Obstacles et problématisation dans les apprentissages interculturels : un exemple d’initiation à la danse Kathak

Dans quelle mesure peut-on parler d’obstacles et de problématisation à propos de processus d’enseignement-apprentissage artistiques interculturels ? Cette intervention se propose d’explorer, par un regard croisé entre une didacticienne qui a travaillé dans le domaine de l’enseignement de la danse Kathak (une danse indienne) en France et une didacticienne des sciences, le sens que ces deux termes, relativement stabilisés en didactique des sciences, peut prendre lorsqu’on les transfère à ce domaine interculturel

'Mafias' in the Waterscape: Urban Informality and Everyday Public Authority in Bangalore

This article investigates the phenomenon of Bangaloreʼs urban 'water mafias', operators who extract and deliver groundwater to scores of informal residential areas in Indian cities. The term 'mafia' here is treated as a semantic area of situated meanings and cultural interpretations that needs to be historicised and prised open in order to better understand how the urban waterscape is produced and inhabited. It situates the provenance and workings of mafias within wider debates on urban informality, state formation, and urban infrastructure and space. Rather than seeing mafias as filling a gap where government water supply has failed, as mainstream narratives suggest, the paper argues that mafias must be seen as formative of the post-colonial state. It further suggests that the specific form of public authority exercised by water mafias explains the production of informality in Bangaloreʼs waterscape. Based on ethnographic research in 2007-2009, the paper characterises the everyday authority wielded by mafias along three main registers: (i) the ability of mafias to make and break discursive and material boundaries between the formal and informal, public and private, and state and society, (ii) the varied nature of mafiasʼ political practices, ranging from exploitation to electoral lobbying to social protection to the provision of welfare, and iii) mafiasʼ complicity in both water and land regimes in a neo-liberalised urban political economy

Fluid Hegemony: A Political Ecology of Water, Market Rule, and Insurgence at Bangalore's Frontier

Since the turn of the millennium, the city of Bangalore (officially Bengaluru) has experimented with a series of neoliberal, market-oriented reforms to overhaul the institutional, pricing, and financial aspects of its urban services. The city's water, in particular, long considered a service that must be subsidized by the state, has been targeted under interventions that seek to commercialize, rationalize, and privatize delivery, while simultaneously deepening certain forms of regulatory oversight. Supported by a melee of international development actors and administered by state-level experts, these policy changes have been especially focused on reforming the city's outskirts, where unruly growth and conflicting governance arrangements have produced highly differentiated patterns of land tenure and water access. Analysis of why certain water policy imaginaries are ascendant today, how programs of reform are conceived of and by whom, and to what ends they proceed in this dynamic peri-urban frontier landscape is essential to an understanding of metropolitanization in the Global South more generally. Yet, critical scholarship on Bangalore and elsewhere has largely neglected the articulations between new infrastructure policies and the local politics of peri-urban frontiers. This dissertation addresses this gap through a multi-sited ethnographic study of policy-making and practice affecting the governance of drinking water at Bangalore's peripheries. It investigates two case studies: (1) a program that sought to reengineer municipal management of citizen complaints, and (2) a project that aimed to extend piped water to residents financed, in part, through the debt market and upfront cash contributions from peripheral residents. The study draws on archival research, in-depth interviews, and participant observation to interrogate the underlying logic, material significance, and political contestation surrounding these projects in the peripheral localities of Bommanahalli, Byatarayanapura, and KR Puram. This research argues, first, that reforms derive not only from the fiscal concerns of the current moment, but also from a preoccupation with disciplining the conduct of local government and citizens in line with market principles. Crucially, this is a regime of rule that is deeply inflected with the enduring legacies of state-led development. It is the concoction of the developmental approaches of yesterday and the pro-market approaches of today that marks the homegrown logic of neoliberalism in India. Second, for all the rhetoric purporting to have overcome the incompetencies of a previous era, today's neoliberal interventions are marked by profound contradictions and limitations. A narrow focus on financial criteria, for instance, has resulted in a disconnect between the promise and material reality of water several years after new market-based policies and programs were instituted. Third, the grounded workings of new water policies cannot be understood without grasping the politics of the peripheralized middle class--a sizeable cross-section of the middle class that is propertied, but that nonetheless does not enjoy the same degree of tenure security as its elite counterparts. Through collective organizing, members of this social grouping contest and ultimately compromise over cost recovery-focused water pricing policies in order to legitimate their property claims in this globalizing and increasingly exclusionary city. The research thus reveals that the outcomes of water policies are contingent on historical geographies of struggle and insurgent claims to space in the places where they unfold. Overall, this dissertation elucidates how neoliberal hegemony in the urban waterscape is fluid and mutable--prone to becoming imbued with a diverse set of interests and to taking shape in and through a terrain of citizenship politics.These findings, relevant for other rapidly urbanizing regions of the world, point to the need to rethink urban water praxis such that it valorizes diverse ways of knowing, anticipates the points of friction between water and spatial policies, and is sensitive to how and why institutionalized top-down schemes actually take root at the grassroots level

