The Intersection of Gender,Caste and Class Inequalities in Child Nutrition in Rural India

While studies have investigated inequalities in child nutrition along single axes of social power such as, gender, caste and class, there has not been any study that has examined the intersection of the different axes in determining nutritional outcomes of children. This paper examines the intersection of gender, class and caste in determining children's nutritional outcomes for rural north, rural south and rural India as a whole. The paper investigates the intersectionality of the three axes in rural India and focuses on regional differences. The results show that children with particular disadvantageous group affiliations often find significant compensatory benefits from other beneficial identities. Class inequality dominates caste inequality and caste inequality dominates gender inequality in rural North India for all levels of stunting. In contrast, caste inequality dominates class inequality which in turn dominates gender inequality for severe stunting in rural South India.     

Sport,Localism and Social Capital in Rural Western Australia

Whilst there has been some research conducted on the role of sport in Australian rural communities, to date there has been little detailed discussion by social scientists and geographers on the association between sport and social capital. This paper identifies elements of social capital, at a community and regional social scale, which have been expressed through the activities and adaptive strategies of twenty‐five sporting clubs from the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. Most of the adaptive strategies are a direct result of the clubs being exposed to the processes of rural restructuring and include amalgamation and the spatial reorganisation of sporting competition locations. The importance of localism in rural communities is also examined through the issues of trust and distrust within a regional hierarchy context. The paper illustrates how sport is not only an important part of rural life but also an activity which plays an integral role in the formation of bonding and bridging social capital.     

Children,social capital and health: increasing the well‐being of young people in rural Wales

This paper explores the usefulness of employing the concept of social capital within a research project investigating the best ways of meeting the health and well‐being needs of young people living in rural Wales. The first part of the paper provides an overview of some of the current research exploring the relationship between social capital, health and young people. The second part provides an overview of findings from an action research project to illustrate how social capital is conceived and applied in this context. It concludes by stating that children and young people do actively generate, draw upon and negotiate their own social capital, and that this is an under‐utilised resource in terms of promoting health and well‐being.     

集群社会资本对乡村民宿企业成长的影响研究——以丹霞山两村为例

采用质性研究方法,以丹霞山两村为例,探析集群社会资本对乡村民宿企业成长的影响机制。研究发现：集群社会资本由个体社会资本（企业纵向联系、市场网络和个人资源）和集体社会资本（社区合作网络和公共资源）构成。乡村民宿获取个体社会资本的存量取决于关系质量和关系数量,前者有利于降低成本、增加异质资源,后者能够补足企业综合性基础;乡村民宿吸纳集体社会资本的程度在于资源共享度和网络紧密度,前者决定了集体资源的存量,后者制约着民宿吸收转化集体资源的程度。个体社会资本影响企业的初创和生存,集体社会资本制约或促进企业的持续发展,两者相互作用共同影响企业成长。从集群社会资本视角可深化理解乡村民宿企业成长的机理,为我国乡村民宿业发展乃至乡村振兴路径提供指导。     

政府在投资农村社会资本中的角色定位及路径选择

本文主要探讨政府在投资农村社会资本中的角色定位及其作用路径。在投资农村社会资本的过程中,政府可以通过完善村民自治制度、培育和扶持农村民间组织、加强农村教育和培训力度等途径向农村投资社会资本,增加农村社会资本存量。     

Divided we fall? The effect of manufacturing decline on the social capital of US communities

What happens to local communities when manufacturing disappears? I examine changes in associational density over nearly two decades as a proxy for social capital in US labor markets. Exploiting plausibly exogenous trade-induced shocks to local manufacturing activity, I test whether deindustrialization is associated with greater or lower organizational membership. I uncover a robust negative relationship between the two variables, particularly acute in rural and mostly-White areas. My findings, however, are sensitive to measurement: There are no clearly discernible effects of deindustrialization on social capital when I consider alternative proxies for the outcome. To reconcile these results, I present evidence suggesting that economic adversity may induce a qualitative, rather than quantitative, change in social capital.     

What is in a name? How caste names affect the production of situated knowledge

Patel, Desai, Kothari … to those literate in the workings of caste these names describe a network and its power in relation to other networks, they infer the rules of engagement within and between network members, and they ascribe a geographical terrain to home. In research, rules of behaviour and assumptions of place that are coded into names can affect access to respondents, their disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. This article explores the coded expectations of knowledge embedded in a name as seen by someone (me) fairly illiterate in the workings of caste by utilising the principle of Bourdieu’s doxa – a ‘pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge’ – to untangle and explore the effect of names on the production of partial and situated knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork in Gujarat, India, I analyse reflexive accounts through the lenses of feminist geographers and critical race scholars to illustrate the effects of being unknowingly and unwillingly placed into a social hierarchy of power in the field, introduce the idea of ‘us-ing’ (an opposite of othering) to describe researcher-respondent relations, and explore how readers might interpret the presence or absence of data and claims to validity. These accounts make visible the effects of positionality on knowledge production in ways that speak to feminist-postcolonial research, and specifically to feminist researchers of colour conducting research away from ‘home’.     

