Teaching and learning in the tropics: an epistemic exploration of “the field” in a development studies field trip

Development studies employs theories, tools and methods often found in geography, including the international field trip to a “developing” country. In 2013 and 2014, I led a two-week trip to Ethiopia. To better comprehend the effects of “the field” on students’ learning, I introduced an assessed reflexive field diary to understand what the field trip experience teaches students about themselves and their relationship to the field. In this paper, I present critical reflections on “the field” that speak to a provocative concept – “the tropics”. These reflections illuminate prevailing challenges in the study and practice of development and suggest a way forward.     

Determinants of temporary labour migration in southern India

We present new data from three village panchayats in northwest Tamil Nadu and investigate the associations between demographic and socioeconomic factors with temporary labour migration from this setting. Individual (n?=?1110) and household (n?=?278) level logistic regression models were used to demonstrate how factors at each of these levels can influence temporary labour migration trajectories. Young males were most likely to temporarily migrate for work from this region. Additionally, large households from historically disadvantaged castes with marginal land and housing were most likely to have at least one migrant member. Households with multiple migrant members appear to use temporary migration to cope with serious deprivation relative to households with only one migrant member. These findings provide a strong case that can be compared to other settings in India and can be used to inform improved policy and targeted development initiatives to support temporary migrant workers and their households.     

The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle: On the Limits of Time Use Surveys

Almost every intervention in the field of international agricultural development — from microcredit finance to fertilizer subsidies to trade policy — has come to recognize gender, and relationships within households, as important. Yet most interventions continue to treat the household as a ‘black box’, with changes within the household measured by the effects on income, anthropometry, health, or other secondary metrics within bargaining models. In this context, there has been increasing interest in time use studies as a way to peer inside this black box. This article offers a review of methods and identifies some of the difficulties facing time use studies in capturing intrahousehold dynamics, and presents the results of a two‐season simultaneous activity time use study in Malawi which aimed to address these difficulties. The results suggest significant limitations to time use surveys. The kinds of reproductive labour that often interest researchers may be invisible to the women responding to time use surveys, with the result that care work is dramatically under‐reported. The authors discuss the implications of the divergence between researchers’ concerns and the women's reports of their lives for time use surveys, and for feminist development research methods more broadly.     

Rocking Behavior of Irregular Free-Standing Objects Subjected to Earthquake Motion

Free-standing rigid objects and structures are dominantly found to exhibit rocking behavior and can be vulnerable to overturning during an earthquake as demonstrated by numerous past earthquake events. Such objects are typically considered to be displacement sensitive with their rocking response being well presented by the Peak Displacement Demand (PDD) parameter of the supporting floor’s motion. This in turn can be directly related to an object’s width (along the direction of motion) for assessing its vulnerability to overturn. Such findings have been sufficiently justified by refined dynamic analysis supported by experimental evaluations which were based on rigid blocks with uniform geometric format (i.e., regular in their mass distribution). However, vulnerable rocking objects can be asymmetric and accordingly their sensitivity to floor displacement cannot be directly related to their width. The key parameter which defines irregular objects’ response to rocking motion is represented by the degree of eccentricity of their center of mass. In this study, the well-known rocking equation of motion is reconfigured and devised to model the rocking responses for 280 irregular objects undergoing eight earthquake motions which included artificial and recorded earthquakes. Analytical results obtained from solving the adjusted equation of motion were evaluated with sophisticated finite element (FE) models simulating the 280 irregular cases. This experimentally validated FE modeling approach was found to be time- and cost-effective for understating the rocking behavior of asymmetric objects as well as clarifying an interesting relationship between the object’s damping level and the condition of the supporting base (i.e., whether being provided with supports at the points of rotation or not). The rocking response of irregular objects was found to be highly influenced by the level of eccentricity of the object when excited by motions with high displacement amplitudes, while such influence was not found noticeable by wider objects. Based on the developed trends between the maximum top displacement of irregular objects and the PDD, an expression for estimating the rocking amplitudes is proposed which is a function of the object’s eccentricity.     

The true ‘EURESCO’? The Council of Europe,transnational networking and the emergence of European Community cultural policies, 1970–90

Abstract

The roots of EU action in the field of culture lie in the 1970s. At the time, the Council of Europe (CoE), the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other organizations were already established players in the field. This article analyses the incremental and often haphazard process in which the European Community (EC) became the key organization at the European level by the end of the Cold War. It stresses the role of the EC’s specific governance structure, its considerable financial resources, and its objectives of market integration and expanding powers as drivers of this process, along with selective forms of adaptation of practices first tried out in other forums. Besides scrutinizing general tendencies of inter-organizational exchange during the 1970s and 1980s, the article zooms in on two concrete case studies. For the 1970s, it highlights the debates about cultural heritage and the European Architectural Heritage Year (EAHY) project: although initiated by the CoE, the EAHY became one of the first cases of EC policy import, strongly facilitated by transnational networks. The second case study, for the 1980s, deals with the development of a European audio-visual policy. Here again the CoE took the lead and worked as a laboratory for schemes later adapted by the EC.     

The evolution of elite high-rise condominiums in India: from the global to the neo-colonial?

The article focuses on the neo-liberal model of elite residence in India—the high-rise, high-density condominium. The growing presence of this model as an expression of social mobility indicates the critical role played by this new housing type in relation to the socio-cultural transformations advanced by neo-liberalism. This article, then, is an architectural inquiry into this new residential type within the contemporary setting of globalisation. I employ the idea of physical and social thresholds as a conceptual tool to investigate the progress of this spatial and cultural typology, following its injection into the Indian architectural landscape. I explore the multiplicity of physical thresholds within its spatial planning as a signal of manifest social relationships of increasing complexity. The two case studies in the global node of Mumbai explored in this research represent the beginning and the peak of development of this gated housing type. The methods used include spatial analyses of the design of the condominiums, participant observation and a reading of marketing material. The findings reveal that what started as a global residential type devoid of socio-cultural overlays has now evolved into a residential form with deeply entrenched cultural hierarchies echoing many attributes of colonial elite-status building.     

Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia

This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–sex’ as (stable) signifiers over centuries; the validity of interpreting social reality through literary texts from the period; the difficulties of locating ‘love’ in severely hierarchical, even slave–owning, societies; and the implications of using such anthologies in the classroom.     

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’.