You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
If right-populists have had enough of establishment experts, how do they replace them, with whom, and to what effect? Presenting the first in-depth analysis of India's new intellectual elite in the wake of a Hindu supremacist government, The New Experts investigates the power of appointed experts in normalising ideologies of governance, beyond party rhetoric. The New Experts presents an accessible narrative of how and why particular ideas gain prominence in elite policy and political discourse. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research with national and international policy makers, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and journalists, this book analyses how political leaders in India strategically use modes of populist spectacle and established technocratic institutions to produce shared visions of glorified technological and hyper-nationalist futures. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But as yoga has gone global, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India, Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power. Drawing on her own experience and her readings of political spectacles, yoga murder mysteries, court cases, art i...
Funk the Clock is about those said to be emblematic of the future yet denied a place in time. Hence, this book is both an invitation and provocation for Black youth to give the finger to the hands of time, while inviting readers to follow their lead. In revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racism takes time, Rahsaan Mahadeo makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with. Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e., time) strange. Funk the Clock forges new directions in the study of race and time by upending what we think we know about time, while centering Black youth as key collaborators in rewriting knowledge as we know it.
An immersive, first-hand account of retail worker surveillance and resistance in the digital age. Technology has sped up the world of retail clothing, rushing affordable, trendy garments to consumers and enriching multinational retail giants like Zara and H&M. But beneath the success of fast fashion, there is a grimmer story to be told—that of the people who do the actual producing and selling. Working undercover in two of the world’s largest fast fashion stores in New York City, Madison Van Oort observed firsthand how data and surveillance shape the lives of low-status workers in an industry in flux—and how these workers are fighting back. Worn Out provides an on-the-ground look at ho...
Through a range of case studies in Asia and the Pacific, this edited collection highlights the extent of the unique ways in which young women lead to create change in their own lives and their communities, as well as in the structures, cultures, and institutions in which they live and work. This volume challenges and reshapes the boundaries and relationships of power that animate traditional attitudes to leadership by exploring the often overlooked role of women as leaders and drivers of social change. The text draws on a number of complex case studies in Asia and the Pacific in order to demonstrate how young women around the world have developed organised approaches to leadership that are o...
Rural–Urban Water Struggles compiles diverse analyses of rural–urban water connections, discourses, identities and struggles evolving in the context of urbanization around the world. Departing from an understanding of urbanization as a process of constant making and remaking of multi-scalar territorial interactions that extend beyond traditional city boundaries and that deeply reconfigure rural–urban hydrosocial territories and interlinkages, the chapters demonstrate the need to reconsider and trouble the rural–urban dichotomy. The contributors scrutinize how existing approaches for securing urban water supply – ranging from water transfers to payments for ecosystem services – al...
The decade 2004-14- when the two United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments, led by prime minister Manmohan Singh, were in office- was a remarkable milestone in the history of India's diplomacy. The period saw a significant transformation in the way India deals with the external world. Under the quiet and active leadership of prime minister Manmohan Singh, India established important strategic partnerships, managed key security challenges, carved out a position of influence in core domains of global governance, and fostered the economic development and socio-political stability of its neighbourhood. The ten years of UPA rule has been a crucial passage in the evolution of India's foreign p...
If right-populists have had enough of establishment experts, how do they replace them, with whom, and to what effect? Presenting the first in-depth analysis of India's new intellectual elite in the wake of a Hindu supremacist government, The New Experts investigates the power of appointed experts in normalising ideologies of governance, beyond party rhetoric. The New Experts presents an accessible narrative of how and why particular ideas gain prominence in elite policy and political discourse. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research with national and international policy makers, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and journalists, this book analyses how political leaders in India strategically use modes of populist spectacle and established technocratic institutions to produce shared visions of glorified technological and hyper-nationalist futures. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Western policymakers, political activists and academics alike see patronage as the chief enemy of open, democratic societies. Patronage, for them, is a corrupting force, a hallmark of failed and failing states, and the obverse of everything that good, modern governance ought to be. South Asia poses a frontal challenge for this consensus. Here the world's most populous, pluralist and animated democracy is also a hotbed of corruption with persistently startling levels of inequality. Patronage as Politics in South Asia confronts this paradox with calm erudition: sixteen essays by anthropologists, historians and political scientists show, from a wide range of cultural and historical angles, that in South Asia patronage is no feudal residue or retrograde political pressure, but a political form vital in its own right. This volume suggests that patronage is no foe to South Asia's burgeoning democratic cultures, but may in fact be their main driving force.
Rules of origin have emerged as one of the most controversial issues in any trade negotiations. This book analyzes the economics of rules of origin in regional trade agreements. It critically evaluates the empirical aspects, providing fresh perspectives on complex policy-negotiations and rules of origin implementation.