Based on fieldwork carried out in Delhi during 2006-2007 this thesis explores the social world of transparency and accountability activism in the city. I focus in particular on the activism scene that has grown up around the campaign for and implementation of the national Right to Information Act 2005. There is a global interest in improving the transparency and accountability of government bureaucracies, and in schemes to foster active citizenship. In tune with this campaigns to provide Indian citizens with a right to access government information have captured the imagination of activists, policy makers, and national and international donor organisations. For transparency and accountability activists rights to access government information offer Indian citizens opportunities to interrogate official procedures and hold officers individually accountable; to provide people with mechanisms with which they might become more ‗active‘ as citizens; and to provide a means of monitoring the performance of the state in fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities regarding welfare, equality and social justice. Taking boundaries as my theme my work looks at the activist scene in Delhi from an ethnographic perspective, investigating how activist projects work. I argue that the ideology and practice of transparency and accountability activism is concerned with boundaries in two ways. First it is directed at illuminating and delineating boundaries between the state and society, and public and private roles. The intention is to combat the effects of private influence and unofficial practices that might lead to the misallocation of government resources. Second it is directed at transcending social and spatial boundaries based on class, caste or community in order to enrol people into projects aimed at producing empowered and active citizens. However, in looking at the activist scene a number of what I call ‗boundary paradoxes‘ become apparent. Activist campaigns to get transparency and accountability legislation passed rely in part on the personal connections to the highest levels of government of activists from India‘s social elite. At the grassroots level activists play a mediating role between the local state and poor or illiterate clients. Social and cultural capital, space, class and gender distinctions emerge as significant factors in the everyday practice of activism, in turn reproducing existing social hierarchies in activist organisations. While seeking transparency and accountability from others activists have to negotiate the boundaries of transparency and accountability in their own organisations, deciding what can be made public and what should remain hidden. And, as activism is organised through informal networks sustaining a livelihood and a full time role in the scene immerses activists in webs of patron-client relations, recommendations and obligations, the antithesis of the disciplined, transparent and accountable bureaucratic organisation that transparency and accountability activism requires from the state. My thesis contains examples of the positive effects that involvement in activism can have, particularly for people from some of Delhi‘s poorer neighbourhoods. However, although activism is directed at producing a future that conforms to activist‘s ideal constructions of how India should be, activists must work in the present to bring this future about. I argue that even as activists work for change, activism itself is a site in which the existing structures of society are reproduced.

On October 8th 2005 the villages surrounding Chinati bazaar in Bagh district of Pakistani-administered Kashmir (PaK) were hit by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale that affected the lives of more than 3.5 million people in PaK and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa. In this thesis I attempt to understand, through the stories and narratives of the people of Chinati bazaar, how they lived through, made sense of, and dealt with the earthquake and its aftermath. I use participant observation and conversations to tell the stories of those affected by the earthquake in their own voices as much as possible. The storytellers of the bazaar lived through two types of events: the earthquake itself and the post-earthquake rehabilitation and reconstruction process. The latter brought with it both positive and negative impacts: if, on the one hand, it brought progress and a new hope that life could be ‘Built Back Better', on the other hand, it brought a different type of suffering – one that led to a loss of honour and dignity, resulted in social upheavals, and led to the exclusion and marginalization of certain groups. In this thesis I focus on both these ‘events'. Through these stories I build an argument about post-disaster discourses of change. I argue that while the narratives of the storytellers of Chinati bazaar posit the earthquake as a point of rupture in their confabulated stories, from which the collective memory of the bazaar dates its movement towards becoming modern and global, these changes have their origins instead in ‘bigger' stories of modernisation and globalisation that predate the earthquake and that highlight and emphasise more continuous processes of change that have been occurring over a longer period of time. In this thesis I analyse how these two competing discourses of rupture and dramatic change on the one hand, and slow, continuous change on the other, play out in the lives of the storytellers of Chinati Bazaar.

This thesis explores the politics and consequences of road construction for local populations and migrant road workers in Ladakh. Through a political ecology framework, I consider road construction as the transformation of an environment in which different agents act through specific socio-political arrangements and for purposes that are socially and culturally mediated. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in remote villages and among groups of Nepali and Jharkhandi road workers in Ladakh, the thesis documents the case of the Zanskar Highway, a 292 km long trans- Himalayan road that has been under construction since the 1970s. It analyses the reasons why states build roads, nationally and more specifically in the contested landscape of Ladakh; why people want roads; how people negotiate roads and their trajectory; and what the consequences of roads and road construction are in terms of mobility, isolation, resource use, livelihoods and well-being. In the thesis, I question the roads-development nexus, and argue that the reasons why states build roads are extremely diverse and have changed over time. I argue that road construction is a highly political process determined by conflicting motivations and perceptions. I also argue that the consequences of roads are complex, often ambiguous and region-specific, and that gains and losses that occur because of roads and their construction are unequally distributed, within and between local and migrant populations. The research makes an original contribution to road studies by studying the political, socio-economic and symbolic consequences of both roads and the process of their construction for the populations that live near new roads and those who build them. It also links ex-ante with ex-post road studies by looking at what happens during the process of construction. Finally, it contributes to Ladakh studies by documenting the history of road construction in the region and providing the first study of migrants in Ladakh.

