Book review / Hereditary Physicians of Kerala

Cleetus, Burton. Review of Hereditary Physicians of Kerala: Traditional Medicine and Ayurveda in Modern India, by Indudharan Menon. Asian Medicine 15, no. 2 (February 2021): 342–44.

Excerpt: Menon interviewed many vaidyans belonging to the prominent vaidya families and has presented their views on a  medical domain which is often unwritten and not found in the mainstream historical writings of the region.

After an introduction, four chapters follow on the background, on the contexts, on folk healing, poison therapy, and Muslim Ayurvedic lineages, and lastly on the Ashtavaidya physicians of Malabar.

More info: <https://doi.org/10.1163/15734218-12341478>

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Book / Poverty alleviation policy in Kochi

Anuradha Kalhan (2019). “A Brief history of poverty alleviation in neoliberal times”
Manohar Books. ISBN:978-93-88540-11-7. 397 pages.

About the book: This book deals with implementation of poverty alleviation policy in recent times. It follows one poverty alleviation policy called Swarn Jayanti Shehri Rozgar Yojana initiated in 1997, through three large cities: Mumbai, Delhi and Kochi.

The book spans five years of fieldwork (2009-14) and reproduces the circumstances of poor urban women, their families and the effect of this policy designed to help them. Most significantly it examines policy execution at the local level. There is substantial difference in the manner in which the same policy is implemented in each city. The organization for implementation is also different and outcome is noticeably different as well.

In a manner the fieldwork also points to nature of ‘trickle-down’ that has occurred. India by then had experienced over two decades (1990-1 and 2013-14) of higher than historic growth. Large cities are high growth-centres, prime location of wealth accumulation as well as trickle down.

Trickle down evidently does not take care of the problem of mass poverty. As the book emphasises, direct policy interventions of several kinds are needed but overall as this volume points out the scale of the problem is completely unrelated to public resources, organization and energy applied to it.

About the author : Anuradha Kalhan has taught Economics in Mumbai University for nearly three decades and has a PhD in the subject from the University of Mumbai. She is now an independent researcher.

More info : https://www.manoharbooks.com/BookDetails.asp?isbn=9789388540117

Academic Publishing Update – October 2020 : 1

Kurt Milberger. “Working with Your Editor: The Role of a Journals Managing Editor.”
The H-Net Book Channel, 14th Sept 2020.

Excerpt : … managing editors are both conduits and advocates for you and your work…. Knowing what a managing editor can do for you as an author is a good first step to understanding journal workflows and preparing your work for publication.

More info : https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/6576783/working-your-editor-role-journals-managing-editor

Shared to KSM by Muhammed Afzal P., Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Pilani.

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Event / CSI Chennai, ACM Chennai & IEEE CS Chennai – Webinar on “Academic Document Creation Using LaTeX” on 22nd Sept 2020 at 6 p.m. IST

CSI Chennai, ACM Chennai & IEEE CS Madras jointly host webinar on “Academic Document Creation Using LaTeX”.

Speaker: Dr. A. Neela Madheswari, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering,
Mahendra Engineering College, Namakkal, Tamilnadu, India.

Date & Time: 22nd September 2020 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. IST.

Pl register at https://bit.ly/336LoqM

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Event / Webinar on Preparing for Work – CV Writing and Interview Skills

CSI Chennai, ACM Chennai & IEEE CS Madras are jointly organizing a “Webinar on Preparing for Work – CV Writing and Interview Skills”.

Date & Time : Thursday, 20 Aug 2020, 6:00pm IST.

More info : https://event.webinarjam.com/register/164/pr86vb6g

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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  

“migrant writing malayalam thesis”,

the second result might be a PDF.

 

 

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”           

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

 

Now you can see the full details of the thesis

 

 

 

Method 2

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

 

 

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

and press “Enter”.

Now you can see the full details of the thesis

 

 

 

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

 

Fellowships / Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships 2021-2022

Description: The Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships are designed for Indian scholars who are registered for a Ph.D. at an Indian institution. These fellowships are for six to nine months.

 

This scholarship is being offered by the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF).

