9 research outputs found
“We cannot be touched”: Body and voice in women’s protests in tea plantations
No full textContesting the understanding of women workers in tea plantations as victims this paper maps their agency through active expressions of protests. While performing the socially ascribed gender roles, responsibilities and practices, there are instances where the women express their agency in definite, visible ways. In understanding the duality of agency and vulnerability, the central role of the body and narratives has to be explored. Protests are manifested through bodily actions where the body is literally put in the line of actions, verbalizing narratives contrary to the dominant narrative. At the same time, however, the examination of the layers within the protest brings out the embeddness of the ascribed gendered roles and position. Through data obtained from two tea gardens in North Bengal, India, this paper explores how protests are played out through the women’s bodies and voices and how this points to a dual and not necessarily contradictory co-existence of agency and subjugation
Nurturing resistance : agency and activism of women tea plantation workers in a gendered space
No full textThis thesis offers an analysis of labour relations and social space in the
tea gardens of north-east India. Existing literature provides us with an
understanding of how the plantations operate as economic spaces, but in
so doing they treat workers as undifferentiated economic beings defined
only by their class identity. Space, however, has to be animated to be
meaningful. Through participant observation and semi-structured
interviews I explore the plantations as actual lived spaces where people
are bound by and resist constraints. Multiple intersecting identities play
out within these social spaces making them ethnic, religious, and caste
spaces in addition to being gendered. Focusing on these intersectional
identities, I demonstrate how region, ethnicity, party affiliation, caste,
religion are played out and how they are invoked at certain points by the
women workers. The articulations of identity not only determine a sense
of belonging or non-belonging to a space but also how one belongs.
Within the physical sites of the plantation, I examine how the women
perceive these spaces and how, in moving between ideas of home/world,
public/private, these very binaries are negated. The strict sexual division
of labour primarily in the workplace but also in the household and
villages inscribe the physical sites with certain gendered meanings and
performances. The women negotiate these in their everyday lives and
shape these spaces even as they are shaped by them. Conditioned by
gender norms and the resultant hierarchy their narratives can be read as
stories of deprivation and misery, but looking deeper their agency can
also be uncovered. The lives of my research participants show how the
social spaces within which they operate are not static; in spite of spatial
controls there are the many minute acts of resistance through which the
women work the existing restraints to their least disadvantage. Focussing
on the minute acts of insubordination, deceit and even confrontation I
elucidate how the women made use of the relations of subordination to
pave spaces of resistance and sometimes even of autonomy. Furthermore,
not all acts of agency are minute or unspectacular. I map instances of
highly visible, volatile and aggressive protests apparently challenging the
accepted social codes within which they function. In expressing
themselves, the women use the available political repertories of protest in
forms of strikes, blockades, street plays, etc. Through these instances of
activism they appropriate and become visible in the public realm and
challenge the accepted ways in which social spaces and norms play out.
Despite their articulate nature, these protests usually seek to address
immediate demands and do not escalate into social movements. Also
while volatile in action, the protests seek legitimacy within the accepted
gender codes that operate in their everyday life in the plantation
Introduction. Debating Intersectionalities: Challenges for a Methodological Framework
No full textIntersectionality is primarily an organizing principle which calls for reflexivity in the study of social characteristics, such that one marginality is not substituted for another and lived experiences are not treated as generic and undifferentiated. Critiques of intersectionality have feared that intersectionality results in the fragmentation of the opposition to structural oppression. We argue for the potentialities of a reflexive use of intersectionality rather than its rejection, for this intersectionality has to be applied as a method of research. Lived experiences provide the possibility to explore how intersectionality works in practice. By mapping the fractured nature of the everyday, a lived-experience approach allows us to be open to competing interpretations, thereby not only illustrating the multi-dimensionality of what is constructed as hegemonic fact, but also can in fact script some resistance to it. Consequently, this article thus argues in addition in favor of a radical intersectional praxis as a means of building coalitions across marginalities
Solidarities in and through Resistance: Rethinking Alliance-Building through Protests in Plantations in India