This research sets out to explore the interface between the new politics of localisation and the political process in India. Governments and donors have increasingly emphasised the locality as the primary unit of development and politics. This new trajectory has been manifest in the increase of community-based organisations and mechanisms of participatory governance at the local level. From the late 1990s, the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh emerged as one of the most important examples of this new developmental politics and this research sets out to explore how local dynamics changed as a result. Political economy approaches tend to focus on state-periphery relations in terms of interest groups or vote banks. By contrast, this research found the village to be an enduring unit in the political system through which political identity manifests itself through three features. First, participation in local elections is driven by common forces of politics of parties, caste and corruption but its outcome is dependent on the specific context at the village level. Second, new participatory institutions created through state policy were found to merge with informal practices at the local level and produce a complex interplay between the new local and state identities. Third, analysis of leadership found evidence of a well-defined system of organisation within party groups at the village level, which were shaped not by party institutions but by the inner workings of village politics. These findings give cause to reassess the way in which we understand policy and political change. I do so by expanding on Skocpol's polity approach, which focused attention on the dynamic interplay of policy and social structure. Drawing on elements of the 'political development' theory, the concept of a ‘developing polity' approach is elaborated on, to better explain the complex interplay between local and higher level politics. These findings have implications for understanding both political change in India and development strategy. The macro-perspective on the decay of political institutions is contrasted with a local perspective that finds evidence of the vitality of party politics at the village level. This has a number of important implications for development, both in terms of the way in which we analyse participation and the way in which participatory development can be translated into political change

Diplomacy is conventionally understood as an authentic European invention which was internationalized during colonialism. For Indians, the moment of colonial liberation was a false-dawn because the colonized had internalized a European logic and performed a European practice. Implicit in such a reading is the enduring centrality of Europe to understanding the logics of Indian diplomacy. The only contribution to diplomacy permitted of India is restricted to practice, to Indians adulterating pure, European, diplomacy. This Eurocentric discourse renders two possibilities impossible: that diplomacy may have Indian origins and that they offer un-theorised potentialities. These potentialities are the subject because combined they suggest that Indian diplomacy might move to a logic unknown to conventional approaches. However, what is first required is a conceptual space for this possibility, something, it is argued, civilizational analysis provides because its focus on continuities does not devalue transformational changes. Populating this conceptual space requires ascertaining empirically whether Indian diplomacy is indeed extra- European? It is why current practices are exposed and then placed in the context of the literature to reveal ruptures, what are termed controversies. The most significant, arguably, is the question of what is Indian diplomatic modernity? Resolving this controversy requires exploring not only the history of the revealed practices but also excavating the conceptual categories which produce them. The investigation therefore is not a history, but a genealogy for it identifies the present and then moves along two axes: tracing the origins of the bureaucratic apparatus and the rationales underpinning them. The genealogical moves made are dictated by the practitioners and practices themselves because the aim is not to theorize about the literature but to expose the rationalities which animate the practitioners of international politics today. The only means to actually verify if the identified mentalities do animate international politics is to demonstrate their impact on practice. It is why the project is argued empirically, in terms of the ‘stuff' of IR.

This report summarizes the process of developing, writing, directing, and finishing Fatakra, a short narrative film. The film was produced as my graduate thesis film in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin in partial fulfillment of my Master of Fine Arts in Film Production. Additionally, this report contextualizes the making of FATAKRA within my development as an artist and filmmaker. Finally, the report looks forward as I complete what is commonly referred to as a “calling-card” film and leave an academic setting to pursue a filmmaking career. / text

This thesis investigates the way that second generation British Indian Bengali middle class, predominantly Hindu respondents, have attempted to communicate their “modern” middle class respectability through their social practices, work and lifestyles. In their reproduction of this respectability, they attempt to distance negative British South Asian stereotypes prevalent in the media, work institutions and in day-to-day life; sometimes to the extent of ‘othering' other South Asians generally or British Bangladeshi Muslim Sylhetis specifically. Second generation's adaptive responses to racism and stigmatised stereotypes prevalent in British society also reaffirms the British Indian Bengali's presumptions of their ethnic distinctiveness and justifying homogenising racist stereotyping of these ‘other' South Asian groups. This thesis examines several aspects of their lives that are affected by these distinguishing tactics, through: presentation of their ethnicity; middle class identity; position of women within “the community”; ideas of love and romance and “type” of marriage. Additionally, there is an examination of how the second generation are increasingly challenging the assertion that all South Asians are primarily driven by ethnicity, religion and regional-language markers in their search for a marriage partner. Marriage trends amongst British Indian Bengalis are showing distinct moves away from finding a partner through ascribed statuses. Likewise, the second generation in their social interaction also exhibit a weaker sense of identification with their regional-language groups.

Poverty reduction and Education for All (EFA) are important policy issues in many developing countries as they are both Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As the existing literature suggests, education positively influences poverty reduction, while poverty, or low income, adversely affects the quality and quantity of education. Accordingly, if education fails to facilitate poverty reduction, the following generation's schooling is likely to be adversely affected, thus perpetuating a vicious education–poverty circle. It was against such a background, and employing a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis, that this study investigated the relationship between education and multidimensional poverty at an individual as well as household level, and the influence of deprivation on children's education, in the context of the slum in Delhi, India. The thesis reveals that education – particularly primary and middle schooling – enhances the earnings of male slum dwellers in particular, the overwhelming majority of whom suffer from informality and instability of employment. It also emerges that education plays an important role in the ability to participate with confidence in the public sphere. At the household level, education proves to have a positive association with monetary poverty, but a higher level of education per se does not necessarily facilitate escape from non-monetary poverty. In such a nexus of poverty and education, the thesis found that household wealth in association with social group and migration status tends to be positively correlated with child schooling, education expenditure, and basic learning. There may be a chance of escaping poverty through education, but such a likelihood is limited for those households that are underprivileged in terms of caste and religion owing to slow progress in basic learning, as well as migrant households due to lack of access to schooling. The thesis concludes by proposing some education policies drawn from the major findings of the study that may be implemented in the Indian slum context.

No description available.