218 research outputs found
Gail and Bharat: Somnath Waghmare's tale of love, resistance, and radical imagination
No full textFeminist scholar and activist Gail Omvedt’s legacy endures – not just in her writings, but in every act of courage that defies the logic of caste. Dr Ruhi Khan, Professor Shakuntala Banaji and Professor Meena Dhanda reflect on Somnath Waghmare’s film Gail and Bharat, which ensures that Omvedt’s story, beautifully entwined with that of her activist husband Bharat Patankar, remains part of India’s collective memory
Confronting denials of casteism
Full text link© 2021 The Authors. Published by Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.7610Punjab-born Meena Dhanda moved to the UK in 1987 as a Commonwealth Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. There she became a researcher specializing on caste among Punjabi youth both in the UK and Punjab (Dhanda 1993; Dhanda 2009). In 1992, she started teaching Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton, a city with a large concentration of Punjabi-speaking people of Indian origin (2011 census). She has since published several articles on caste in the UK (Dhanda 2020, 2017, 2014) and has become one of the important voices in the debates on the prevalence of casteism in the UK. She joined the UK anti-caste movement in 2008. In 2013, she was appointed Principal Investigator [PI] of a research project on “Caste in Britain” funded by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also regularly appeared in British media, as featured in the documentary Caste Aside (Mogul 2017) and was the sole consultant for a BBC1 documentary: Hindus: Do we have a caste problem? (Qayum 2019), which has been viewed by over 1 million people.
She talked about her anti-caste activism experience in the UK with Nicolas Jaoul, a French anthropologist who has specialized on the Ambedkarite movement in India and worked on its British counterpart as well (Jaoul 2006, and in this special issue)
Caste in Britain: Socio-Legal Review
Full text linkMeena Dhanda was the Principle Investigator of the consortium of experts which produced the report.Background and aims of the project In April 2013, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was enacted. Section 97 of the Act requires government to introduce a statutory prohibition of caste discrimination into British equality law by making caste ‘an aspect of’ the protected characteristic of race in the Equality Act 2010. In light of this, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) contracted a team of academics drawn from different research institutions to conduct an independent study in two parts: • a review of existing socio-legal research on British equality law and caste; and • two supporting events (for experts and stakeholders). This report (Dhanda et al, 2014a) details the findings from the first part of the study and is best read alongside the report of the experts’ seminar and stakeholders’ workshop (Dhanda et al, 2014b)
Confronting Denials of Casteism An Interview with Prof. Meena Dhanda, a UK-Based Anti-caste Academic Activist
No full textInternational audienc
Hindutva and the University
No full textThe sustained assaults on universities and schools in Kashmir, the long-standing discrimination against Dalits and minorities at Indian universities, and the recent armed attacks on students and faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University in India all draw attention to the way in which questions of knowledge—its production and dissemination—are fundamentally, and violently, imbricated with the project of Indian, and particularly Hindu, nationalism.
The assault on public university students is part of the battle over categories such as nation, borders, autonomy, and more recently citizenship. In addition to incursions on institutions of knowledge and their patrons – which range from physical violence to efforts to delegitimise opposing views by constructing them as ‘anti-national’ – Hindutva organisations such as the RSS, as well as its networks and adherents in Western academic contexts, also aim to promote intellectual work and academic knowledge that aligns with their political ideology.
