1,720,965 research outputs found
A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath's The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India and the Study of Caste
No full textAbstract In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India , and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues
In the Zayat Built Before You: Biographies and Belonging of Buddhist Women in Myanmar (1860s-1980s)
No full text287 pagesThis dissertation is the first study of vernacular biographical writing composed by Buddhist monastic women in Myanmar, known in Burmese as thilashin. In 1979, the thilashin, Sayagyi Daw Zanawati (b.1904), head nun of the Sagaing Hills Khemethaka Nunnery, composed a 150-page biographical volume entitled, Head Teachers of the Sagaing Hills Khemethaka Nunnery. The volume was completed in preparation for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of Khemethaka’s 1904 establishment and published by a Yangon press in 1982. Narrating the lives of her forerunners—Khemethaka’s founder, Daw Medhawati (1862-1932), Medhawati’s trusted friend, administrative partner, and successor, Daw Konmari (1866-1962), and Konmari’s successor Daw Gunawati (b. 1888)—before turning to her own autobiography, Zanawati embeds the story of Khemethaka’s establishment, growth, and maintenance within and between multiple family histories, currents of broader Buddhist institutional change amidst regional Buddhist modernist movements and colonial-era administrative reforms, and the volatile regimes of political power that coincided with and followed Myanmar’s independence. This analysis of late twentieth century biographies of Buddhist women in Myanmar aims for neither the empirical reality of history, nor the emergent realities of ethnography, but for something in between: a study of the stakes of rhetorical self-presentation of Buddhist monastic women in late twentieth century Myanmar.Barred from ordination-based succession and kept aside of male monastic centers of institutional activity, thilashin remain subject to exclusion from the normative terms and spaces of male monastic identity and continuity. To overcome challenges of recognition and institutional legibility, Zanawati and her predecessors crafted their own expressions of Buddhist authority. Across the volume’s four entries, Zanawati mobilizes vernacular idioms of authority, affect, time, and space. This dissertation examines these four concurrent themes in relation to Zanawati’s four entries, tracing the ways that tacit theories of time and space, articulated in the affective register of personal encounters, inform they way women orient themselves, their relationships, and their claims to authority in a broader Buddhist institutional environment.2027-01-0
Hidden in Plain Sight: Decoding Inscriptions of Caste and Gender in Indian Computing
No full text245 pagesDespite claims of meritocracy, modernity, and progress, ascriptive social hierarchies like caste continue to prevail in the worlds of science and technology. This thesis explains how they are reconfigured in the modern context of computing, how they are sustained and kept hidden, how are they challenged by the oppressed, and the implications of understanding them for a future of equitable computing. Caste is a system of graded inequality that organizes social, cultural and economic life in South Asia. Modern, urban South Asian society understands itself as moving away from caste. Legal protections against untouchability and affirmative action policies are often cited as examples of how the caste system is no longer a problem. Specifically, the Information Technology industry in India is seen as a site of modernity, innovation, and a post-colonial model of excellence built on merit and accomplishment, unencumbered by “old” forms of hierarchy and privilege. Narratives of meritocracy frames caste as an ancient relic that is irrelevant to the modern, progressive and caste-blind worlds of computing and technology in India and in the growing Indian diasporic communities in countries like the US. Despite these claims, a number of stories of caste discrimination have recently emerged from the computing industry. These stories and marginalized caste communities have moved advocacy efforts and policies in the computing workplace and universities in the US to protect against caste discrimination. The debate on the existence and relevance of caste in the computing industry points to deeper tensions between ascriptive inequalities and the worlds of technology that are mutually shaped by long intertwined historical and contemporary processes. This thesis takes up a study of these tensions by exploring how relations of caste and gender manifest in worlds of computing. It is an ethnographic and a Dalit (formerly 'untouchable' in the caste system) feminist enquiry of the myth of castelessness and how it is manufactured, maintained, broken, and worked around in computing. This dissertation does three things: 1.) It offers a Dalit methodology of studying caste in nominally casteless worlds of computing, 2.) It explains how the myth of castelessnesss is produced and maintained with a recursive erasure of caste achieved through processes of preclusion, elision, codification and displacement in worlds of computing by upper castes, specifically in diversity and inclusion efforts. 3.) It analyzes how the myth of castelessness affects Dalit engineers and how they interrupt, subvert and navigate these nominally casteless, but in practice caste-laden, worlds of computing. This work argues that the lack of understanding and attention to caste has not meant that it is absent from worlds of technology but that the fraught nature of caste produces a challenge of legibility. This work offers a resolution of this challenge through careful consideration of historical and contemporary conditions of both groups - those who are most vulnerable to casteism as well as those who benefit the most from it. It shows that caste is a dynamic social relation that organizes the political economy of computing. It continues to shape relationships, cultures and understandings of computing with a particular tenacity and flexibility in the modern and global context. It explores how caste is inscribed as codes, markers, subjectivities and vocabulary in worlds of computing and how its naturalized, common-sense understanding produces the myth of castelessness while keeping caste alive in hiding in plain sight. It concludes with key takeaways for readers that show how a study of caste and gender in computing offers important insights and a new framework to understand power and inequality in computing
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Dalit Futures: Critical Caste Parenting and Dalit Women in Nepal
No full text132 pagesThis thesis interrogates the persistence of Nepal’s caste system through my lived experiences alongside the often-overlooked everyday experiences of Dalit women. Employing autoethnography and juxtaposing these narratives with the growing body of scholarship and debates surrounding entrenched social stratifications, this study introduces “critical caste parenting” (CCP) as a concept and analytical framework. CCP explores how caste ideologies are transmitted, negotiated, and resisted within families, contributing to their persistence in broader society. Drawing from critical race parenting scholarship, the thesis centers the agency and lived experiences of Dalit women. By exploring the intergenerational dynamics of parenting as a site of both social reproduction and potential resistance, the thesis argues for the role of the CCP in imagining a Dalit futurity free from caste-based oppression. This work contributes to critical Dalit and caste studies, feminist thought, and understandings of the Nepali state’s role in the formation and persistence of caste-based stratification
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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