Outsourcing Patriarchy To and Within India: Intersectional and Decolonial Gender Politics Across Scales

Young caste-class privileged gender justice workers in Delhi navigate several relations of power—with Euro-American feminisms, and with less privileged feminisms and recipients of development work within India. Their experiences reveal that decolonial politics in India cannot be conceptualised without consideration of other axes of inequality including caste and religion. There is thus a need to broaden decolonial and intersectional analyses to include multiple spatial scales, from the transnational to the most granular interpretations of the local. By bringing intersectional analyses into greater dialogue with postcolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates that patterns of “outsourcing patriarchy” are observable at many scales, and that these patterns at different scales are co-produced, each in turn shaping the other. Such a framework also explains how young caste-class privileged gender justice workers outsource patriarchy and reproduce “mainstream” feminisms even as they seek to avoid doing so.     

Young people’s disadvantages on the labour market in Italy: reframing the NEET category

Abstract

The worsening of young people’s condition on the labour market has been described as a long-term trend of contemporary advanced capitalist economies. In recent years, the NEET (not in employment, education or training) label has been increasingly used to assess the integration of young people into the labour market. Does the NEET category adequately grasp the complexity of the underlying processes? In this contribution we will try to answer this question considering the Italian case as an extreme example. Focusing on the features of the youth labour market in Italy, we show the heterogeneity that lies behind the NEET concept, as well as its relationships with the labour market, the education system and welfare institutions. We argue that the institutionalization of NEETs as an analytical category may prove to be problematic as it may fail to identify specific vulnerable subgroups clearly, thereby leading to ineffective one-size-fits-all policy responses.     

Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide

Social scientists have extensively debated the virtues, pitfalls, and practical effects of open dialogue and truth-telling versus silence and concealment in global post-conflict endeavours for justice and reconciliation. This article addresses these debates not by endorsing practices of either talk or silence, but by investigating the practical dilemmas faced by Rwandan youth born of rape committed during the 1994 genocide as they find themselves caught in dual cultural imperatives to reveal and to conceal the circumstances of their origins. On the one hand, the post-genocide moment has seen the rise of truth-telling and self-revelation through testimonial practices in settings like post-genocide trials and reconciliation or peace-building workshops. On the other hand, silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship in Rwandan cultural practice, and youth participants struggled with the stigma of having been born of genocidal rape. We argue that the youths’ ambivalent and sometimes contradictory moral evaluations of talking about versus hiding their origins highlight the challenges and complexities of identity and belonging in post-genocide Rwanda, since their very existence draws them, their mothers, and their perpetrator-fathers into ongoing relationships. These youths’ lives and experiences speak to larger and powerful conundrums at the heart of what it means to live with legacies of violence, including what should be said or remain unsaid, and how the very opposition between revealing and concealing can be confounded by social and cultural variances in the meaning of “truth.”     

Rural youth and urban-based vocational training: gender,space and aspiring to ‘become someone’

ABSTRACT

The policy phrase Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is rapidly gaining ground across Southeast Asia (and beyond). Despite numerous policy reports, little is known about how vocational training and education work as sites of practice. This is especially true for informal household-based apprenticeships and privately organized, commercial classroom-based training. Yet, these latter arrangements are numerous, an integral part of the widespread informal economy, and reflecting the fact that homes have retained their productive character in much of the Global South. Combining a village-based perspective (Laos) with an urban-based perspective (Cambodia), we analyse how these informal and privately organized training spaces are situated in rural youth’s gendered lives and shaped by, but also generative of, aspirations of ‘becoming someone’. In addition, comparing informal apprenticeships with classroom-based training leads us to raise some important questions about the implications of the (global) policy emphasis on the standardization and formalization of TVET.     

Socio-demographic differences of disability prevalence among the population aged 60 years and over in Bangladesh

This study aims to delineate the sociodemographic differences in disability prevalence across the population aged 60 years and over in Bangladesh, and to investigate the association of factors with reporting disability in later life. A microdata sample for those aged 60 years or over from the Census of Bangladesh 2011 was used where disability was assessed with a self-reported single response question. Logistic regression models were performed separately for men and women. Results reveal that the disability prevalence rate increased sharply with age, and it was higher among older women (5.2 per cent) compared to men (4.8 per cent). Physical and vision disabilities were the two categories with the highest prevalence of reported disabilities, with a higher prevalence of physical disability among men and vision disability among women. Being older, female, currently not in marital partnership, and having a lower educational attainment, not being employed, living alone, and residing in the rural areas were significantly associated with reporting disability in later life. The higher prevalence of disability among older women, those who are illiterate, and those residing in rural areas highlights the need for policies prioritising these groups. Special attention should also be given to those who are currently not in marital partnership, particularly women who are living alone.     

Obedient children and reckless rebels: Jabotinsky's youth politics and the case for authoritarian leadership, 1931–1933

This article traces the pivotal role that ideas about “youth” and “generationhood” played in Vladimir Jabotinsky's political strategy as leader of the Union of Revisionist Zionists and its youth movement, Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (Betar). During the leadership struggle within the movement between 1931 and 1933, Jabotinsky believed that he could draw upon debates sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” in order to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The article demonstrates that Jabotinsky's deliberately ambiguous and provocative constructions of “youth” and “generationhood” within the movement's party literature and in articles addressed to the Polish Jewish public, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.     

Being NGO girls: gender,subjectivities and everyday life in Kolkata

This article discusses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a cultural and political force in shaping the gendered and classed subjectivities of young women growing up in ‘red-light areas’ in Kolkata, India. It foregrounds the flexible deployment of NGO gender narratives by ‘subjects’ of NGO development to improve their everyday lives. Drawing on debates of NGOization, post-colonial urban Indian femininities and intersectionality, it demonstrates how several young women who grew up as ‘subjects’ of NGO development mobilize, reject and improvise contested NGO-inspired femininities for their everyday gain. At the same time, it illustrates how NGO gender narratives that are useful to some young women in their renegotiation of gender norms are deemed ineffective, if not obstructive, by other young women, particularly those whose lives remain entangled in multiple marginalities.     

‘YOUTH RIOTS’ AND THE CONCEPT OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.     

Knowledge,Morality and ‘Kastom’: SikAIDS among Young Yupno People,Finisterre Range,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent of knowledge about HIV/AIDS among young Yupno women and men. Local understanding of sikAIDS is shaped by cultural, moral and religious concepts and processes that are based on social values and practices. Difficulties these young people face in accessing information about HIV/AIDS and using it to implement preventative measures — for example by obtaining condoms — have to be seen in the framework of ‘kastom’ and a moral discourse coined and influenced by the Lutheran Church. As the research shows, there is an urgent need for a broad and contextually sensitive approach to sexual health, including information about conception, family planning methods, and sexually transmitted diseases when planning awareness campaigns for teenagers in rural regions.     

156项工程与新中国工业城市发展(1949～1957年)

“一五”时期,以156项工程为契机,新中国开始了全面的社会主义工业化建设。这些大型经济建设项目的启动,不仅改变了中国城市发展的道路、方向,而且为中国城市的快速发展提供了强劲的动力,从而推动了中国城市进入以重工业优先发展战略为导向的新阶段。在这一发展模式的作用下,中国城市的发展呈现出城市职能的经济化、城市化发展的高速化、大中城市优先发展以及区域城市发展均衡化等新特点,这种城市发展的变化既彻底改变了旧中国城市的半殖民地半封建性质,又为后来中国城市的发展奠定了全新的基础。