Challenges Faced by Non-Profit Associations in Laos: A Case Study of Huam Jai Asasamak

This paper looks at the case study of Huam Jai Asasamak, a Non-Profit Association operating in Laos in order to understand various challenges faced by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in the socialist regime of the Laos. It uses participant observation as a research method based on time spent living in Laos as well as other qualitative research methods including document analysis, observation, and interviews. The paper gives a contextual overview of Laos and shows that civil society is a new phenomenon in Laos linked to social and political consequences of opening up of the Laos economy in 1980s. Furthermore, the two types of challenges are discussed: Inter-NGO (issues related to organizational challenges), and Intra-NGO (those that an organization faces nationally or internationally). After the adoption of the New Economic Mechanism in 1986, more iNGOs gradually gained permission to operate in Laos. However, the legal framework for local organizations to operate did not come into effect until 2009. Therefore, the challenges faced by local CSOs present a case study of state-led civil society in Laos characterized by the state’s direct control and supervision of the sector. This has ultimately created a space for civil society in Laos that is limited in capacity and operating in a somewhat fearful environment. However, based on the analysis of civil society in Laos, the paper states that a compromise between the state and CSOs is the chief determinant characteristic of civil society organizations in Laos. The CSOs are not looking to change the regime but rather to defend their right to exist. In doing so, they comply with state\u27s regulations. Consequently, the civil society steers away from a liberal perspective of civil society, and creates its own realm, thereby defining civil society from its own [Laotian] perspective

Towards a fifth cinema

Following other advances in international film movements, namely Third and Fourth Cinema, we propose the concept of Fifth Cinema to refer to a composite of audio-visual outputs developed primarily by refugees and/or enabled with their interests and stories at heart. Although the experience of forcible displacement and expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, Fifth Cinema exhibits certain similarities. It is a cinema that is nomadic, insecure, fragmented, displaced, accented, and hybrid. Emotionally and politically fraught, it is emergency cinema, getting unheard voices out there. It is a ‘smart cinema’ enabled by the spread of digital technologies making it instantaneous, dispensable yet indispensable as a record of a millennial phenomenon. By no means a concerted social movement, it is certainly about reflecting on the surge of individual movements and their filmic outputs, occasionally collective as the result of shared endeavours and co-productions. In this article, we chart out some key features and proponents of Fifth Cinema as an ‘open corpus’ and as part of making a political statement: that refugee conditions and contributions are appreciated, valorised and supported with the means to represent themselves, creatively, interculturally and politically through the (co-)production of their own stories

BIODEGRADABLE POLYMERIC FILM FOR FOOD PACKAGING

Food packaging films that show post-consumer biodegradability are rarely explored by researchers. The present study was carried out to investigate the physicomechanical characteristics of ethyl cellulose (EC) based films to be used in food packaging. Ethyl cellulose was plasticized with different percentage of polyethylene glycol (PEG). The samples of standard dimensions were subjected to different testing such as soluble matter content, moisture content, oil permeability, surface morphology, mechanical testing etc. The data obtained was analysed to decide the moderate percentage of plasticizer that can be used to provide a rational explanation of a perfect quality specimen. It has been revealed that too high or too low percentage of plasticizer was not appropriate for a good film. Tensile stress analysis was used to estimate the mechanical properties of the films. The results have shown an increase in tensile properties with increase in coalescence temperature. Temperature-dependent plastic deformation was observed for coalescence temperatures above 50oC

Skipping memories on partition and the intersensory field in subcontinental Britain

Based on the research and development of a theatre drama. Silent Sisters, I consider how the partition of India-Pakistan when over ten million people were displaced is remembered in the diasporic context in Britain. These recollections and representations may be explored in terms of three main registers: first, objects and memories from the partition period itself in the subcontinent; second, those that may be from elsewhere but then are embedded in partition contexts; and third, those that throw light on the phenomena of partition from afar through fragments of ‘skipping memories’. The first broad context may encompass imagery that is directly from the period of mass displacement, extremely rare in that most people were too caught up in the urgency of carrying only bare essentials if anything at all lest they be killed, raped and/or looted. The second series of contexts may refer to free-floating representations, created in and on different time-spaces, but once embedded in semiotically rich contexts about partition take on new meanings and resonances that can be equally emotive. Relatedly, a third case is of how objects and memories become part of a generative archive that encompasses a range of media on the theme of partition – a canon that is potentially endless. In this case, the archive is pieced together out of tendrils that remain, tangible and intangible. It is an intersensory archive that is not just retrospective but also future-orientated in terms of what the fragment might catalyse - visual, narrativised, embodied, recited, sung, enacted, and digitalised