Resource Accessibility and Vulnerability in Andhra Pradesh: Caste and Non‐Caste Influences

Coastal Andhra Pradesh in southern India is prone to tropical cyclones. Access to key resources can reduce the vulnerability of the local population to both large‐scale disasters, such as cyclones, and to the sort of small‐scale crises that affect their everyday lives. This article uses primary fieldwork to present a resource accessibility vulnerability index for over 300 respondents. The index indicates that caste is the key factor in determining who has assets, who can access public facilities, who has political connections and who has supportive social networks. The ‘lower’ castes (which tend to be the poorest) are marginalized to the extent that they lack access to assets, public facilities and opportunities to improve their plight. However, the research also indicates that the poor and powerless lower castes are able to utilize informal social networks to bolster their resilience, typically by women's participation with CBOs and NGOs. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether this extra social capital counterbalances the overall results which show that — despite decades of counteractions by government — caste remains a dominant variable affecting the vulnerability of the people of coastal Andhra Pradesh to the hazards that they face.     

Gendered and generational experiences of place and power in the rural Irish landscape

The out-migration of young people from rural regions is a selective and highly gendered process suggesting considerable differentiation in the way young men and women identify with and experience rural life. Gender imbalance in rural youth out-migration has prompted feminist researchers to consider more carefully linkages between the gendered nature of rural space and place and the social and spatial mobility of rural young men and women. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Irish fishing community, this article explores the gendered dimensions of rural youth experience. Theoretically grounded in the conceptual triad of gender, power and place, this article considers how young men and women experience ‘the rural’ as masculine and feminine subjects. Special attention is given to the ways in which relations of power in ‘the rural’ are articulated, contested and accommodated in the everyday lives of local young men and women. As well as highlighting the ways in which rural space and place is male-dominated, this article foregrounds other power relations at play in the rural. As part of this effort, I problematize male power and point to the ‘effectivity of girls as conduits of power’. I argue that subjectivities of intra-gender relations are a critical dimension of rural youth experience and cannot be overlooked in research on rural youth experience and emigration.     

市场资本驱动下的乡村空间生产与治理重构——对婺源县Y村的实证观察

乡村振兴不能回避资本，然而资本下乡会改变乡村内部治理结构，如何善用资本以实现乡村善治成为一个难题。文章以江西省婺源县Y村作为典型案例，基于空间生产理论视角，深度剖析资本介入后村庄治理主体的关系转换和资本运行的内在机制，并揭示资本介入后乡村善治面临的难题。文章认为，市场资本介入乡村重构了空间生产主体，并倾向于构建符合自身需求的新空间形态。新空间形态进一步形成了新社会关系网络，新社会关系网络在市场资本的助推下稳固，并逐步将村民主体排挤出村庄，导致资本下乡后空间非正义等问题凸显。未来的乡村治理模式应当发挥资本的触媒作用；维持政府公正性角色，保持乡村空间正义；明确村民主体地位，鼓励村民作为村庄营建的主体；强化集体力量，保持村集体对空间的有效控制权。     

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.     

Social capital and poverty of the wage-labour class: problems with the social capital theory

Social capital, understood as norms of reciprocity and associational life, is supposed to provide a bottom-up approach to poverty alleviation world-wide. The World Bank says that social capital is a necessary condition for long-term development and that social capital is the capital of the poor. This paper will argue that much of the literature is too sanguine of the benefits of social capital for the poor. It is, of course, important to look at the extent to which social capital can help the poor. But how the conditions of the poor people can also affect their social capital is equally important to examine, and this has often been neglected by many scholars who have been busy to prove that social capital is a new paradigm of development. Based on qualitative interviews in two rural areas in Orissa, eastern India, this paper seeks to examine whether and to what extent poor people of the daily wage labour class benefit from their social capital. It then goes on to unpack the mechanisms in which the economic-political conditions under which poor people live and the spatiality of these conditions affect the production of social capital. By seeking to unpack the dialectical relation between social capital and poverty, the paper aims at problematizing the overly optimistic claims about social capital. It shows that it is untenable to posit social capital as an independent variable and poverty as a dependent variable because the economic-political conditions of poor people have an enormous constraining effect on social capital itself and its supposed material benefits for the poor.     

