Social construction of migrant identities: everyday life of Bangladeshi migrants in West Bengal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anindita Chakrabarty ◽  
Manish K Jha
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
Migrant Populations ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Rich Description ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bangladeshi Migrants

Abstract The construction of migrant population across India–Bangladesh borders is premised on cultural affiliation, religious sentiments and the contingent political economy. With a history of partition in different phases, the subjective conceptions of identity of migrants are layered and complex. The article unravels how identities of migrants are shaped in everyday life through the frame of legality–illegality, religious–political and economic–social aspects. Drawing on previous research and empirical engagement, the article engages with the questions on citizenship, residency, identity, belonging, exclusion and inclusion. The field work in the borderland district of North 24 Parganas provides rich description about the life and circumstances of migrants at the threshold of security and insecurity, belonging and unbelonging around layers of caste and communal tangle. The article presents a grounded understanding on the politics of documenting and phenomenon of maintaining undocumentedness. To explain the social construction of identity, the article explores the role of Hindu nationalist ideas that influences the negotiation of migrant populations around religious lines; either accepted, ignored, patronized or kept insecure, susceptible to fear and exclusion.

Food and mobility

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-288
Author(s):  
Tiana B. Hayden ◽  
Dhan Zunino Singh
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Technological Systems ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Following JTH’s editorial calling for a deeper consideration of the movement of people and things, we propose a more integrated and spread-out consideration of the relationship between food and mobility. Our aim is to bring together two consolidated fields of study – food studies and mobilities studies – in the interest of expanding the focus and subject of history of things in motion. A focus on food helps bring to the fore questions of the social construction of non-human mobility, the socio-technological systems for the circulation of foods, and the mutual affectations between transport and what is transported. It also allows for new understandings of the materialities of power relations, everyday life, networks, scale and temporality, and place-making.

“Sou Inglesa! Sou Inglesa!”: Memórias de uma Menina Anglo-Portuguesa (1907-1930)

2017 ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Miguel Alarcão
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

Textualizing the memory(ies) of physical and cultural encounter(s) between Self and Other, travel literature/writing often combines subjectivity with documental information which may prove relevant to better assess mentalities, everyday life and the social history of any given ‘timeplace’. That is the case with Growing up English. Memories of Portugal 1907-1930, by D. J. Baylis (née Bucknall), prefaced by Peter Mollet as “(…) a remarkably vivid and well written observation of the times expressed with humour and not little ‘carinho’. In all they make excellent reading especially for those of us interested in the recent past.” (Baylis: 2)

The dress: Theme and self-presentation in online Australian wedding planning fora

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Brenda Laskey ◽  
Lesley Stirling
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
New Media ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Cultural Object ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
The Social

This investigation of the discourse of Australian women in the ‘new media’ context of online special interest advice fora contributes to theory about the ways in which language encodes cultural practices and mediates the social construction of identity. The linguistic self-presentation of participants in 588 asynchronous written posts to wedding planning fora was analysed. Prevalent themes were identified inductively and the degree to which each identified theme was evident in the data was measured. The study uncovered ways in which group membership criteria were expressed and found that traditional ideals of feminine perfection were reinforced. A focus of the investigation was the ways in which the participants spoke about the wedding dress. At times, it was referred to using personification as though it were a proxy for a lover. On other occasions, it appeared to function as a representation of the writer’s idealized bridal self. It emerged as a highly significant cultural object which conferred a special but temporary identity.

The History of Unreason

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Samuel Teague ◽  
Peter Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
History Of

This chapter reflects on the importance of the historical narrative of mental illness, arguing that Western countries have sought new ways to confine the mentally ill in the post-asylum era, namely through the effects of stigma and medicalization. The walls are invisible, when once they were physical. The chapter outlines how health and illness can be understood as socially constructed illustrating how mental health has been constructed uniquely across cultures and over time. To understand this process more fully, it is necessary to consider the history of madness, a story of numerous social flashpoints. The trajectories of two primary mental health narratives are charted in this chapter. The authors argue that these narratives have played, and continue to play, an important role in the social construction of mental illness. These narratives are “confinement” and “individual responsibility.” Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Roy Porter, the authors describe how Western culture has come to consider the mentally ill as a distinct, abnormal other.

scholarly journals The Social Construction of Historical Traumas: The Polish Experience of the Uses of History in an Intelligentsia-dominated Polity

