associated divisions of power to any discussion of the potential benefits of community development. It proposes that, without such an analysis, community development can simply mask the underlying causes of structural inequality. It may even exacerbate divisions between groups competing for dwindling public resources in the context of neoliberal globalisation. Reflecting on their own contexts, a wide range of contributors from across the global north and south explore how an understanding of social class can offer ways forward in the face of increasing social polarisation. The book considers class as a dynamic and contested concept and examines its application in policies and practices past and present. These include local/global and rural/urban alliances, community organising, ecology, gender and education