Litigation against Political Organization? The Politics of Dalit Mobilization in Tamil Nadu,India

This article examines contemporary Dalit assertion in India through an ethnographic case study of a legal tool being mobilized by Tamil Nadu's lowest‐ranking Arunthathiyars in their struggle against caste‐based offences. The Arunthathiyars of western Tamil Nadu are increasingly taking recourse to the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA Act) in an attempt to bring members of higher castes to justice. The article explores how Arunthathiyars are employing the law and how their litigation is reshaping the politics of caste in this region. The authors document how a process of litigation by Arunthathiyars is countered by a politicization of caste by the dominant Gounders of the region, who recently entered electoral politics with a new caste‐based party. Even though the litigation route further antagonizes caste relations, it is argued that the PoA Act has provided Dalits with an invaluable tool to seek justice, democratize public space, and challenge the power of the dominant caste in the region. Dalit social movements, it is concluded, are more likely to be successful if they are backed by a legal weapon and accompanied by Dalits’ growing economic independence.     

Class,Caste, Gender,and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle-class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper-caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.     

中国西南贫困地区乡村韧性研究——以重庆市为例

文章聚焦于我国西南贫困地区乡村韧性，以重庆市 120 个抽样村为研究对象，采用熵值法，从经济韧性、社会韧性、工程韧性多维度视角评价重庆市乡村韧性水平。研究发现：①重庆市抽样村庄的乡村韧性平均值为0.46（满分为1），处于中等偏下水平。②重庆市北部地区的乡村韧性水平较高，交通不便、少数民族聚居的东南部地区乡村韧性水平相对较低。③经济韧性水平偏低限制了抽样村的韧性水平，体现在生产资本投入不足、人力资本水平偏低、土地资源禀赋不优。④相较于乡村状态韧性，抽样乡村的响应韧性水平较低，主要原因在于乡村经济子系统与基础设施（减灾防灾）子系统的响应韧性值较低。文章基于研究结果提出了旨在提升我国西南地区乡村韧性的建议。     

Discipline and Devolution: Constructions of Poverty, Race, and Criminality in the Politics of Rural Prison Development

Abstract:  The soaring expansion of the US prison population is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in rural communities in the Northwestern states of Idaho and Montana, this paper explores how cultural productions of poverty and exclusion intersect with rural prison development. I examine how representations of poverty and criminality are entangled with processes of economic restructuring and the localization of economic development and social welfare. I explore the ways in which the rural prison geography of the Northwest is linked to the material and discursive construction of those in poverty and how these narratives are produced through local relations of race, ethnicity, and class. I suggest that the mobilization of these constructions legitimates rural prison expansion, increasingly punitive social and criminal justice policies, and the retrenchment of racialized and classed inequality. Further, I argue that these discursive imaginations of the poor work to obscure the central dynamics producing poverty under the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance.     

乡村旅游地空间生产与村民角色转型的过程与机制——以丹霞山瑶塘村为例

乡村旅游空间与村民社会角色是一个相互形塑和建构的过程，揭示两者的互动机制对乡村旅游地可持续发展具有重要意义。研究发现，乡村旅游地空间经历了农业生产空间、农旅并存空间、旅游消费空间的演变过程；村民角色从“农业生产者”，经不同转型轨迹，归于“旅游从业者”角色。权力、资本和市场等主体对乡村旅游空间的建构，对村民角色扮演提出新的期望和规范；村民主体的微观权力、资本积累、个人技能、个人观念影响其角色扮演与空间适应；不同角色村民主体通过微观空间生产行为，促使乡村旅游空间景观化、商业化和制度化，也会产生民宿空间分异和乡村公共空间侵占等问题。     

THE GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF HUMAN CAPITAL: MEASUREMENT OF CONTRIBUTING MECHANISMS

This paper investigates how the geographic distribution of human capital—measured as college attainment—evolves over time. With U.S. data, I decompose generation‐to‐generation changes in local human capital into three factors: the previous generation's human capital, intergenerational transmission of skills from parents to their children, and migration of the children. I find significant persistence of local skills at the commuting zone (local labor market) level. Labor market size, climate, and local colleges affect local skill measures. Skills move from urban‐to‐rural labor markets through intergenerational transmission but from rural‐to‐urban labor markets through migration.     

Family education support to rural migrant children in China: evidence from Shenzhen

Rural migrant children have become a fast-growing population in China as a consequence of the large-scale population flow from rural to urban areas. Besides the dual-structure hukou system, which restrains rural migrants from upward mobility, family capital also plays an important role in providing family educational support to rural migrant children. Using the data from P District and N District of Shenzhen in 2013, this paper explores the present status of three dimensions of family capital and five aspects of family educational support to Chinese rural migrant children, as well as the correlation between family capital and family educational support from perspectives of migration status (hukou), life course (children’s age), and school type. Constrained by inadequate family capital in multiple dimensions manifested by less education, lower income, and limited social networks, etc., parents of rural migrant children provide less family educational support in nearly every aspect compared with parents of urban local children. Among rural migrant children, those in private migrant schools receive the least support from their parents.