by Sriram

Academic Publishing Update – July 2020 : 1

Kaitlin Thaney. “The open scholarship ecosystem faces collapse; it’s also our best hope for a more resilient future.” LSE Blog. June 19, 2020.

Excerpt : The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly impacting universities and higher education institutions, reducing budgets and presenting new design challenges that will fundamentally alter how research and scholarship operate. Economic volatility is also constraining support for key systems and services that the academy relies on, especially those that are community-led.

Kaitlin Thaney argues that there’s a need to converge on community-controlled open scholarship projects, to both meet the demands of the moment, and build a more resilient system for scholarly communication for future crisis situations, and invites readers to participate in planning how such systems can be maintained.

More info: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/06/19/the-open-scholarship-ecosystem-faces-collapse-its-also-our-best-hope-for-a-more-resilient-future/

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by Sriram

Encyclopedia entry / Wetland Conservation and Sustainable Development in Kerala

Karunakaran Prasanna, Chitra, Preetha Kizhakkekara Vannadil, and Vikas Pattath Ayyappan. ‘Wetland Conservation and Sustainable Development in Kerala, India’. In Life on Land, edited by Walter Leal Filho, Anabela Marisa Azul, Luciana Brandli, Amanda Lange Salvia, and Tony Wall. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Published ahead of print, 17 June 2020.

Abstract: The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat held at Ramsar, Iran, in 1971, defines wetlands as areas that are marshy, fen, peatland, or water. Wetlands in India encompassing both natural and human-made inland and coastal wetlands add up to 757,060.

Kerala has a rich biophysical system due to the presence of three biodiversity rich ecosystems: the tropical rainforest, the coastal marine coral reefs, and the coastal brackish water and freshwater wetlands. It has 160,590 Ha of wetlands, including both inland and coastal wetlands, and is key for wetland conservation because it includes three large wetlands that are Ramsar sites—Vembanad, Ashtamudi, and Sasthamkotta.

Kerala saw its inland wetland area considerably reduced in the past decades. Pressure on natural resources and on wetlands in particular has increased over the last few decades due to increasing industrialisation, urbanisation, and the lack of environmental considerations in development projects.

Protection of wetlands can contribute to the achievement of nearly all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whether it is eradication of poverty, water and food security, combating climate change, or development of inclusive and sustainable human settlements. In Kerala, this could be attained by integrating wetland conservation goals into the SDG planning process and the State sectoral policies.

More info: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71065-5_115-1

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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by Sriram

Event / Webinar on “Global Christianity and the Transformation of Dalits in Colonial and Postcolonial Kerala” at KCHR, Thiruvananthapuram

The Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) invites you to a Webinar on  ‘Global Christianity and the Transformation of Dalits in Colonial and Postcolonial Kerala’ by Professor P. Sanal Mohan.

Date: 10 July 2020 (Friday)

Time:3:00pm (IST)

You can join the webinar with a valid Gmail id using the following link from 2.45 pm onwards on 10th July 2020. There is no separate registration process.

https://meet.google.com/ktm-ogzj-qno

The webinar will be recorded and you can watch the Live Stream at

https://stream.meet.google.com/stream/dbc8620f-3894-4f2e-9f5f-9acca15a3148

About the Speaker: Professor P. Sanal Mohan currently teaches at the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. He was the former Director of the KCHR. He was Smuts Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany, among others. His areas of research interest include colonial modernity, social movements and questions of identity, Dalit movements and Christianity in India His book Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala was published by the Oxford University Press in 2015.

About the Lecture: The Transforming power of the ‘word of God’ proclaimed the globality of Christianity experienced by Dalits in colonial and postcolonial Kerala. What were the implications of the word of God in the everyday life of Dalits where meaning was produced and circulated along with the work in the fields of the landlords? Christianity provided a different  idea of the sacred and a new religious and social imagination to the people. It was this notion of the sacred that resignified Dalits as socially significant from the 19th century onwards. I wish to address the dynamics of this resignification exploring archival and ethnographic materials. Although Christianity entailed globality in its very inception, in this paper I am specifically concerned with Global Missionary organizations founded in the final years of the 18th Century and their tryst  with Dalit communities in Kerala.

Shared to KSM by Ashok R. Chandran, Publications Officer, MIDS, Chennai.

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by Sriram

Book review / Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in Kerala

Ahmad, Zarin. ‘Review of Interrogating Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India, by Salah Punathil’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 54, no. 2 (June 2020): 347–49.

Excerpt (edited): The book addresses the contours of conflict and violence between two fishing communities, the Marakkayar Muslims and the Mukkuvar Christians in Kerala. By exploring the long history of violence among two distinctive fishing communities, the work problematises the taken-for-granted notion of mobilisation of religious identity implicit in the discourse on communal violence and foregrounds the spatial dynamics in violent conflicts which is the essential contribution of the work.

More info: https://doi.org/10.1177/0069966720916335

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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by Sriram

Resource / Kerala’s guest labourers

Praveena Kodoth. “Failures of Citizenship under the Lockdown: The Case of Migrant Labour”. CDS-RULSG Lecture No.3 / 2020.