Mediating rape: the ‘Nirbhaya effect’ in the creative and digital arts

While reports of ‘Nirbhaya’ referring to the brutal gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus in Delhi 2012 have been prolific, less attention has been paid to other media and artistic representations on the subject. In this article, I consider how the atrocity has been mediated through multiple outlets in India as part of a reinvigorated aesthetics of grief, anger, critique and protest. Building on earlier feminist modes of artistic engagement and describing it as the ‘Nirbhaya effect’, I consider outlets such as online films, canvas art, posters, photography, murals, comic books, satirical skits, and ‘social experiments’ which continue unabated in India despite the state’s censorship of the BBC documentary on the issues raised, India’s Daughter. The creative outlets may be considered in terms of five overlapping registers: memorialisation, affirmative solidarity, ironic provocations, rescripting the master narrative, and sensationalization. Altogether, they indicate the many potentials and limitations of a violent wound in the social fabric channelled through the creative arts and digital media. Keywords: gender, rape and sexual violence, media, creative arts, digital media, representation

The digitalia of everyday life: multi-situated anthropology of a virtual letter by a ‘foreign hand'

The article considers the transmissions and effects of a digital letter, and its implications for multi-situated—as opposed to a multi-sited—anthropology. Multi-situated moves beyond multiple sites as supplementary contexts to the life flows of people, materials, and ideas, to consider multi-ontological, dynamic, and temporally contingent situations constitutive of such movements in the making, that are embedded and/or enfolded along several intersecting planes on- and offline. The public letter was written collaboratively in May 2012 by activists in Britain, agreed to and signed off by supportive British members of Parliament among others, and addressed to the then prime minister of India and the chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu. The letter’s contents pertained to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in south India, with concerns about mandatory procedures in the construction of a nuclear power station, and democratic and human rights abuses against nonviolent protestors. By focusing on the emergence, travels, and receptive trajectories of the letter, the article makes a case for the increasing need to encompass aspects of digital anthropology not as a discrete subdiscipline, but as an integral part of core anthropological focus and method for the study of “onlife” entanglements—what effectively has become the digitalia of everyday life

Introduction: (En)countering sexual violence in the Indian city

Over the past few decades, incidents of rape, sexual discrimination, honour killing, acid attacks and sex-related murders in Indian cities have come under much media and public scrutiny, significantly impacting conceptions of gender, risk and women’s safety in urban spaces. The city itself has become a dominant trope for underscoring the anxieties, discourses and exegesis of sexual violence, as exemplified in the oft-cited designation of Delhi as the ‘rape capital of India’. This introduction to the themed section critically engages with ‘the urban’ in attempts to understand sexual violence in India, and focuses on the multiple public (workplace, leisure, street lives) and private (domestic, intimate) arenas of urban life where sexual violence is encountered, and the resources they provide to counter it. The co-editors engage with the interdisciplinary research papers by contributing authors, that show how sexual violence is ‘(en)countered’ in women’s right-wing politics, processes of cultural production, community health activism, experiences of violent relationships, and men’s growing anxieties about women’s self-determination in Indian cities. With a specific ethnographic emphasis on women’s experiences of rhetoric, representation and resistance to harassment, the themed section analyses sexual violence through the lens of urban social and spatial transformation in the region

Introduction - Global Black Lives Matter: Representations of resistance, memory and politics

Viral videos, murals, graffiti, performance activism, tumbling statues, and Black Atlantic film screenings are all part of empowering audio-visual-digital narratives that contribute to the rising momentum against ongoing institutional racism - on the backs of the legacies of colonialism, slavery and exploitation across the world. From the Rhodes Must Fall movement that started in South Africa, the townships of Johannesburg, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Black Lives Matter in US and UK, to the reclaiming of rights of indigenous communities, migrant ‘braccianti’ in Italy, Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories among other ethno-racial minorities - audiovisual-digital conduits have connected local and global struggles for rights and recognition in the face of state brutality, corporate collaborations and racist violent attacks. This is amid growing awareness of the disproportionate impact of the COVID19 pandemic on marginalised Black, migrant, minority, and indigenous communities – further linking social exclusion and health inequalities to ethnic or racial discrimination

An Analytical Approach For Transmission Expansion Planning with Generation Variations

Planning for expanding a power system under different scenarios is one of the major challenge for power engineers hence, it is very important and essential to implement a well-balanced and feasible system over a time horizon under suitable assumptions and available constraints. Transmission expansion planning is one of this task. Here it is important to develop a suitable planning structure. In this paper some analytical approaches have been implemented for specific load condition with variations in generation

[Virtual roundtable on mapping gendered violence] Can we know no? Reflections on domestic violence in the transit lounge of Mishti Gals

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