Archive
Volume 6, Issue 1 (2015)
Forms of Social Asymmetry and
Cultural Bias. Of Gender and Science in India and the World
The
Incorporation of Symbolic Inequality
A
Marxian 'Moment' in the 'Theatre of the Oppressed': Infrapolitics and
Making of the 'Naxal Narrative' in South-Eastern Uttar Pradesh
The
Egyptian Case: Can Subjects become Citizens?
Othering,
an Analysis
V Sujatha
The relative absence of women in
science and technology, especially at the apex positions, is a common
trend throughout the world. But the asymmetry could be associated with
different set of factors in different parts of the world. Catholic
countries like Italy and Portugal, smaller socialist countries like
Latvia, and Lithuania, countries like India renowned for its
patrifocality and developing countries like Brazil - all have a good
record of women's entry and participation in scientific research. The
lowest participation of women is found in those countries like Germany,
US, France and Japan with greatest advance in science and technology
and those with a very high military budget. Based on a literature
survey in India this paper argues that we need to pay attention to
variations in the level of asymmetry and the cultural moorings of bias
in order to explain the relation between the social structure of
asymmetry on the one hand and, cultural resources that sustain the
asymmetry, on the other.
Boike Rehbein, Jessé Souza
Research on social inequality has
mostly focused on capitalism, studied the relation between the
capitalist division of labour and stratification and used
socio-economic criteria in the process. While all of this is important,
it is only one side of the coin. Inequality in capitalist societies
reproduces precapitalist structures, which is largely invisible due to
the focus on capitalism itself. Under the guise of formal equality and
freedom, invisible dividing lines between classes emerge. These are
incorporated and institutionalized distinctions between social
environments. People internalize patterns of action in these
environments and thereby acquire symbolic classifications that
constitute a shared hierarchy of values.
Anand Kumar, Subir Rana, Ashish Kumar
Das
Persistence of chronic poverty,
social injustice perpetuated by the caste system besides gender and
class based discrimination has resulted in a systemic crisis and gave
rise to the ultra-left movement called Naxalism or Naxalbari. The
raison d'être for this movement is still rife and relevant since the
adivasis and dalits have not only been denied their Constitutional
rights even after half a century of independence, but are confronting
new and bigger challenges by the neo-liberal regime. This paper
presents an in-depth study of South eastern Uttar Pradesh against a
historical backdrop and underlines the interconnectedness of growing
incidences of Naxalism given the region's feudal agrarian trajectory
and the malaise of chronic poverty, under-development and misuse of
office by the political class. It points to major ways of collective
mobilization by the underprivileged sections of the society including
heightened class consciousness, Gandhian constructivism and electoral
democracy.
Julten Abdelhalim
The paper enquires into the Egyptian
transformation associated with the uprisings in 2011. It asks whether
the transformation was capable of completely changing state-society
relationships. The focus is on the transformation of dominated subjects
into democratic citizens. To answer the guiding question, the paper
reviews state-society relations before the Tahrir uprising and then
analyzes the current state of affairs.
Lajos Brons
Othering is the construction and
identification of
the self or in-group and the other or out-group in mutual, unequal
opposition by attributing relative inferiority and/or radical alienness
to the other/out-group. The notion of othering spread from feminist
theory and post-colonial studies to other areas of the humanities and
social sciences, but is originally rooted in Hegel's dialectic of
identification and distantiation in the encounter of the self with some
other in his "Master-Slave dialectic". The paper distinguishes two
kinds of othering, "crude" and "sophisticated", that differ in the
logical form of their underlying arguments. The essential difference is
that the former is merely self-other distantiating, while the latter -
as in Hegel's dialectic - partially depends on self-other
identification.
Exploring
the Invisible: Issues in Identification and Assessment of Students with
Learning Disabilities in India
Fouzia Khursheed Ahmad
Students with learning disabilities
have special
needs in academic, classroom, behavioral, physical, and social
performance, and the most common area requiring adaptation of classroom
procedures is academic instruction. The issue of timely identification,
assessment and remediation to help students to cope up with the
difficulties in education has started gaining attention in India as a
crucial step needed for ensuring an education system that proves truly
inclusive since much yet still needs to be done in this regard. The
relevance and urgency of exploring this area is therefore of utmost
importance. This paper attempts to explore and discuss the concept,
need and issues in the identification and assessment of students with
learning disabilities in India
Orient
und Okzident in Calicut. Muslimische Studenten und Studentinnen in
Kerala, Südindien, im Spannungsfeld zwischen lokaler Verwurzelung und
globalen Verflechtungen, by Barbara Riedel
A Review by Gernot Saalmann
