Becoming an 'Asli Karigar': The Production of Authenticity Among Old Delhi's Muslim Artisans.

Fieldwork for this thesis was undertaken with Muslim artisans who live and work in Old Delhi, India, between July 2006 and October 2007. These artisans are skilled in a form of embroidery, done with gold and silver metallic wires, known as zardozi. This craft emerged in India in conjunction with the rise of so-called Islamicate states beginning in the 13th century and zardozi was essential to the production of luxury goods of exquisite quality. Today, the high quality and intricate form of the craft is rarely patronised, while sub-standard work is being produced in the name of zardozi. With the liberalisation of India's economy in the early 1990s, competition from abroad and new opportunities afforded by the growing export market for handicrafts have accelerated the decline in high quality craftsmanship. These recent trends have meant that many highly skilled artisans are losing their sources of livelihood or are forced to produce low quality goods for a mass market. In my thesis, I argue that the marginal position of urban Muslim artisans runs much deeper than recent shifts in the global marketplace. This marginalisation can be located in their exclusion from the broader narratives of the Indian nation-state, whereby the rhetoric embedded in colonial and post-colonial discourses locates the authentic artisan and authentic crafts production in primarily rural and "Hindu" communitarian settings. In this context of marginalisation, I pose the following research question: How do urban Muslim artisans constitute themselves as real, authentic craft producers or, in their own words, as "asli karigar-s"? The broader theoretical objective of the thesis is to recover the possibility of "becoming subjects" in the spaces whereby normativity is aspired to and not necessarily where it is subverted or resisted. In the thesis, I locate various "sites" of performance where the real, authentic artisan is constituted, including the construction of the "Other" through language that distinguishes authentic from inauthentic; the incorporation of Islam into conceptions of ideal work practices; constructions of lineage through narratives situated in both linear and nonlinear temporal frameworks; and relations with the state - the largest patron of crafts in India - through encounters with government sponsored exhibitions and award competitions

A D.C. motor model including armature reaction

In a d.c. machine the armature reaction reduces the total flux per pole because of saturation effects at heavy armature currents. In this project the separately excited d.c. motor is modelled by considering the total flux per pole as a function of armature and field currents. The machine model is linearized so that it is valid only for small changes in the neighbourhood of steady state conditions. The machine model when represented in the matrix form is a set of first order differential equations in which changes in the armature voltage, field voltage and load torque are the inputs, whereas changes in the armature current, field current and motor speed represent the response of the machine. [Continues.

Centering Communities of Color in the Modernization of a Public Health Survey System: Lessons from Oregon

Context: Public health survey systems are tools for informing public health programming and policy at the national, state, and local levels. Among the challenges states face with these kinds of surveys include concerns about the representativeness of communities of color and lack of community engagement in survey design, analysis, and interpretation of results or dissemination, which raises questions about their integrity and relevance. Approach: Using a data equity framework (rooted in antiracism and intersectionality), the purpose of this project was to describe a formative participatory assessment approach to address challenges in Oregon Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Student Health Survey (SHS) data system by centering community partnership and leadership in (1) understanding and interpreting data; (2) identifying strengths, gaps, and limitations of data and methodologies; (3) facilitating community-led data collection on community-identified gaps in the data; and (4) developing recommendations. Results: Project team members’ concerns, observations, and critiques are organized into six themes. Throughout this engagement process, community partners, including members of the project teams, shared a common concern: that these surveys reproduced the assumptions, norms, and methodologies of the dominant (White, individual centered) scientific approach and, in so doing, created further harm by excluding community knowledges and misrepresenting communities of color. Conclusions: Meaningful community leadership is needed for public health survey systems to provide more actionable pathways toward improving population health outcomes. A data equity approach means centering communities of color throughout survey cycles, which can strengthen the scientific integrity and relevance of these data to inform community health efforts

Engaging Antiracist and Decolonial Praxis to Advance Equity in Oregon Public Health Surveillance Practices.