More info and video: https://youtu.be/4S5oZE5S-vE

About the lecture:  This talk critically examines the state’s treatment of migrant labourers as “guests” in Kerala during the pandemic, arguing for distinguishing benevolence from justice in granting rights

This is the third lecture in the series on “Rights-Based Policy in the Wake of the Pandemic in Kerala: Development Emergencies and Welfare’ organized by Research Unit on Local Self Governance (RULSG) at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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by Sriram

Finding the thesis at Shodhganga from a Google Search

Finding the thesis at Shodhganga from a Google Search
by Muhammed Afzal P.

While searching online, we sometimes come across chapters from PhD dissertations uploaded in Shodhganga (the digital repository of theses submitted to Indian universities).

For example, when we search for   Image1

“migrant writing malayalam thesis”,

the second result might be a PDF.

 

Image2

 

But when we open the file, we cannot identify the thesis (of which this chapter is a part).

 

If the chapter is relevant for our research, we will need to use and cite it.Or we might be interested in reading other chapters of that thesis.

The pattern of URL of thesis in Shodhganga are as follows:

http://hdl.handle.net/10603/16891 or
https://sg.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/16891

This is the pattern of URL of a chapter in Shodhganga https://sg.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/16891/9/10_chapter%205.pdf

Two methods can be adopted to locate the full thesis or its bibliographic information in Shodhganga:

Method 1

In the URL of the PDF change  “bitstream”            Image

to “handle”, and remove what follows “19658/”

 

Now you can see the full details of the thesis

Image5

 

 

 

Method 2

Copy the two set of “numbers” that follow “bitstream”

Image5

 

 

And place them after http://hdl.handle.net/

Image6

and press “Enter”.

Now you can see the full details of the thesis

Image7

 

 

 

This way too, we get to see the details of the thesis.

Was this tip useful? Do you know another method? Share your method as a comment.

About the author:

Muhammed Afzal P. serves as Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,BITS Pilani, Pilani.

Email: muhammedafzalp@gmail.com

 

by Sriram

Book review / Memory, Kinship and Middle Classes

Abraham, Janaki. ‘Review of The Fall of Gods: Memory, Kinship, and Middle Classes in South India, by Ester Gallo’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 54, no. 2 (June 2020): 326–29.

Excerpt: This is a special book for several reasons: for exploring a social history on which few anthropologists have written; for the focus on memory and middle class identity when most studies of the new middle classes are synchronic; more generally for the way she brings out the importance of kinship and kinship memories for a class analysis; for the exploration of how memories of the past shape kinship relationships in the present; for the intra-caste differences highlighted; for the way Gallo skilfully presents the very varied and complex ethnography; and for the way she gives voice to both men and women and to changing intergenerational relationships.

More info: https://doi.org/10.1177/0069966720914050

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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by Sriram

Event / Webinar on Writing a History of Trivandrum

The Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) invites you to a webinar on ‘Spaces, Bodies, Absences: Some Questions While Writing a History of Trivandrum, ca. 1800–1930’ by Professor G. Arunima.

Date: 6 July 2020 (Monday)
Time: 3:00 p.m. (IST)

You can join with a valid Gmail ID. Or watch the live stream here. The webinar will be recorded.
About the Lecture: Critical geographies, and urban studies, have recast ways of studying towns and cities. This talk is on Trivandrum, and is part of the ongoing work on reading the history of Kerala through a lens of its different religious groups and claimants.
This is an attempt to understand the ways in which towns and cities are produced as a relationship of bodies and spaces, marking differential claims, entitlements, and erasures.
The talk will also unpack the paradoxical ways in which the archive of the city determines both ways in which its history may be written, while containing significant absences that limit our understanding of histories of caste, labour, or gender that are critical to a study of city formation.
About the Speaker: Professor G. Arunima teaches in the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has researched and published on both historical and modern contexts in India, focusing particularly on cultural, visual, and material texts, and rethinking the politics of the contemporary.
Some of her areas of interest have been the study of family and kinship; different aspects of aesthetics and modernities; visual culture and theory; and religion and faith practices.
She is the author of There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, ca. 1855–1940 (Orient Longman, 2003), and translated Rosy Thomas’s biography of her husband, the iconic playwright C.J. Thomas, from Malayalam to English (He, My Beloved CJ, Women Unlimited, 2018).

More info: <http://kchr.ac.in/articles/191>

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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by Sriram

Journal article / Social Re-entry and Challenges of Released Prisoners in Kerala

Varghese, Jenu, and Vijay Raghavan. ‘Restoration of Released Prisoners to Society: Issues, Challenges and Further Ways; Insights from Kerala, India’. International Annals of Criminology. Published ahead of print, 1 June 2020.

Abstract: Social re-entry in the criminal justice system cannot be avoided since virtually all prisoners are released sooner or later. These initiatives are the outcome of a restorative justice approach which aims to reduce future offences by bringing back offenders to normal life by rehabilitation and restoration.

Prisoners’ lives in prisons were very difficult in the Indian context till the last decade. Different rehabilitative approaches have been introduced inside prisons but, after release, the number of social re-entry initiatives is much less.

The released face many psychosocial and economic issues which may destroy a person’s ability to adjust with the services provided.

The national prison policy of India recommends aftercare services for the rehabilitation of released prisoners. The labelling and social stigma due to the crime hinder prisoners’ ability to re-enter society after release.

In this context, the present paper explored the issues and challenges faced by the released prisoners during their social re-entry and came up with rehabilitative initiatives for a better restoration process in the Indian context.

More info:

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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