861 research outputs found
Bahumukhī mana, bahurupī prema
No full textThe document contains a novel written by the Bengali author Nirpendra Kumar Basu (1898-1979). The monograph is from the private collection of Sharmadip Basu
Building the New Turkey: State-space, Infrastructure, and Citizenship
No full textThis dissertation explores the contentious and contradictory ways the development of authoritarian infrastructure shapes state-citizenship relations, using the urban as an entry point through which such relations are (re)ordered and (re)produced. To do so, it analyzes the recent housing and mega transit projects in Istanbul as a common thread that weaves through state-space, citizenship, and urbanization. In this context, the research has three interrelated core arguments. First, it argues that within the last 20 years, the Turkish government created a new citizenship contract that presented the provision of infrastructure (housing and transit projects) as its primary mechanism to overcome existing inequalities and to offer full-fledged citizenship to its subjects. Second, it argues that what makes such a citizenship contract possible is the state-led process of commodification and production of parceled land (arsa in Turkish) through urban infrastructure, built on the Neo-Ottoman fantasies of unity, communal belonging, and collective prosperity. Finally, the research argues that such a citizenship model has its own contradictions and instead of overcoming existing inequalities, it creates new forms of socio-spatial and economic unevenness. The states failure to deliver its infrastructural promises reflect the gaps in the social contract, opening new spaces for citizens to reclaim and redefine their rights and responsibilities
Rethinking Toronto's Middle Landscape: Spaces of Planning, Contestation, and Negotiation
No full textThis dissertation weaves together an examination of the concept and meanings of suburb and suburban, historical geographies of suburbs and suburbanization, and a detailed focus on Scarborough as a suburban space within Toronto in order to better understand postwar suburbanization and suburban change as it played out in a specific metropolitan context and locale. With Canada and the United States now thought to be suburban nations, critical suburban histories and studies of suburban problems are an important contribution to urbanistic discourse and human geographical scholarship.
Though suburbanization is a global phenomenon and suburbs have a much longer history, the vast scale and explosive pace of suburban development after the Second World War has a powerful influence on how suburb and suburban are represented and understood. One powerful socio-spatial imaginary is evident in discourses on planning and politics in Toronto: the city-suburb or urban-suburban divide. An important contribution of this dissertation is to trace out how the city-suburban divide and meanings attached to city and suburb have been integral to the planning and politics that have shaped and continue to shape Scarborough and Toronto.
The research employs an investigative approach influenced by Michel Foucaults critical and effective histories and Bent Flyvbjergs methodological guidelines for phronetic social science. To do this, the analysis provided draws principally from archival materials, newspapers, plans and policy documents, and interviews to reveal how socio-spatial landscapes were made and remade both in thought and practice. In this regard, Henri Lefebvres theoretical ruminations on the production of space are also important. Even where not made explicit, the making and remaking of the spaces discussed reveal the near constant work of the conceived to intervene in and reorder the lived.
The dissertation concludes with a discussion of how we might ask new and different questions about past and current rounds of city-building, so that good and just places to live are made more possible
Outer Length Scales in Nocturnal Stable Boundary Layers
No full textRecently, Basu and Holstlag (2021) proposed a unified framework for describing outer length scales (OLS). By utilizing this framework, we document various characteristics of OLS in nocturnal boundary layers over the US Great Plains.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Atmospheric Remote Sensin
Forced Displacement and Racialization: The Colombian Experience
No full textThis thesis compares the differential processes of racialization from a Colombian perspective experienced by three groups of displaced migrants in the global North and South. First, internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have been forced to move to the Coffee Region in Colombia after leaving their homes in rural regions between 2000 and 2015. Second, Colombian refugees who had similarly sought asylum in Toronto, Canada, and who migrated between 1997 and 2004. Third, Venezuelan migrants who arrived in the Coffee Region in Colombia between 2014 and 2018 due to the deteriorating living conditions and crisis in Venezuela. This research contributes to further theoretical debates on critical geographies of race, postcolonial geography, and urban geography in relation to forced migration. The objective of this research is to question understandings of race and racism, particularly how space and mobility affect the dynamics of racialization through such diverse experiences of forced displacement. The main argument of this research is that the process of forced displacement (as experienced by the Colombian IDPs and Venezuelan migrants to the Coffee Region in Colombia, and for the Colombian refugees to Toronto), results in spatialities of racialization. While escaping violence and economic hardship, forced migrants are subjected to oppressive and exclusionary processes that make them vulnerable to systemic racism and microaggressions. This comparative research uses a combination of qualitative methodologies, including in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field diary, and policy and document reviews. The research reveals that despite different experiences of internal displacement or transnational migration, spatial processes of racialization present similar dynamics of white supremacy as the dominant racial ideology
Cupid Joins the War
No full textThe author explores the history of love and sex in war though the ages. This monograph is from the private collection of Sharmadip Basu, Kolkata, W.B., India
Subaltern Cosmopolitanisms: Place-making and Translocal Space in Sikh Diaspora Across Hong Kong, Vancouver and Toronto
No full textHow does one see what one cannot see? With the objective to move past the orientalizing visual gaze – of exotic temples, food and turbans – this study instead draws attention to the itinerant and elusive place-making which are often overlooked in geographical and urban inquiries of othered religions. Multicultural frames of cosmopolitanism have centered on a visual and consumerist approach to order diverse places and peoples while reproducing binaries of public-private and secular-religious. Vinay Gidwani differently imagines a subaltern cosmopolitanism of dynamic practices of migrants that are transgressive of state and capitalist urban configurations. Similarly, AbdouMaliq Simone's notion of a worlding from below brings out the seemingly disparate activities of migrants in the Global South that characterize a lesser seen circuit of urbanity overlooked from top-down snapshots of urban infrastructure and financial capital. This study explores sensuous geographies of Sikhs to contribute to a conceptualization of worlding and cosmopolitanism. The theoretical framework considers the intertwining of religion and race at the source of the making of the problematic figure of Man and its secular-religious dichotomy. In this, the study aims to destabilize the world religion and liberal humanist paradigms which shape the modern episteme and the productions of worlds. The work of decolonial and transnational feminists further a poetic intervention to consider subaltern knowledge practices, particularly of women of colour, that go unrecognized in their embodied resistance. Following M. Jacqui Alexander's call for re-wiring the senses and a sacred feminist praxis, and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s tuning to the musical storytelling, this study brings attention to sensuous poetics and topologies of Sikhs that escape representable cartographies. In that, Sikh spaces, epistemologies, and itineraries are conceptualized to give depth to a Sikh geographical imagination. Utilizing multi-sited ethnographies, qualitative interviews, and community mapping, the research followed diaspora Sikhs in Hong Kong, Greater Vancouver, and Greater Toronto. I argue that an everyday horizontal spatiality of relation emerges in Sikh processes of worlding and translocal space, which give insights to a subaltern cosmopolitanism, different from state and secular discourses of multiculturalism
A Flyvbjergian perspective on public elementary school closures in Toronto: a question of 'rationality' or 'power'?