 

More details including the guidelines, eligibility conditions, application procedure etc. are available here. http://www.usief.org.in/Fulbright-Nehru-Doctoral-Research-Fellowships.aspx

 

Last date: July 15, 2020.

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Book Chapter / Representation of Men and Women in K. G. George’s Films

Vasudev, Archana. ‘Materialities, Subjectivities and the Symbolic Spaces of Destruction and Hope in K. G. George’s Films’. In Deleuzian and Guattarian Approaches to Contemporary Communication Cultures in India, edited by Gopalan Ravindran, 141–54. Singapore: Springer, 2020.

Abstract (edited): The theory of male gaze was first introduced by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. According to Mulvey (Screen 16: 6–18, 1975), cinema reflects the oblivion of patriarchal society and reinforces the notion that women are the subject of heterosexual male control and desire (Superson in Hypatia 26: 410–418, 2011).

The function of cinema, according to Laura Mulvey, is to serve as a voyeuristic medium that encourages the audience to take pleasure from looking upon. Many Hollywood movies, especially the films of Hitchcock and Sternberg, were widely studied on the basis of this version of psychoanalytic theory.

Subsequently, new sources for revitalizing feminist film theory emerged through performance studies, new media studies, phenomenology, and Deleuzian philosophy. These are theoretical frameworks that move beyond the semiotic preoccupation with meaning, representation and interpretation.

Taking Mulvey’s analysis as its starting point, this chapter examines the specific techniques of the veteran Malayalam filmmaker K. G. George’s representation of women in his film Adaminte Variyellu (Adam’s Rib), and men in Panchavadi Palam (Panchavadi Bridge), in order to suggest an alternative way of understanding the status of women and men in these works.

In particular, this chapter aims to mobilise Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema and other artistic media in order to argue the case that K. G. George’s films offer his characters a status that can be enjoyed by the spectator without any preconceived notions.

The Deleuzian approach allows for a less negative outlook on desire, subjectivity, and identity; opening up readings of film as embodying many forms of desire and creating experiences of affirmation for the spectator (Smelik in Wiley Blackwell Encycl Gend Sex Stud: 1–5, 2016).

More info: <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2140-9_9>

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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Journal article (OA) / The Social History of Caste Colonies in Kerala

Pramod, Maya. ‘As a Dalit Woman: My Life in a Caste-Ghetto of Kerala’. CASTE / A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 1, no. 1 (February 2020): 111-24.

Abstract: It is awfully significant to enquire how the lower casts Dalit women have read about socio-economic and cultural aspects of Dalit colony life, that have changed our life and society.

I argue that the colonies serve as an index of their inferior social status. It serves more of their ghettoisation than for their empowerment. It further distances them from society and helps to appropriate their labour.

This is the continuation of the age-old practice of caste discrimination and deprivation that kept them away from the mainstream while appropriating their labour for the general development of society.

This paper focuses on the rereading of social norms which evolved through my probing of the social history of ‘caste colony’ as part of my research, especially in Dalit women.

More info and full text (OA): https://doi.org/10.26812/caste.v1i1.69

Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup

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Kerala Scholars Network / Update 15 – Ala–A Kerala Studies Blog

From
S. Harikrishnan (Co-editor, Ala),
PhD Researcher, Dublin City University,
Dublin

Hi,

Ala’s (http://ala.keralascholars.org/) 18th Issue is now out, and features three articles:

Jenny Rowena delves into lesser-known facets of the temple-entry movement to interrogate the Malayalee consensus about the movement as one which granted rights to oppressed lower castes. http://ala.keralascholars.org/issues/18/revisiting-the-temple-entry-movement/

In a Malayalam article, V. Sasi Kumar writes about environmental issues associated with climate change with a special focus on Kerala.  http://ala.keralascholars.org/issues/18/climate-change-impact/

Rachel Varghese writes about the possibilities that archaeology could offer in Kerala.  http://ala.keralascholars.org/issues/18/archaeology-in-kerala/

If you wish to contribute, please see author guidelines here. http://ala.keralascholars.org/publish-with-us/

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Reposted from Kerala Scholars eGroup