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 911-931
Author(s):  
Tomasz Zarycki ◽  
Tomasz Warczok
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The West ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Polish Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
And Control

The article argues that Poland’s mainstream national historical narrative, at least as far as the last two centuries of history of the country is concerned, is full of ‘traumatic’ motives which are regularly used and developed in diverse current political and intellectual contexts. Polish history is imagined to a large extent as an endless chain of 200 years of suffering, caused, among other things, by occupations, wars and exploitation, which are usually seen as not fully recognized in other countries, in particular in the West. The article attempts first of all to explain this specific nature of Poland’s historical identity by the privileged role of the intelligentsia, understood as a specific type of elite based on possession and control of cultural capital. It reconstructs the historical rise of the intelligentsia and its impact on the mainstream narrative in question, pointing to a selective choice of potential ‘traumas’ which are assigned a national status. They may be seen as tools to build positions in what can be called the Polish ‘field of power’, to use the notion coined by Pierre Bourdieu. The particular configuration and recent history of the field of power in Poland is reconstructed in order to explain different strategies of what can be called the social and political construction of historical traumas in Poland.

scholarly journals Os Jovens e o Imaginário da Aids: notas para uma construção social do risco

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Jeolás
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Individual Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Symbolism ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
Social Construction Of Risk ◽  
The Way

Este artigo, baseado em pesquisa sobre o imaginário da aids entre jovens, busca compreender a noção de risco como uma categoria sociocultural, cujos significados se acumulam nos conceitos de várias áreas do conhecimento e nos usos de senso comum. O perigo, o mal e o infortúnio sempre foram moralizados e politizados nas diversas culturas humanas e a história da aids não poderia ser diferente. Os simbolismos culturais sobre contágio, doenças transmitidas pelo sexo e pelo sangue e os valores atuais da sexualidade, incluindo as relações de gênero, estão presentes na forma como os jovens representam o risco do HIV. Além disso, não se pode desconsiderar a ambivalência que os riscos assumem atualmente para os jovens: alguns negados e afastados, outros aceitos e valorizados. No caso da aids, a busca pela vertigem e pelo êxtase, componentes do sexo e das drogas, distancia o discurso dos jovens sobre risco do discurso preventivo, baseado na racionalidade do comportamento individual, assumindo valores distintos ligados a experiências cotidianas. Youngsters and the imagery of AIDS: notes for the social construction of risk This article, based on research about the imagery of AIDS among youth, aims to understand the notion of risk as a social-cultural category, whose meanings are piled upon concepts of several areas of both knowledge and common sense usages. Danger, evil and misfortune have always been moralized and politicized in the different human cultures and it could not be different in the history of aids. Cultural symbolism about infection, sexually and blood transmitted diseases, as well as sexuality’s current values, including here gender relations, are present in the way the youth represents HIV´s risks. Besides, the ambivalence these risks assume for the youth nowadays cannot be disregarded: some are denied and put aside, others are accepted and valorized. In the case of AIDS, the search for vertigo and ecstasy, components of sex and drugs, distances the youth’s discourse about risk from the preventive discourse, based on the rationality of individual behavior, assuming distinct values linked to everyday experiences.

Art and its Objects: William Ivins and the Reproduction of Art

1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 65-98
Author(s):  
Gordon Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Reproduction ◽  
The Relationship

This paper is a critique of the contribution of William Ivins's Prints and Visual Communication (1953) to an understanding of the meaning of fine art reproductions. Ivins showed that photographic reproduction was constructed in relation to, and displaced, older ways of reproducing art which were carried out by handicraft engravers. His analysis alerts us to the fact that ambiguity characterized art reproduction before photographs. Art reproductions, then, were interpretations in line based on conventional modes of representation – what Ivins calls a visual syntax. In this respect he enhances our understanding of the social construction of the artist. For Ivins the social history of reproduction seems to end with the camera. This completed an individuation of creativity ushered in with the Renaissance, but which was always qualified by the interfering visual syntax of craftsmen-interpreters. It is argued that the value of Ivins's account resides in its reconstruction of the relationship between handicraft engraving, fine art reproduction and aesthetic objects that have long since slipped from our consciousness.

The Social Construction of Equality in Everyday Life

Human Studies ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott R. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Social
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document