This panel will discuss the role played by pedagogy and knowledge production in the Hindu nationalist project, as well as the forms of learning, knowledge, and organising that are seen as threats to it, and then met with violence. In doing so, it will place the recent and widely discussed attacks on Indian university students within the long history of India’s military occupations, and everyday violence against minorities in India, and against the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
Speakers:
• Mehroosh Tak, Kashmir Solidarity Movement
• Akanksha Mehta, Goldsmiths, University of London
• Meena Dhanda, University of Wolverhampton
• Rahul Rao, SOAS, University of London
Chair:
• Akshi Singh, Queen Mary University of London
The event is organised by Queen Mary's South Asia Forum and published as a podcast by The Polis Projec
Confronting Denials of Casteism An Interview with Prof. Meena Dhanda, a UK-Based Anti-caste Academic Activist
No full textInternational audienc
Freedom from Caste: New Beginnings in Transdisciplinary Scholarship
No full textThis is the Editorial to the Special Issue titled \u27Freedom from Caste: Anti-caste Thought, Politics and Culture\u27, guest edited by Karthick Ram Manoharan and Meena Dhand
The concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism
Full text link© 2022 The Author. Published by Wiley on 12/07/2022. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13147The article considers three interlocking ways in which we can understand the concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism in the Indian diaspora. First, at the level of experience—of UK activists and campaigners—it has been found that the concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism is not conclusively determined at this level. Second, by a juxtaposition of the conceptual apparatus of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ the article considers the fault lines—illuminating or obfuscating—that appear in conceptualising anti-casteism as a form of anti-racism. Here, the sociality of caste is found to be important, the operation of racialisation underpinning anti-racist practice. Finally, by considering the legal apparatus available in a given jurisdiction (UK), the article evaluates the feasibility of measures that might facilitate the actualising of anti-casteism as a form of anti-racism through the practice of litigation to allow a pragmatic capturing of the experience of casteism as a form of racism
Temporality, authorial intentions, and truth in video game fiction
Full text linkA thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.This thesis examines the claim that video games differ fundamentally from other
media in terms of fictional truth. Fictional truth has been treated extensively in the
field of philosophy of fiction, primarily in relation to literature and, to a certain
extent, film, but video games have been far too neglected. Truth in game fiction
has been discussed by game scholars, and one prevalent view is that fictional
truth in games can be altered through the interaction of the player. Scholars
support this claim with reference to the purportedly unique nature of games as a
medium in terms of temporality and authorial intentions, asserting that these two
factors determine truth differently in game fiction.
Game scholars often argue that video game stories have other temporal
properties than novels and films, that game stories take place in the present and
that this makes it possible for players to alter the truth-value of fictional
propositions. They also argue that games have an interactive fictional truth, and
that the player is some kind of author. However, by applying theories from
philosophy of fiction, and with a methodology based in analytic philosophy, the
thesis refutes these claims. I show that there are fundamental issues with their
conception of time in fiction and that they fail to show why the arguments used to
defend this conception are applicable exclusively to games. I also show that they
fail to connect their claims regarding authorship to corresponding discussions in
philosophy of fiction, where there have been extensive debates surrounding the
importance of authorial intentions and to what extent these can determine the
fictional truth of a given work; the same issues making it problematic to ascribe too
much authority to the creator of a fictional work are retained and/or exacerbated
when players are seen as authors. The thesis thus refutes common claims in
game studies and expands the scope of philosophy of fiction
Race, Power, and Order in Russian Anti-Tajik Discourse on Social Media
No full textThis contribution traces the origins of anti-Tajik discourse on Russian social media in the wake of the Crocus City Hall attack. Building on the literature on race and ethnicity in the Soviet and Post-Soviet context, this article argues that public reactions on social media reflect the Soviet nationalities policy, which created a climate conducive to ethnopluralism. While race was not a category in the Soviet Union’s internal policy language, a lot of the current xenophobic language in Russia assumes certain characteristics that are baked into modern hierarchies of race and ethnicity. However, race is not the only dimension in the contemporary far-right belief system, and several social mechanisms are necessary to create a racially pure state. This article proposes to map far-right ideology along three axes: race, power, and order, thereby avoiding the theoretical and empirical confusion that might arise with the categorization of far-right movements. By mapping the far-right ideology in Russia, this contribution showcases different radicalization avenues of far-right rhetoric and the possibility of global far-right alliances. Finally, the case study of anti-Tajik discourse illustrates the way social media users conceptualize national identity and Otherness in the context of a radicalizing far-right government
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