Public health surveillance and data systems in the US remain an unnamed facet of structural racism. What gets measured, which data get collected and analyzed, and how and by whom are not matters of happenstance. Rather, surveillance and data systems are productions and reproductions of political priority, epistemic privilege, and racialized state power. This has consequences for how communities of color are represented or misrepresented, viewed, and valued and for what is prioritized and viewed as legitimate cause for action. Surveillance and data systems accordingly must be understood as both an instrument of structural racism and an opportunity to dismantle it. Here, we outline a critique of standard surveillance systems and practice, drawing from the social epidemiology, critical theory, and decolonial theory literatures to illuminate matters of power germane to epistemic and procedural justice in the surveillance of communities of color. We then summarize how community partners, academics, and state health department data scientists collaborated to reimagine survey practices in Oregon, engaging public health critical race praxis and decolonial theory to reorient toward antiracist surveillance systems. We close with a brief discussion of implications for practice and areas for continued consideration and reflection

Managing institutional fragmentation and time compression in post-disaster reconstruction - the case of Bam

Several studies have revealed the difficulties often found in defining stakeholders’ roles in post-disaster reconstruction projects. Insufficient and ill-timed collaboration are typically identified as the principal source of problems. Borrowing the concept of Institutional Fragmentation (IF) from the field of project management, this paper examines significant obstacles to collaboration and to sharing knowledge and experience in post-disaster reconstruction projects, revealing the causes and effects at four levels of fragmentation: the construction industry, project procurement, design and construction work. The case of the reconstruction program conducted after the 2003 earthquake in Bam (Iran), illustrates these different levels of fragmentation and their short and long-term impacts. Results show that three of the four levels of fragmentation caused unexpected outcomes during program implantation and afterwards; fragmentation increased the divergence between the many stakeholders with their interests and expectations, during and after their intervention. Conflict and confrontation between two controller organizations led to an excessive emphasis on technical requirements at the expense of heritage preservation. Results also explain how specific conditions after the disaster - such as lack of time coupled with socio-political pressures - increased fragmentation. Post-disaster reconstruction projects require systematic and comprehensive procurement to cover the interfaces that will enable tasks to be conducted effectively. The study proposes a conceptual approach to fragmentation that can help academics, practitioners, and decision-makers understand the origins and consequences of institutional fragmentation on the timely use of resources, and to develop governance structures and mechanisms that can help reduce it in post-disaster reconstruction initiatives

The art of indigeneity: Aesthetics and competition in Mexican economies of culture

On the basis of ethnographic research with woodcarvers in Oaxaca, Mexico, this paper investigates the role that aesthetic practices play in economic competition in cultural markets. I explain how one family has become the most successful artisans in their village by aesthetically referencing the indigenous art that is highly sought after by the North American ethnic art market. By reformulating Bourdieu's analysis of artistic fields, I argue that aesthetic competition should be theorised at the level of genres, which allow insight into how individual aesthetic innovations may transform the fields in which art is produced and circulated. I show that by referencing indigeneity, this successful family not only accesses a new market but also renders their work more authoritative than the carvings of their neighbours, which aesthetically reference Mexican ‘artesanías’ (craftwork). In so doing, they not only earn more money but also change the ways that Oaxacan woodcarvings are valued in general

On Measuring Project Performance: Some Problems of Aggregation

Performance evaluation of buildings--by means of postconstruction evaluation--has traditionally focused on the performance measurement of building subsystems. This approach, based on the horizontal view of the building process, suffers from two important shortcomings. First, its underlying assumption that a completed building's performance can be arrived at simply by aggregating the individual performances of its parts is not valid. Like most complex systems, a completed building is much more than the sum of its parts. Second, the focus of traditional appraisal on subsystems, with its feedback information on individual products and services, actively encourages suboptimization of tasks. It is a condition that is contrary to the requirements imposed by the multiorganizational nature of the building team, and the resulting interdependence of tasks, where useful feedback information is that which relates to the project as a whole. To overcome these shortcomings of the traditional building appraisal model, an alternative model based on the vertical view of the building process is propose

Women’s self-employment in Europe : What factors affects women’s self-employment in five regions in Europe?

This study aims to analyse women’s self-employment in five regions of Europe, namely Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, North-West Europe and Western Europe in two years, 2002 and 2016. To assess the factors affecting women’s self-employment in Europe we base our analysis on push and pull theory and as far as the quantitative part is concerned we estimate a probit model. Our research questions are the following: What socio-economic factors influence women to enter self-employment in the five regions of Europe? How are these factors related to the push and pull theory? Is there a trend of convergence over time in the five European regions studied? The main findings are that being women decreases the probability to become self-employed in the five European regions, except in the Northern part of Europe. The result suggests that women more often than men are pushed into self-employment as they have to balance work with family. Being young (18-35) also decreases the probability of being self-employed compared to middle age individual (36-50) in the year 2002 and 2016. Individuals with low and medium-skill level have a lower probability of being self-employed in comparison to the individual with high skill. Regarding the research questions, this study found that variable age (18-36), age (51-65), married, children, medium education, high education, low skill and high skill are factors that influence women in their decision to become self-employed. Observing the change over time of self-employment, we found that the probability increases being selfemployed in Southern Europe whereas it decreases in Northern Europe