Finding a home in or through mobile phones: Access and usage patterns among homeless women in shelter-homes of India

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Mobile Media &Communication, Ahead of Print.
With the number of mobile phone subscribers increasing across all sections of society, this paper aims to understand if homeless women in shelter-homes of India have access to mobile phones and, if so, what are their usage patterns. Facilitated by issues ranging from domestic violence to lack of employment to forced migration and even to human trafficking and rape, women residing in the shelter-homes of India have a myriad of stories to tell. Not all of them have been on streets forever and many have the basic literacy to understand how to use a mobile phone. For the purposes of the study, the researchers engaged with women above 18 years of age up to the age of 45 in a series of open-ended interviews to understand their access to mobile phones and contextualize their homelessness within an affordances-based framework for mobile phone access. This paper takes into account the dual barriers of gender and the lack of a home to study the digital divide experienced by homeless women in India, expanding on how both these factors shape their access and usage, eventually bridging the digital divide, and whether mobile phones are required/desired by the women themselves. The study found that the women staying in shelter-homes see a window of hope in their use of mobile phones in the form of an independent financial future or an independent marital life, but the biased perception of using a mobile phone among women hinders women’s access to and use of these devices, which ultimately results in the loss of any kind of opportunity before it has even been explored, perhaps leading to the loss of a chance at a bright future.

Sexual peril and dangerous others: The moral economies of the trans prisoner policy debates in England and Wales

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Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
This article analyses a widely publicised case in England, where a trans woman was remanded to a women’s prison and subsequently sexually assaulted other women prisoners. The article traces how the case was politically mobilised to support a growing backlash against trans rights in Britain. The article argues that the case was successfully deployed by trans-hostile groups because of a combination of carceral politics and sexual exceptionalism, which cut across both left and right politics and has roots in racialised narratives of ‘dangerous others'. These narratives, while ostensibly claiming to guard against sexual violence, paradoxically limit the capacity to meaningfully address underlying causes of sexual harm.

Illegibly legible: Outcomes of a land records modernisation programme in South India

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Abstract

This article analyses an initiative in 2017 to update and digitise textual land records in Telangana, a south Indian state. Its premise is that experiments to modernise land records have not met with pre-determined standards of success due, primarily, to the historically evolved contradictions around land as a resource and a commodity. In countries like India, the colonial policies on land and the post-colonial success of landlords to manipulate land records had already left the post-War task of ensuring conclusive land titles intractable. In more recent times, however, the agenda of land records modernisation has been absorbed by neoliberalism, which aims to create free land markets and replace traditional subsidies with direct cash transfers. This article shows that, consequently, the task of land records modernisation in Telangana became disembedded from agendas of agrarian egalitarianism and was rendered more complex—historical errors and exclusions were reproduced in new ways; technocratic solutions of the bureaucracy made governmental processes opaque; landed sections continued to subvert implementation; tenants were excluded from the land titles; and there were fears that the scheme would be misused to ease corporate land acquisition. Land records modernisation remains important for agrarian reform, but its success remains contingent on a greater appreciation among policymakers for the historical and political economy aspects of land ownership and possession.

‘For them farming may be the last resort, but for us it is a new hope’: Ageing, youth and farming in India

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Abstract

Based on an empirical exercise carried out in five villages of Odisha in eastern India, the paper looks into ageing of the farm population and the experiences and responses of farmers of various age groups to farming. The findings of the study indicate that agriculture is greying, farmers are getting older and the youth, particularly of higher and cultivating castes, are averse to farming. The unwillingness of these youths to join farming is mainly attributed to loss of social status, declining profitability in agriculture and discouragement of immediate ‘mentors’, the middle-aged farmers, caused by the perpetual decline of farm income and loss of social recognition. The hitherto nonfarming youths, belonging to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and service-rendering castes, especially the female youths, are joining farming to fill this gap, mostly as leased-in cultivators.