scholarly journals Urban Mountain Waterscapes: The Transformation of Hydro-Social Relations in the Trans-Himalayan Town Leh, Ladakh, India

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 1698
Author(s):  
Judith Müller ◽  
Juliane Dame ◽  
Marcus Nüsser

Socio-economic processes and climate change impact the socio-hydrology of many small towns in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), such as Leh in Ladakh. The rapidly urbanising town experienced a shift from agricultural livelihoods towards incomes mainly relying on the tourism sector. As results of this research show, the limited water resources essential to the everyday life of urban citizens have become increasingly important for the tourism sector and the urbanisation process. This study aims to understand the transformation of the urban mountain waterscape and the role of different actors involved. The waterscape approach frames hydro-social relations in a specific spatial context and additionally captures diverging hydromentalities within local actor constellations. Related discourses are materialised as water governance impacting the everyday life of urban citizens. A combination of quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods allows for a differentiated picture of current developments. Based on 312 household questionnaires, 96 semi-structured interviews, and a participatory photography workshop, this study provides evidence that urban restructuring induced by development imaginaries produces uneven water citizenships in Leh. Along with socio-economic shifts, the community-managed water regulation system is replaced by a technocratic scheme, centralising water supply and sanitation. While some of Leh’s citizens benefit from urban restructurings, others are confronted with environmental and social costs, such as a deteriorating water quality and a further reduction in quantity.

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juanita Elias ◽  
Shirin M. Rai

AbstractIt goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualised as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the longstanding grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many would ask: Why do we need an explicit feminist theorisation of the everyday? After all, notions of everyday life and everyday political struggle infuse feminist analysis. This article seeks to interrogate the concept of the everyday – questioning prevalent understandings of the everyday and asking whether there is analytical and conceptual utility to be gained in articulating a specifically feminist understanding of it. We argue that a feminist political economy of the everyday can be developed in ways that push theorisations of social reproduction in new directions. We suggest that one way to do this is through the recognition that social reproductionisthe everyday alongside a three-part theorisation of space, time, and violence (STV). It is an approach that we feel can play an important role in keeping IPE honest – that is, one that recognises how important gendered structures of everyday power and agency are to the conduct of everyday life within global capitalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 887-907
Author(s):  
Cristina Perales Franco

Abstract: Convivencia is a Spanish concept that addresses the ways of living together, living with others. School convivencia in particular is formed by the tapestry of social relations that construct the everyday life in schools, and it provides the relational elements and boundaries where the school experience is constructed. This article derives from an investigation of the relationships between two Mexican primary schools and their local communities and their implications for school convivencia. It presents two challenges of analysing school convivencia from an ethnographic perspective: the struggle between restrictive and comprehensive approaches and the tension between the specific and the complex in understanding convivencia.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Simpson

This article examines the performative transformation of street spaces into performance places by considering the practices of street performers. Street performance here refers to a set of practices whereby either musical or nonmusical performances are undertaken in the street with the aim of eliciting donations from passersby. Drawing on ethnographic observations undertaken in Bath, U.K., and situating the discussion in recent conceptions of everyday life and public space, the specific sociospatial interventions that street performances make into Bath’s everyday life are considered. In doing so, the article focuses on the fleeting social relations that emerge from these interventions and what these can do to the experience of the everyday in terms of producing moments of sociality and conviviality. This is also reflected on in light of the various debates that have occurred in Bath as a result of these interventions relating to the increased regulation of street performances. The article then highlights the conflicted and contentious position that street performers occupy in the everyday life of such cities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Herslund ◽  
Gry Paulgaard

The paper investigates how refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience and interact with their new rural places of residence. Theoretically, the paper finds inspiration in “phenomenology of practices” (Simonsen, Prog. Hum. Geogr., 2012, 37, 10–26), which emphasizes the bodily and sensory experiences of daily life that spur feelings of, for example, “orientation” or “disorientation”. The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with refugees and local volunteers in 2016/2017/2019 in small towns in the rural north of Norway and rural Denmark. There are several differences between the Norwegian and Danish rural areas, in relation to distances, climate and population density. Nonetheless, the ways in which the rural areas are experienced from within, by refugees settled there, show surprisingly many similarities. Many of the informants, in both the Norwegian and Danish cases, initially expressed frustration at being placed in rural areas without having any say in the matter. Those who were former city-dwellers especially experienced moments of disorientation, as their encounters with Nordic rural life were experienced as the opposite of their urban backgrounds. Limiting structural conditions very much shape the everyday lives of refugees in the first years, when they do not have a car or the financial capacity to find their own house. They feel stressed, with busy everyday lives made up of long commuting hours on public transport. In these first years of uncertainty, the dark and harsh weather very much adds to the feeling of stress and insecurity. What seem to add “orientation” are social relations with other refugees and local volunteers organizing activities.


