Escaping India’s culture of education: migration desires among aspiring middle-class young men

Research on Indian overseas students in Australia has shown that there is an intricate connection between class and migration processes. Yet most of this work has focused on the experiences of students already abroad. Research on the formulation of migration-decisions and class dynamics from the sending side has been slow to emerge. This paper fills this gap and locates the analysis of migration desires within the literature on the Indian middle classes. I demonstrate how a middle-class culture of education that articulates hegemonic experiences, aspirations, and trajectories drives many aspiring middle-class young men to consider migrating as an alternative path to social mobility. Migration emerges as a temporary strategy geared towards accruing economic and cultural capital necessary for the fulfilment of class-based personal ambitions and wider social responsibilities at home. Migration is shown to stretch the boundaries of processes of class formation that now straddles multiple sites, resources, and aspirations

Education and the making of mobile livelihoods: Dubai Indian families’ trajectories over time and space

This paper examines how Indian migrant families in Dubai actively sustain mobile livelihoods across the Indian Ocean and beyond, paying attention to the role played by education in the unfolding of such migrant lives. This paper aims to nuance the experiences of Gulf migrants that have broadly focused on systemic vulnerabilities produced by the legal, economic and social structures encountered in Gulf destinations. This paper builds on the stories of three families from the southern Indian state of Kerala with diverse mobility trajectories over time and space, which is conceptualized in relation to the practice of specific livelihoods, focusing on the patterns and impacts of mobility at different life stages and across generations. Literature engaging with the migration-education nexus, which reveals that education is an integral part of mobile livelihoods worldwide, provides an analytical backdrop. The paper shows distinct ways in which education forms a crucial part of complex agendas, informing family migration to and from the Gulf region. Furthermore, it captures how migrants’ educational agendas are continuously being adjusted in processes of migration, and how this relates to the ongoing transformation of individual and collective social identities and the remaking of mobile livelihoods

Exposed to Dubai: education and belonging among young Indian residents in the Gulf

© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper explores the life experiences, identities and trajectories of young Dubai-born Indians living in the Arab Gulf. It seeks to contribute to an emergent body of research on the formation of diasporic identities and forms of belonging among South Asians in the Gulf, which underscores the ways in which migrants articulate forms of cultural belonging in a context where they are denied the right to citizenship. Building on the notion of the ‘educated person’, the paper argues that education constitutes an important, yet overlooked, basis for forms of cultural belonging in Dubai

“Facing life together”: Everyday friendship and well-being among Dubai’s Indian diaspora

In this chapter, I focus on the cultural terms through which a group of young Indian middle-class friends experienced well-being and sought to give their lives a sense of quality in the context of migration to the Arab Gulf. I draw on an understanding of migration as an undetermined process, driven by a variety of motivations, in which new forms of sociality, subjectivities, and belonging may emerge, and that these may, in turn, transform people’s migratory experiences and trajectories. The ethnographic evidence I present below speaks of the emergence of an Indian youth culture centred on the nurturing of particularly intense forms of friendship. In turn, I examine how these friendship bonds support and facilitate the development of alternative experiences of self-realisation, and forms identity and belonging, which reshaped my respondents’ sense of well-being. In particular, I examine how my interlocutors narrate a shift from a notion of well-being based on hard work, frugality, and the achievement of long-term objectives, to a notion of well-being based on developing a group history and the enjoyment of intimate friendships in the present

‘The year that can break or make you’: the politics of secondary schooling, youth and class in urban Kerala, South India

Education harbours some of the most pervasive contradictions in contemporary India. While it produces world famous human capital enhancing the country’s rising competitiveness as a global ‘knowledge economy’, millions of children still lack access to basic education. In Kerala, a state famous for the success of its educational achievements, the benefits of education that can be gained by those in the lower strata of society continue to be marginal regardless of policies of positive discrimination. Focusing on youth at the higher secondary school level (grades 11-12), ‘the primary bottleneck in the education system today’ (World Bank 2012), this thesis seeks to understand the social processes that go into making education a key resource to the (re)production of inequalities. Based upon a year’s ethnographic fieldwork in and around two schools in Ernakulam, South India, this thesis examines the ways in which two distinct groups of youth – one attending a top end private English medium school at the heart of a city and the other educated in an institution at the bottom of the schooling ladder – inhabit their final year of schooling and generate future projects and aspirations. I located their experiences at the intersection of the two educational sites par excellence: the school and the house. In the city, middle-class schooling and parental regimes attempt to orient youth’s lives towards the acquisition of multiple competences aimed at enhancing their individual prospects towards becoming competitive professionals, depicted as garnering maximum amounts of wealth and prestige in today’s globalised economy of paid employment and migration. At the fringes of middle-class urban life and the quest for professionalism, youth are becoming subject of an increasing ghettoisation: only the educationally, financially and socially poor are left to attend their school. In that stark scenario, education emerged as central to both youth performances of class, status and gender. They constructed and embodied identities based on education and more generally with ideas of competence. This creative work revealed an overtly hierarchical field formed of distinctive peer groups engaged in overt practices of exclusion and inclusion according to imagine futures: mostly elusive fantasies that reveal the youth marked by uncertainties in a time shaped by rising expectations and increasingly intricate and unequal paths leading to them

A Physical Layer Model for G3-PLC Networks Simulation

This work presents a model of the G3-PLC physical (PHY) layer tailored for network simulations. It allows simulating frequency selective channels with non-stationary colored noise. Collisions with other frames are modeled taking into account the length and the power of the interfering frames. Frame errors are estimated using the effective signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio mapping (ESM) function. The proposed PHY layer has been integrated into a distributed event-based simulator developed by Microchip. The layer 2+ stack of the simulator uses the same code that actual Microchip G3-PLC devices. Validation has been accomplished by comparing its results to a test network deployed in the laboratory. The latter consists of a coordinator and one hundred meters distributed in 5 levels. Faster-than-real-time simulations and an excellent agreement between the simulated and the measured performance indicators at the application layer have been obtained.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Modelling and CNG distribution study of a Natural Gas-Diesel Dual Fuel Engine

Nowadays, environmental concerns have created the need of evolution in combustion engines for trying to give a solution to the growing problem of pollution produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. This master thesis project has been motivated by the developing of dual fuel engines with natural gas as main energy source for being an alternative to traditional combustion engines. Dual fuel is still a new technology that needs of research for a complete understanding of its operation, such as advantages and drawbacks, in order to improve it. For that reason, a CNG-diesel dual fuel engine has been modelled through computer software GT-POWER with the main objective of studying CNG distribution in the intake manifold and how this distribution affects to cylinder-to-cylinder variations

A comparative study of the characteristics and physical behaviour of different packing materials commonly used in biofiltration

In this study, the characteristics and physical behaviour of 8 different packing materials were compared. The materials were selected according to previous works in the field of biofiltration including organic and inorganic or synthetic materials. Results pre-selected those more acceptable support materials for the main function they have to perform in the biological system: high surface contact, rugosity to immobilize the biomass, low pressure drop, nutrients supply, water retentivity or a commitment among them. Otherwise, pressure drop have been described by means of the respective mathematic expressions in order to include phenomena in the classical biofiltration models.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft