Discourse &Communication, Ahead of Print.
This paper investigates the representation of social actors in news reports on economic and financial crimes in four Nigerian newspapers: Punch, The Guardian, The Nation and ThisDay. Theo van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic inventory for the representation of social actors and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) served as the theoretical framework. Five socio-semantic categories were applied in the news reports: functionalisation, backgrounding and suppression, activation and passivation, personalisation and impersonalisation and nomination and categorisation. Only the accused were both nominated and categorised. They were nominated when the reference is to people of high status and categorised when the reference is to ordinary or middle-class people. All the other social actors were nominated because of their roles in the fight against economic and financial crimes. The study shows that language is a medium for hidden meaning in the reportage of economic and financial crimes.
Invisible, aesthetic, and enrolled listeners across storytelling modalities: Immersive preference as situated player type
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Immersive storytelling includes narrative experiences that take place in the public spaces of theaters, theme parks, museums, and historical reenactment sites; on tabletops, where role-playing games are collaboratively played; in fictional spaces superimposed on the real world during a live-action role-playing (larping) event; and in hybrid, asynchronous, and transmediated spaces that blend the digital, the virtual, and the real. Understood as a kind of boundary object, a player typology can incorporate multiple perspectives and heterogeneous sources of information, producing ‘ideal types’, which provide a framework for observation and discussion across immersive modalities. This paper offers a typology of situated immersive preference, in which narrative immersion and embodied immersion are understood to vary independently of one another. Along the vertical axis listener-players of immersive storytelling experiences are classified as narratively attached, narratively detached, or narratively opposed. Across the horizontal axis of embodied engagement, listener-players are classified as invisible, aesthetic, or enrolled. Nine ideal types emerge at the intersection of these narrative and embodied preferences. Why someone might fit into one category rather than another reflects comfort rather than personality. Situated immersive types are understood to be fluid and temporary configurations. The degree to which players are willing to engage and are comfortable with what they are being asked to do may differ dramatically from experience to experience and from day to day, and even during a single session, reflecting how they feel at a given moment, which is affected by who they are with and how they are perceived and treated by others. This framework for understanding immersive preferences calls for the design of more widely inclusive story worlds.
Immersive storytelling includes narrative experiences that take place in the public spaces of theaters, theme parks, museums, and historical reenactment sites; on tabletops, where role-playing games are collaboratively played; in fictional spaces superimposed on the real world during a live-action role-playing (larping) event; and in hybrid, asynchronous, and transmediated spaces that blend the digital, the virtual, and the real. Understood as a kind of boundary object, a player typology can incorporate multiple perspectives and heterogeneous sources of information, producing ‘ideal types’, which provide a framework for observation and discussion across immersive modalities. This paper offers a typology of situated immersive preference, in which narrative immersion and embodied immersion are understood to vary independently of one another. Along the vertical axis listener-players of immersive storytelling experiences are classified as narratively attached, narratively detached, or narratively opposed. Across the horizontal axis of embodied engagement, listener-players are classified as invisible, aesthetic, or enrolled. Nine ideal types emerge at the intersection of these narrative and embodied preferences. Why someone might fit into one category rather than another reflects comfort rather than personality. Situated immersive types are understood to be fluid and temporary configurations. The degree to which players are willing to engage and are comfortable with what they are being asked to do may differ dramatically from experience to experience and from day to day, and even during a single session, reflecting how they feel at a given moment, which is affected by who they are with and how they are perceived and treated by others. This framework for understanding immersive preferences calls for the design of more widely inclusive story worlds.
The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth‐century studies
Abstract
This article is about why Africa is overlooked in eighteenth-century literary studies. Africa’s neglect is not merely a problem of attention. Neither the parameters of the field nor the tools of the discipline appear particularly suited for engaging Africa as anything other than an invention of the European imagination. In what follows, I seek to bring more clarity to the origins of this paradox and to contextualize some of its governing assumptions not in order to solve it but to show that having already solved it can’t and doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for scholars of eighteenth-century literature to face it head-on. The first section offers a brief account of how this paradox arose from the political and intellectual matrix of the mid-twentieth century when African Studies was first institutionalized in the West. The subsequent sections highlight the way this history has shaped—both directly and indirectly—the way scholars and teachers of eighteenth-century literature have understood Africa and their obligations to it and suggests some ways we might begin to rethink Africa’s place in the field
New Resources
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 394-398, October 2023.
Book review: Usha Thakkar, Congress Radio: Usha Mehta and the Underground Radio Station of 1942
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 383-387, October 2023.
Usha Thakkar, Congress Radio: Usha Mehta and the Underground Radio Station of 1942, (Penguin Random House, 2021), 353 pp., ₹699 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0-670-09566-7.
Usha Thakkar, Congress Radio: Usha Mehta and the Underground Radio Station of 1942, (Penguin Random House, 2021), 353 pp., ₹699 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0-670-09566-7.
Book review: Jeemol Unni, Vanita Yadav, Ravikiran Naik and Swati Dutta, Women Entrepreneurship in the Indian Middle Class: Interdisciplinary Perspective
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 380-383, October 2023.
Jeemol Unni, Vanita Yadav, Ravikiran Naik and Swati Dutta, Women Entrepreneurship in the Indian Middle Class: Interdisciplinary Perspective. Orient BlackSwan, 2021, 271 pages, ₹1,075 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-93- 5442-145-7.
Jeemol Unni, Vanita Yadav, Ravikiran Naik and Swati Dutta, Women Entrepreneurship in the Indian Middle Class: Interdisciplinary Perspective. Orient BlackSwan, 2021, 271 pages, ₹1,075 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-93- 5442-145-7.
