Gender Space And Agency In India

This volume explores the links between gender, space and agency in India. It offers fresh perspectives and frameworks within which these links can be analyzed across diverse geographical contexts in India. The chapters in this volume are based on field studies which showcase how agency is gendered. The volume examines how gender and agency are fashioned by a multitude of everyday contexts, socio-economic processes, policy interventions and geographic phenomenon and manifest in diffusion of education, decentralization of politics, rising social inequalities, poverty, green revolution, mechanization of agriculture and even drought. This book will be of interest to researchers, teachers and practitioners of human geography, social and cultural geography, and those interested in geographies of gender. It will also be helpful for policy makers interested in the issues of gender and development in India.

This book examines the vulnerability of women in public spaces in India through the analysis of artistic representations ranging from emerging digital media, commercial Hindi films and graphic narratives to narratives of real and lived experiences of women. In doing so, the book resists gendered violence and champions women's right to mobility.

"The essays in this volume look at how gendered demands for both temporal and spatial access are articulated within specific spaces. The essays look at such questions as, how do categories such as 'time' and 'space' intersect with each other in complementary and contradictory ways? In order to find tangible forms, do such articulations look for alternative 'spaces' themselves? Can digital space, for example, be described as an 'alternative space' within which a certain generation of young feminists has politically come of age in the post-liberalisation era? The volume attempts to provide commentaries and theorisations of the fact that in recent years, as we have witnessed in India, the emergence of a new feminist subjectivity. Such a phenomenon is also accompanied by the growth of a new female subject, within which the fulcrum of this new feminist subjectivity primarily rests. Predominantly urban, predominantly over-educated, Hindu, upper-caste and upper middle class, this new female (and feminist) subjectivity demands rigorous theorisation."--

In today’s world, it is crucial to understand how cities and urban spaces operate in order for them to continue to develop and improve. To ensure cities thrive, further study on past and current policies and practices is required to provide a thorough understanding. Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East examines the poetics and politics of city and urban spaces in contemporary South Asia and the Middle East and seeks to shed light on how individuals constitute, experience, and navigate urban spaces in everyday life. This book aims to initiate a multidisciplinary approach to the study of city life by engaging disciplines such as urban geography, gender studies, feminism, literary criticism, and human geography. Covering key topics such as racism, urban spaces, social inequality, and gender roles, this reference work is ideal for government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

This book highlights various dimensions of human habitats in 21st Century India. The human habitats in the country are marked by perceptible inequality in social and economic spheres. This is occurring in tandem with rapid socio-economic transformation across both rural and urban landscapes. There is a plurality of transformative characteristics in terms of social and economic classes, gender and space. Inequality in access to natural resources such as land and water is still a big factor in socio-economic differentiation in rural habitats. This constructs a pedestal of unequal opportunities and access to basic human necessities such as healthcare, education, potable water and sanitation. Human habitats experiencing socio-spatial segregation and exclusion based on caste, community and gender are detrimental in formation of a civil society and its sustainability in long terms. The ideal situation for this would be formation of an inclusive society that celebrates age old socio-cultural diversities, reduces inequalities and reveres composite culture.

Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include combinations of quantitative and qualitative analyses, visual sources and in-depth case studies are being tried out and accepted in geography despite its masculine legacy. This pioneering study brings together Indian geographers’ contributions to understanding gender, and through them, seeks to enrich the discipline of geography. It engages with the recent ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences, which has reclaimed the explanatory power of space and place in social theory that had been nearly lost to deconstructive postmodernist scholarship. The volume draws entirely from the Indian scholarship, showcasing contextualised knowledge production, but hopes to initiate a a dialogue with scholars elsewhere working with feminist methodologies.

This book marks the 30th anniversary of the IGU Commission on Gender and Geography, honouring the contributions of Janice Monk in establishing the field of feminist geography. The collection is published as part of the series International Studies of Women and Place that Janice Monk co-edited with Janet Momsen for over 30 years. The chapters, from over 45 leading international scholars, encompass key areas Monk has contributed to within feminist geography. The collaborative nature of this project reflects the networks and themes Monk nurtured throughout her long and impactful career. The book provides critical insights to wide-ranging topics that include the development of feminist geography in different global contexts, gendered geographies of work and everyday life, and gender and environmental concerns. Diverse voices and perspectives in this book will serve as invaluable resources for scholars interested in gender and feminist geographies, the history of the IGU Commission on Gender and Geography, career trajectories of women geographers in different parts of the world, gendered geographies of the life course, as well as feminist analyses of environmental issues. The book will be useful to students, educators, and activists in gender studies, development studies, and human geography.