No full textThe tea plantations of Dooars in West Bengal, India are among the primary tea growing belts in the country. The 2000s saw a crisis in the plantation sector with the closing down of some of the plantations and curtailed operation in others coupled with traditionally low wages in the sector. The paper uses this moment of crisis of livelihood to interrogate resistance and solidarity. Focussing on three protests — one organised by trade unions, another by social movement organisation and the third by the women workers of the plantation, the paper looks to understand the divergences and convergences between the three. How are intersectional alliances formed and what part of one’s identity is foregrounded in such alliances? Who owns protest movements? How does language of protests differ across these? How does the neo liberal state interact with such challenges to its authority? Social movement literature tends to focus on how professional activists create coalitions to strengthen movements. Through the ethnography of the three protests, this article suggests ways in which activists are also produced by movements. It asks can collective actions energized through affective bonds achieve ends which institutional social arrangements are constrained from striving for
Towards what end? Collective bargaining and the making and unmaking of the working class
No full textIn contemporary literature, bargaining is often construed as an instrument in the hands of the employer, a practice that is sustained by undermining worker solidarity and promoting interests of privileged unionized workers at the expense of other workers. This article challenges such narratives by foregrounding the idea of solidarity and highlighting the complex interplay of solidarity emanating from the multiple ways consciousness about worker identity plays out. Drawing on the literature on new social movements (NSM) and industrial relations (IR), the article shows that the relevance of bargaining is not merely confined to instrumental economic goals but extends to politically constitutive action. In the process of bargaining the political agency of workers and distinctive articulations of solidarity are identified. This article presents and classifies three kinds of solidarity that correspond to the three dimensions of political consciousness, namely critical solidarity, limited solidarity and absent solidarity across cases that are shaped by contextual realities of labour politics.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Too Much or Too Little? Paradoxes of Disability and Care Work in India
No full textThe notion of care often normalizes within it violence that can have devastating effects on the lives of disabled people. Cripping care critiques the normalization of such notions of care. This paper articulates this paradox of care within the lived experiences of disabled girls and their mothers as primary carers. Through extensive case studies of young, disabled girls and their carers in villages of West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Odisha in India—where abject poverty, lack of resources, and a dearth of sensitized social relationships remain entrenched—this paper problematizes care relationships, moving beyond social model approaches to include understandings from the Global South of what it might mean to crip care. The paper explores care relationships within the family, which valorize the emotional and physical labor of women in the garb of motherhood while negating the personhood of disabled daughters. While the care relationship between mother and daughter is enhanced by the affective bonds of empathy, emotional responsiveness, and perceptual attentiveness that transform intimate tasks into relationships of trust and demonstrations of trustworthiness, in the unforgiving realities of rural poverty in India the collective act of survival of such families needs to be contextualized within the debates about cripping care
Salt Lake Archives: A Report
No full textSalt Lake was developed as a township in the eastern fringe of Kolkata through reclamation of parts of the vast marshlands. In 2021, the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata started the initiative of archiving Salt Lake city to commemorate 50 years of the township in 2022. The process began by tracing the origin of Salt Lake in old books, archival records, newspapers, assembly debates, census data and interviews of early residents, workers, planners etc. This report provides a clear, informative and concise account of the Salt Lake Archives
in Special Section: Aspirational Mobility, edited by Eva Gerharz and Supurna Banerjee
No full textSpiegel A. Social Imaginaries, Transnational Occupational Cultures and Sense of Place: The Case of German Corporate Managers in China . Transfers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. 2024;14(2):10-31
Alerta global : políticas, movimientos sociales y futuros en disputa en tiempos de pandemia
No full textLa pandemia del coronavirus ha dejado el mundo en suspenso en 2020. Nuestras vidas y rutinas se han visto trastocadas. La incertidumbre se convirtió en regla. A la gravedad de la crisis sanitaria, se suma la urgencia de afrontar los retrocesos democráticos y de derechos, la emergencia climática, la crisis ecosocial, las asimetrías globales y las profundas desigualdades. Frente al momento dramático de nuestra humanidad, los pasos que demos podrán ser decisivos. El futuro está en disputa y los escenarios posibles son múltiples. Alerta global reunió los análisis de 48 autoras y autores de 28 países y de todos los continentes para discutir las múltiples implicaciones sociopolíticas de la pandemia. En sus páginas hay una mirada global sobre la crisis actual y el mundo contemporáneo, la forma en la que se exacerban las desigualdades y se diversifican las formas de control social, pero también sobre cómo se abren nuevas solidaridades, movimientos sociales, vías para renovar el pensamiento crítico y posibilidades de otros mundos posibles