No full textThe notion of social capital in contemporary societies is viewed as being necessary for the rejuvenation of civil society. However, such assumptions are based on inclusionary democratic practices; the heterogeneity of societal needs and the underlying power structures are often not taken into account. The author explores the possibility of examining neighbourhood-based social capital along the lines of 'intrinsic' (within neighbourhood) and 'extrinsic' (neighbourhood - city) relations. A spatial comparison of such preexisting, dense, dynamic networks of everyday mundane activities often leads to a better understanding of how power is created, maintained, and eventually used in times of neighbourhood crises. More specifically, by using a Flyvbjergian perspective of rationality and power, the author combines the notion of social capital as proposed by Putnam with Epstein's framework of participation within schools, to identify variations in civic activities within Public Elementary School Districts in Toronto (TDSB). Drawing from a unique descriptive dataset on parental and community participation available from the TDSB, and by combining it with enumeration-area data aggregated at the school-district level, this framework is empirically tested to gain an understanding of how such links relate to school-closure decisions. Within the context of education reform in Ontario, the results reveal the paradoxical nature of social capital in promoting and subjugating notions of democracy and civil society.
Magnanimous Kunti by Samaresh Basu/ সমরেশ বসুর কলমে মনস্বিনী কুন্তী
No full textSamaresh Basu wrote a number of books based on Puran-Mahabharata under the pseudonym Bhramar and Kalkoot. Such as, ‘Shamba (1978)’, ‘Juddher Sesh Senapati (1984)’, ‘Prachetas (1984)’, \u27Pritha (1986)\u27, ‘Antim Pranay (1987)’ etc. ‘Pritha’ was published in the magazine \u27Prasad\u27 under the pseudonym \u27Bhramar\u27. In such books, the author analyzed the traditional story of the Puranas in a new perspective.
One of the memorable Panchakanyas in Puranas, Empress Kunti has been recreated in the light of the author\u27s spirit in this book. In the present article we will discuss how the character of Kunti has been recreated by Samaresh Basu in \u27Pritha\u27.
At the beginning of the story, before reaching the context of Kunti, the author undertakes a very realistic analysis of heaven-hell, Gods-demons, Samhita era-Puranic era, male-female relationship, marriage customs, child birth and the position of women in society. Then he explained the solitude, self-immolation and transition of Kunti from a feminist perspective.
The story of love-marriage-motherhood-heroism-restraint-pain-sacrifice of this remarkable female character of Mahabharata has been captured in a new way in the unique writing of Kalkoot. Inventing many thoughtful arguments the author tried to establish the father-son relationship between Yudhisthira-Vidura and Karna-Durbasha. How the author incarnated new contexts in the familiar story of Mahabharata and how he made it acceptable by arranging relevant arguments in favour of his new thoughts – this essay will try to elaborate these points
Negotiating Acts of Citizenship in an Era of Neoliberal Reform: The Game of School Closures
No full textIn Ontario, the landscape of public education has changed quite rapidly during the past decade. Critics argue that neoliberal policies concerning privatization and marketization in the education system have produced different outcomes for different groups. One of the most sensitive issues during these years has been the closure of schools. Over three years (1999-2002) nearly 200 schools were closed in Ontario. These many changes, however, have not gone uncontested and communities have adapted to these circumstances in different ways. Acts of citizenship range from coping independently to challenging these changes collectively. This article examines the failures and successes of various acts of citizenship in challenging neoliberal governmental rationalities. More specifically, it traces the difficult process of school closure negotiations using examples from Toronto. Based primarily on participant observation carried out over a year, it examines the politics of the community consultation process among a heterogeneous 'family of schools' amid mixed incomes and varying capacities and needs. Through these case studies it explores whether these acts are inclusionary or exclusionary, homogenizing or diversifying, positive or negative. The evolution of the planning process is examined at three different periods (1998, 1999, 2000), demonstrating the slow and steady construction, advancement and legitimization of neoliberal policy, and correspondingly the spaces and citizens it makes and unmakes through this process. The article concludes with a framework of collective action highlighting relational aspects of citizenship that lead to positive or negative consequences for civil society. Copyright (c) 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..
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