"Postcolonial Bourdieu": Notes on the Oxymoron

The notion of a postcolonial Bourdieu presents us with an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms - that points to a set of conditions which have informed the international translation of Bourdieu's work as well as certain tensions existing both within and towards the field of postcolonial studies. Colonial contexts, as well as competing anti-colonial positions, have been a part of the social environment that has generated much of the social theory we present to our students. Yet these contexts are rarely given due consideration. Moreover, Manichean presentations and receptions of theory that have reduced various intellectual fields to a series of "isms" lack the subtlety that is necessary for an understanding of the complex, interwoven and shifting nature of social thought (Puwar & Sharma 2007)

Carrying As Method: Listening to Bodies as Archives

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related

Quantifying the Impact of Chikungunya and Dengue on Tourism Revenues

<b>Background</b><br> Health economists have traditionally quantified the burden of vector-borne diseases (such as chikungunya and dengue) as the sum of the cost of illness and the cost of intervention programmes. The objective of this paper is to predict the order of magnitude of possible reduction in tourism revenues if a major epidemic of chikungunya or dengue were to discourage visits by international tourists, and to prove that even a conservative estimate can be comparable to or even greater than the cost of illness and intervention programmes combined, and therefore should not be ignored in the estimation of the overall burden. <b>Methods</b><br> We have chosen three Asian economies where the immediate costs of these diseases have been recently calculated: Gujarat (an economically important state of India), Malaysia, and Thailand. Only international tourists from non-endemic countries have been considered to be discouraged, and a 4% annual decline in their numbers has been assumed. Revenues from these tourists have been calculated assuming that tourists from non-endemic countries would spend, on average, the same amount as all international tourists. These assumptions are conservative and consistent with the recent experience of Mauritius and R�union islands. Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) have been considered half as likely to avoid travel to Gujarat compared to non-Indians. This paper reports inflation-adjusted expenditure figures as 2008 US$, assuming recent market exchange rates of 42.0 INR/US$, 3.22 MYR/US$, 0.68 EUR/US$, and 33.6 THB/US$. <b>Findings</b><br> A 4$ 8 million for Gujarat, US$65 million for Malaysia, and US$ 363 million for Thailand. The estimated immediate annual cost of chikungunya and dengue to these economies is US$90 million, US$ 133 million, and approximately US$127 million respectively, indicating that impact on tourism revenues should not be ignored when calculating the burden of infectious diseases. The impact on Gujarat is relatively less because its share of world tourism receipts is just 0.04$ 9.6 million loss in domestic tourism revenues to Gujarat. <b>Interpretation</b><br> This paper shows that potential loss of tourism revenues due to a severe epidemic outbreak could be substantial. In some cases, ignoring this component could seriously underestimate cost-benefit results, forestalling promising interventions that could benefit the society as a whole or leading to inadequate investment of resources in prevention and public-funded control programmes. This would be to the detriment of especially poorer sections of the society, who may not be able to afford treatment costs. At present data are insufficient for us to make more than a preliminary estimate of the magnitude of the potential loss of revenues from tourism due to a major outbreak of chikungunya or dengue.

Why Should 5000 Children Die in India Every Day? Major Causes and Managerial Challenges

Globally, more than 10 million children under 5 years of age, die every year (20 children per minute), most from preventable causes, and almost all in poor countries. Major causes of child death include neonatal disorders (death within 28 days of birth), diarrhea, pneumonia, and measles. Malnutrition accounts for almost 35 % of childhood diseases. India alone accounts for almost 5000 child deaths under 5 years old (U5) every day. India.s child heath indicators are poor even compared with our Asian neighbors, namely Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Nepal and Bangladesh. Within India, the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh account for almost 60 % of all child deaths India.s neonatal mortality, which accounts for almost 50 % of U5 deaths, is one of the highest in the world. India launched the Universal Immunization Program in 1985, but the status of full immunization in India has reached only 43.5 % by 2005-06. India started the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) in 1975 to provide supplementary nutrition to children, but 50 % of our children are still malnourished; nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa. The WHO/UNICEF training program on Integrated Management of Neonatal and Childhood Illnesses, known as IMNCI, started in India a few years ago, but the progress is very slow. What is unfortunate is the fact that most of these deaths are preventable through proven interventions: preventive interventions and/or treatment interventions, but the management of childhood illnesses is very poor. In this working paper, we bring out the nature and magnitude of child deaths in India (Chapter 1) and then share with you in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 our observations on the management of some of national programs of the government of India such as The Universal Immunization Program (UIP) The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) The Integrated Management of Neonatal and Child Illnesses (IMNCI) In the final chapter (Chapter 5), we highlight certain managerial challenges to satisfactorily address the child mortality and morbidity in our country.

Compiling Maxwell Street

A Book Review Essay of Maxwell Street by Tim Cresswel

Puzzlement of a déjà vu: Illuminaries of the global South

The act of de-centring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge, as long standing geo-political anchors of epistemological authority, is by its very nature a continuous process of undoing, relearning and creating. The very position of being a messenger from the ‘North’, of knowledge and theory from the ‘South’ can re-produce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This paper considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus will be on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitute points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes platforms them in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which they respectively map fields, to situate their own points of intervention

Surrogate safety evaluation and validation with crash history for interurban midblock sections under heterogeneous traffic conditions in India

480-492Traditionally, road safety analysis has been conducted by analysing collision records, which has a reactive approach as the analyst waits for collisions to occur. The alternate proactive approach in the form of surrogate safety measures is to study traffic conflicts which are bound to occur more frequently and thus has related them to the possible incidences of collisions. In the present study, traffic conflict indicators have been used to assess the level of safety by considering the typical midblock sections of an interurban corridor using vehicle trajectory data extracted through microscopic simulation. The surrogate safety parameters such as Time to Collision (TTC), Deceleration Rate (DR), change in velocity (Delta V) as well as conflicting vehicle Speed (Max S) have been extracted from trajectory data throughthe application of numerical elaboration to evaluate safety. Further, an attempt has been made to quantify the traffic conflicts occurring at the midblock of referred study. The proposed threshold values of surrogate safety parameters have been validated using the reported three years’ crash data. The approach presented in the paper has helped in the identification of midblock locations prone to road crashes and hence has served as a proactive alternative as opposed to historical crash based analysis

Resistance and Resignation:Responses to Typecasting in British Acting

This article draws on 38 in-depth interviews with British actors to explore the operation of typecasting. First, we argue that typecasting acts as the key mechanism through which the ‘somatic norm’ is established in British acting. It delivers an oversupply of leading roles for white, male, middle-class actors while ensuring that those who deviate somatically are restricted to largely socially caricatured roles. Second, we focus on the career trajectories of ‘othered’ actors. While they frequently experience acting roles as offensive and discriminatory, we demonstrate how most nonetheless reluctantly accept the terms of their ‘type’ in order to survive and succeed. Third, we focus on the minority who have attempted to challenge their type. Here we find that successful resistance is accomplished by carefully choosing work that subverts the somatic norm. However, the ability to exercise such choice is highly contingent on resources associated with an actor’s class origin