La danse indienne Kathak en France (essai de transposition et conception d'une ingénierie didactique)

La danse indienne kathak, comporte des techniques corporelles et du sens des récits. La démocratisation de cet art a engendré des déformations dans son enseignement et dans sa présentation. C'est pourquoi, nous pensons réhabiliter son corpus de connaissances pour pouvoir formaliser et institutionnaliser son enseignement. L'étude consiste à élaborer des contenus d'enseignement du kathak à l'attention d'un public français, pour lequel aucune stratégie d'enseignement n'a été mise au point à ce jour. Notre hypothèse générale est que la transmission de savoir prévu pour un public tout venant en France nécessite une transposition. La question centrale est l'équilibre entre sens et technique dans le kathak transposé. Au plan théorique, nous fonctionnons sur le concept de Transposition didactique qui surveille le passage d'un objet de référence à un objet d'enseignement et au plan opérationnel, avec l'Ingénierie didactique qui contrôle la conception et les effets des contenus d'enseignement.Kathak, an Indian dance, comprises specific body technics and narrative significances. The democratisation of this art has lead to the deformation of its teaching and its presentation. Hence, we would like to rehabilitate its fundamental corpus in order to formalize and institutionalize its instruction. The study consists in elaborating teaching contents for a keen but uninitated French public for whom no teaching strategy has been defined as yet. Our general hypothesis is that the transmission of knowledge intended for lay French pubic requires transposition. Our principal question is the balanced mix of body techniques and narrative significances in the teachable kathak On the theoritical level, we will comply with the principles of didactic transposition which supervises the passage of an objet of reference into a teaching objet and on the operational level, we will follow the methodology of didactic engineering which controls the conception and the effects of teaching contents.RENNES2-BU Centrale (352382101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Sweet-Talking the Climate? Evaluating Sugar Mill Cogeneration and Climate Change Financing in India

International support to help pay the costs of climate change mitigation in developing countries is an essential element of any future international climate change agreement. Analyses of various funding options have focused broadly on their relative ethical justifications, ease of implementation, and cost effectiveness. Yet for the most part, these international climate discussions about the nature of a future international financial transfer mechanism are occurring mostly on a high policy level, without grounded analysis in the places where the resulting activities would take place. Drawing on past experiences, there is a need for more bottom-up analysis regarding the efficacy of various types of assistance in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.In India, high efficiency cogeneration of electricity and steam from sugar cane waste (bagasse) has been ranked among the highest for its potential for cost-effective emissions reductions and other development and environmental benefits (WRI 2000). India’s sugar industry is the largest in the world and employs over 14 million people and 45 million farmers and their families (Winrock 2002). Despite its multiple purported benefits, and numerous domestic and international programs to support the technology, less than 10% of India’s estimated potential for bagasse cogeneration has actually been exploited, while approximately 20% of the total potential is in the planning stages (WADE 2004, MNES 2004). Focusing on Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, two of the largest sugar producing states in India, this research examines the current state of the technology, barriers to its dissemination, and the results of past international and domestic efforts to support it