Women and Waste: The Question of Shit-work
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 271-287, October 2023.
One of the fastest-growing sectors of the Indian economy is waste. Its labour illustrates Deliege’s paradox of material essentiality combined with social stigma and marginalisation. Between 2015 and 2019 the production and disposal of waste in a small South Indian town was traced through its circuits of industrial production (agro-processing), distribution (of people and of food), consumption, the production of labour (human wastes) and the reproduction of society (health care activity). The material substances of waste, their physical organisation and gendered labour processes are mapped onto each circuit. This enables a discussion of three questions: (a) regulative institutions in the formal and informal waste economy; (b) the gendering of property and work in the capitalist waste economy and (c) the gendered significance of collective action. The privatisation of waste work has caused a deterioration in work conditions throughout the waste economy. Literally and metaphorically, waste work is shit-work in which women experience the worst conditions in both physical and economic terms.
One of the fastest-growing sectors of the Indian economy is waste. Its labour illustrates Deliege’s paradox of material essentiality combined with social stigma and marginalisation. Between 2015 and 2019 the production and disposal of waste in a small South Indian town was traced through its circuits of industrial production (agro-processing), distribution (of people and of food), consumption, the production of labour (human wastes) and the reproduction of society (health care activity). The material substances of waste, their physical organisation and gendered labour processes are mapped onto each circuit. This enables a discussion of three questions: (a) regulative institutions in the formal and informal waste economy; (b) the gendering of property and work in the capitalist waste economy and (c) the gendered significance of collective action. The privatisation of waste work has caused a deterioration in work conditions throughout the waste economy. Literally and metaphorically, waste work is shit-work in which women experience the worst conditions in both physical and economic terms.
Book review: Vasanthi Raman, The World of the Banaras Weaver: A Culture in Crisis
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 374-376, October 2023.
Vasanthi Raman, The World of the Banaras Weaver: A Culture in Crisis, Second South Asia edition (Routledge, 2020), xxiii + 339 pages, ₹1495 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0-367-44351-1.
Vasanthi Raman, The World of the Banaras Weaver: A Culture in Crisis, Second South Asia edition (Routledge, 2020), xxiii + 339 pages, ₹1495 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0-367-44351-1.
Women and Their Interests in Rural India
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 288-308, October 2023.
There is a substantial and growing recognition of the hazards of treating the interests of women as being homogenous. A variety of sources focus on diversity in the interests of a woman, ranging from bargaining with patriarchy where she is forced to carry out diverse tasks within the household, to the extension of these negotiations elsewhere in her socio-economic reality. These challenges are accentuated at times of wider social transformation. Responses of women to these challenges are also influenced by their position within the household. This article seeks to gain insights into the complex negotiations between women, households and society in times of socio-economic transformation by exploring the relationship between women’s interests, strategic gender interests and practical gender interests within households that are headed by women. It does so through an empirical examination of the linkages between these interests of women across four different patterns of transformation in 21st-century rural India.
There is a substantial and growing recognition of the hazards of treating the interests of women as being homogenous. A variety of sources focus on diversity in the interests of a woman, ranging from bargaining with patriarchy where she is forced to carry out diverse tasks within the household, to the extension of these negotiations elsewhere in her socio-economic reality. These challenges are accentuated at times of wider social transformation. Responses of women to these challenges are also influenced by their position within the household. This article seeks to gain insights into the complex negotiations between women, households and society in times of socio-economic transformation by exploring the relationship between women’s interests, strategic gender interests and practical gender interests within households that are headed by women. It does so through an empirical examination of the linkages between these interests of women across four different patterns of transformation in 21st-century rural India.
Between the Devil and the Deep Sea: Tribal Women’s Inheritance Rights in India
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 309-329, October 2023.
In recognition of their distinct culture and identity, tribal communities in India enjoy constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and self-governance, which extend to customary laws for marriage, matrimonial rights and inheritance. In contexts where the tribal customary law has denied women inheritance rights, some women have approached the courts of law. The Hindu law on inheritance specifically excludes tribal communities from its application; yet, courts have found a way to apply it by reasoning that the parties to the case were ‘sufficiently Hinduised’. This article examines Indian judicial responses to this issue, and the ramifications for the inheritance rights of tribal women. The article critiques law’s lack of imagination and inability to capture the complex dynamics of social relationships in tribal communities, in a context of their massive dispossession from tribal lands. While highlighting the distinct relationship of property, community and family in tribal communities, it examines how law could ensure that tribal women retain their tribal identity and yet secure equal inheritance rights, rather than force a trade-off between tribal identity and securing inheritance rights on grounds of ‘sufficient Hinduisation’.
In recognition of their distinct culture and identity, tribal communities in India enjoy constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and self-governance, which extend to customary laws for marriage, matrimonial rights and inheritance. In contexts where the tribal customary law has denied women inheritance rights, some women have approached the courts of law. The Hindu law on inheritance specifically excludes tribal communities from its application; yet, courts have found a way to apply it by reasoning that the parties to the case were ‘sufficiently Hinduised’. This article examines Indian judicial responses to this issue, and the ramifications for the inheritance rights of tribal women. The article critiques law’s lack of imagination and inability to capture the complex dynamics of social relationships in tribal communities, in a context of their massive dispossession from tribal lands. While highlighting the distinct relationship of property, community and family in tribal communities, it examines how law could ensure that tribal women retain their tribal identity and yet secure equal inheritance rights, rather than force a trade-off between tribal identity and securing inheritance rights on grounds of ‘sufficient Hinduisation’.