Why Indians Vote: Reflections on Rights,Citizenship, and Democracy from a Tamil Nadu Village

This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as citizens, programmatic policies and their local implementation, commitment to caste and party loyalties, and authority of charismatic leaders. The paper explores the roots of the political consciousness and rights awareness that underpin high levels of electoral participation. It suggests that elections form unique moments that allow ordinary people to experience an individual sense of citizenship and of democracy itself while at the same time allowing them to pursue projects of recognition, respect and assertion as members of communities. It is precisely this dual feature that makes voting so enduringly attractive to India's contemporary electorate.     

Millennium development goals (MDGs) and indigenous peoples' literacy in Cambodia: erosion of sovereignty?

Nation‐building throughout Southeast Asia has been undertaken in contexts where minority groups, living on the margins of society, are being forced into recent state constructions, and have had their cultures eroded as a result. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for education have provided international benchmarks for literacy. These have been adopted by the Cambodian state, and a number of donors and NGOs have funded and enacted policies with the explicit aim of improving the language skills of Cambodia's highland communities. However, these are being implemented in communities that do not speak Khmer (the Cambodian national language), and do not have indigenous systems of writing. Drawing on fieldwork in Cambodia, this paper argues that the impact of the MDGs has been to depoliticize an inherently contested terrain, and to ironically silence communities on fundamental issues by teaching them to read, write and speak the national language. This has limited their capacity to perform sovereignty by restricting the very voice they are entitled to speak.     

Liberation Theology and Zombies: Paralysis and Praxis

In Fredric Jameson's formulation it may now be “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” What Jameson suggests is that our current preoccupation with the drama of the apocalyptic belies a deeper paralysis of the imagination, and with this the concomitant loss of actions conducive to a new politics. Jameson's comments here foreground a contradiction in our experience of late capitalism, representations of dramatic rupture which obscure fundamental political stasis. This paper takes Jameson's reflections and the contradiction of action which is also non-action as the point of departure to query the current state of Liberation Theology, particularly the work of Ivan Petrella, to defend the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, and ask how our contemporary predicament might be illuminated by Danny Boyle's zombie film, 28 Days Later.     

Multiple historical geographies: responses and resistance to colonial conservation schemes in East Africa

Examining four colonial soil conservation schemes in East Africa that were part of the modernising project of colonialism, this article considers multiple historical geographies of the colonised world. There were multiple modernities: while information and ideas flowed in many directions between (and within) the metropole and colonies, the particular ‘modernity’ that was put into practice was shaped by its context. The article highlights therefore that – despite playing to the same tune of modernity – colonialism was highly differentiated in the way that its policies played out on the ground. Furthermore, the ‘colonised’ acted and reacted to the policies in highly differentiated ways that depended on their particular context in time and space. All but one of the soil conservation schemes examined were rejected and there was significant resistance to them. Much of the existing literature on such schemes examines them in the context of essentially political processes, and in particular their influence on rising nationalism. Whilst these processes are important, this paper shows that there were other, non-political, factors that influenced the reception they were given, which need to be considered too. These ‘everyday’ details were about the practical and technical nature of the schemes, and by exploring these aspects of the schemes, and comparing them, the article highlights why most were rejected. It suggests that different aspects of conservation schemes need to be explored for a firm understanding of the reasons behind resistance to such schemes.     

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation,Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.     

‘It’s one of the first times I’ve felt fully engaged’: developing student engagement using blogging as a form of assessment

There is a widespread debate in higher education about how best to support students in becoming more active and engaged learners. Geographers have occupied a central position in these debates having long been concerned with understanding and creating teaching spaces that encourage active and experiential learning. Recent pedagogical innovations have seen a movement away from a reliance on lecturing as the key pedagogical method and a redefinition of the roles of both teacher and learner. In this paper, we look at the role that assessment, specifically assessed blogs, can play in enhancing student engagement. Drawing on interviews with Course Organizers from two case study courses, student focus groups, and course evaluation surveys we show the various ways in which blogs enhance engagement. We draw attention to how blogging enabled students to personalize their learning and make it more meaningful to them, as well as to foster greater engagement with the course materials including making connections across the course as a whole. Further, we show how blogging enabled students to develop transferable skills that would stand them in good stead for the rest of their time at university and in their future professional lives.     

The geography of unsheltered homelessness in the city: Evidence from “311” calls in New York

We provide the first detailed evidence on the distribution of unsheltered homelessness within the city. We rely on “311” call data reporting unsheltered homeless individuals to New York City authorities, based on evidence that the distribution of calls reflects their actual locations. Centrality dominates an otherwise important role of median income in explaining variation in unsheltered homelessness across neighborhoods. Subway stations and restaurants are important as well. We also find that police respond more quickly to calls in more affluent and central neighborhoods. This suggests that the distribution of homelessness across neighborhoods could affect the city's overall response.