Author(s):  
Philipp Zehmisch

Chapter 1 explores the intellectual trajectory of the concept of subalternity. The first section revisits some key debates of subaltern theory which are considered relevant for the book. It demonstrates that subaltern theory may be fruitfully applied to understanding social inequality, especially when it comes to analysing the interlinked exclusion of subalterns from hegemonic frameworks of speech and, access to means of production in the modern state. The second part reflects on the methodological and theoretical consequences of applying subaltern theory to anthropological fieldwork and ethnographic writing. The author demands that the fieldwork method of participant observation is particularly suited to document the everyday life of subalterns, especially their often embodied practices and rituals. Beyond, he argues that the establishing of social relations with subalterns may serve as a precondition enabling the fieldworker to ‘speak with subalterns’ and thus to capture their voice in a more direct way.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Miloš Jodas ◽  

The principal aim of this paper is to define Kyrgyz music in Kyrgyzstan ethnomusicology in order to assess whether the traditional Kyrgyz music has an essential impact on the identity of the Kyrgyz people and, if so, how does this impact manifest itself. In order to assess the impacts during research, the author was concerned with the influence of urbanization, globalization on processes related to music, the preference of either traditional or modern music, and how music is perceived in a cross-generational perspective. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on related phenomena including folk music instruments of the Kyrgyz or the Kyrgyz storytellers and musicians, who call themselves aqyns and manaschi. Additionally, the relationship of the national pride and music or the most common forms of music education of children and adolescents and its financial and spatial availability are being explored and scrutinized. The unifying theme of this thesis is music in everyday life of the Kyrgyz. The analytical part of this research mainly draws on the results of the author’s month-long field research from 2018 which took place in various diverse regions of Kyrgyzstan. The research includes a questionnaire, overt participant observation, and semi-structured interviews.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamal Devkota ◽  
Kaustuv Raj Neupane

Small towns in the mid-hills of Nepal rely on springs, streams and rivers in surrounding catchments for drinking water. The rapidly growing population in these towns has put increasing stresses on limited water resources. The inverse relationship between supply and demand of water has created challenges to the water security in these towns. In the absence of elected local government, decision making processes, including the management and governance of water at local level were directly affected. There were some unanswered questions – who are the leaders? who sets agendas? How do they formulate and implement strategies and make decisions? This paper aims to analyse the context of water governance in rapidly urbanising small town in Nepal, focusing on actors and institutions. Primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focused group discussions and key informant surveys from Dhulikhel municipality and its upstream communities. This paper argues that the local level water governance practices in rapidly urbanising small towns in Nepal are still evolving. During the political transition and vacuumed local jurisdictions, the real decisions to manage and govern water were made in an informal way. The formal course of making decisions by authorised actors and institutions has been curtailed significantly.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110003
Author(s):  
Pablo J Boczkowski ◽  
Facundo Suenzo ◽  
Eugenia Mitchelstein ◽  
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik ◽  
Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt ◽  
...  

How and why do people still get print newspapers in an era dominated by mobile and social media communication? In this article, we answer this question about the permanence of traditional media in a digital media ecosystem by analyzing 488 semi-structured interviews conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States. We focus on three mechanisms of media reception: access, sociality, and ritualization. Our findings show that these mechanisms are decisively shaped by patterns of everyday life that are not captured by the scholarly foci on either content- or technology-influences on media use. Thus, we argue that a non-media centric approach improves descriptive fit and adds heuristic power by bringing a wider lens into crucial mechanisms of media reception in ways that expand the conceptual toolkit that scholars can utilize to analyze the role of media in everyday life.


Author(s):  
Antonio Rosales

Basic human rights are not met in many parts of the world. Hunger, ill-health, and poor education are often part of the lives of the poor. The purpose of this study is to understand poor people's sources of strength, social relations, sources of income, and perspectives as strategies to cope with poverty in everyday life. Data gathering was done through field observations and semi-structured interviews with poor and non-poor people in the Philippine town, Hagonoy. All data was codified according to recurrent and salient issues and analyzed using chiefly symbolic interactionism as the theoretical framework. The results of this study reveal that poor people suffer from stigmas. Poor people carry out various survival strategies: some strategies are creative, spiritual, and norm-breaking; social relations are important to cope with poverty. There are differences in the way poverty affects men and women due to culturally defined gender roles. The poor people in this study were marginalized into less desirable areas; because of their lack of resources they live in shanties where they have little protection. Calamities affect both the non-poor and the poor people but the latter are in a less fortunate position.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 987-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel de Godoy Ferreira ◽  
Viviane Soares ◽  
Rosane Gonçalves Nitschke ◽  
Adriana Dutra Tholl ◽  
Maria Angeles Garcia Carpintero Muñoz ◽  
...  

This is a qualitative, exploratory-descriptive study, grounded on the everyday life and interpretative sociology. The aim of the study was to understand the everyday life of pregnant women and their families, based on prenatal care. The study was conducted in a health center in southern Brazil, and it involved ten pregnant women. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews, using the intrafamilial genogram and ecomap, between March and May of 2011. Data analysis involved: preliminary analysis, ordering, key links, coding and categorization. The results show that the everyday life of pregnant women involves biological changes and emotional experiences that generate a need for changing their pace of life, whose implementation depends on social changes, requiring a support network that may contribute to promote health during pregnancy.


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