In the same spirit of broader studies and interrogation of broader themes arising from the research on rural-urban migration, such as environment and migration, small towns and migration, logistics and migration, etc., the concluding workshop was held in Kolkata on The second section contains schedules and reports for the public lectures, the conference and the final workshop.
RESEARCH BRIEFS
The Ordinary City
A conspicuous part of the working-class population manned the various kinds of transport that ran in the city. Labour, Precarity and the City : exploring the creation of urban work in Kolkata / Supurna Banerjee.
Towns and Migrants: Explorations of an Urban Future
The term 'metapolitical', which the author uses to look at the generic city, must be understood as underlining the inclusion of the aesthetic dimension in the political analysis of the city. What becomes clear from this track is the increasing dissociation of the city and the class angle. This logistical development comes in the wake of the Chinese Belt Road Initiative (BRI) and the India-Japan Asia Africa Growth Corridor.
Such an organized focus on trade has led to expansions of the border towns, influenced by the local characteristics as well as the statistical agenda of the border country. However, the broad design of the 'small town', which includes all non-metropolitan phenomena, must also serve another and more central goal. Some of the research papers have already been published in the South Asian journal of forced migration studies, Refugee Watch.
PROGRAMMES
Public Lecture I
Separation, Mobility and the Ordinary City
On Migrants’ Subjection and Subjectivity by Subir Sinha
Sixth Critical Studies Conference
What are the traditional institutions and agencies related to refugees and immigrants in cities. Recently, the recurrence of violence should be seen in the context of the construction near Calcutta of a new city that is growing from the dispossession of the peasants. The resulting violence and the selective inclusion and exclusion of population groups are features of the city's contemporary history.
It was important to study the transformation process, the steps taken towards increasing the sustainability and resilience of the city. Experts who theorize the city approached the subject from roughly three perspectives: (a) the angle of spatial practices, this way is dominant among urban planners and geographers (b) the city perceived on the basis of the mental images it evokes, this way is dominant among researchers of cultural studies, and (c) the city as a space for life and production. Although the third way of looking at the city attempts to overcome the singular form of the first two by presenting a subject-object view and gives us a greater range of conceptual tools to study issues of urban justice, the problem of how to take into account its segmentation and connections, in the formation of the city, and therefore the various fault lines (economic groups, caste, race, gender, religion, etc.) along which the city develops as a site of power, contestation and claims. making remains.
23 August 2017
Radhika Raj (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Center for Urban Policy and Governance): Producing a 'Migrant' versus the 'Local': The case of an all-male right-wing organization on the fringes of the city. Srinivasan (Chennai Metro Union of Construction and Unorganized Workers): The State's Role in Urban Violence against Marginalized Castes: Manual Scavenging in India Today. Oindrila DuttaGupta (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Center for International Policy, Organization, Diplomacy and Disarmament): Gender, Migration and the City: An Alternative Perspective from the Global South.
Murchana Roychoudhury (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, Interdisciplinary Social Sciences): Exploring the environment and migration nexus in the Brahmaputra Valley. Samita Sen (Jadavpur University) on Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Subhoranjan Dasgupta (eminent literary critic and analyst) on Walter Benjamin, Paris the capital of the 19th century and other writings.
Nabajyoti Deka (IIT Kharagpur, Department of Economics): Environmental Migration and the Dynamics of Labor Economics: Narratives from the Bank of the Brahmaputra River in Postcolonial Assam. Himadri Chatterjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Center for Policy Studies): Land and Labor on the 'Frontiers' of Calcutta: Refugee Lives Between City and Countryside. Supurna Banerjee (Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata): Work, Precarity and the City: Exploring the Emergence of Urban Work in Kolkata.
Kaustubh Mani Sengupta (Bankura University, Department of History): Infrastructural development and the issue of reparations in colonial Calcutta. Iman Mitra (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Patna): The Rent Economy of the City: The Calcutta Improvement Trust and the Politics of Urbanization in the Twentieth Century. afternoon: Closing remarks by Ranabir Samaddar, Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group.
Brief Reports of Sixth Critical Studies Conference
24 August 2017
- A): The panel engaged in social theorist Agamben’s understanding of camp, while simultaneously departing from the notion of camp as an exceptional and apolitical space, as
- B): The panel entitled ‘Identity and Inclusion’ saw papers that talked about migrant identities and the politics of inclusion and exclusion that infuse such identities
- A): Titled ‘The Urban Question and the Northeast’, this panel presented papers that discussed primarily two diverse trends associated with India’s Northeast in the present
- B): With ‘Urban Governance’ as the broad focus on the panel, issues of migrants’
- A): The papers in this panel engaged in an interesting debate on the conditions of women labour migrants in South Africa and in the Global South with ‘Gender, Movements
- B): ‘Revisiting the Migration Archives from the Brahmaputra Valley through an Inter-Disciplinary Perspective’ being the overarching theme of discussion, this panel
Conditions of the Working Class in England was written by Engels when he was 24-25 years old. The speaker focused on four key features of the book before moving on to other discussions. The book describes itself as the state of the working class, but in many ways it is actually a pioneering work in industrial urbanism.
One of the documents used extensively in the book is the inquiry by the English Health Authority following the cholera epidemic of 1831-32. In many ways this is the book which anticipates many of the most common arguments about industrial urbanism. A strong criticism of the book that has emerged at a later stage is the way he approaches the Irish question, the question of immigrant Irish workers.
25 August 2017
A): The papers in this panel looked at ‘Vulnerable Bodies: Marginal Subjectivities in Post-colonial Calcutta’, through a study of the nature of governance regarding the
This session discussed and debated issues such as the binary of congestion and decay, the relationship between infrastructure, electricity and construction works, the links between sanitary infrastructure and urban ecology, and the study of the city as an entity in itself. The panel discussion focused on questions of compensation in relation to the infrastructural development of colonial Calcutta, the institutional politics of spatial organization and the everyday practices of rent extraction after the inception of the Calcutta Improvement Trust in 1912, and "primitive capital accumulation". in the central part. of Calcutta in the second decade of the 20th century that led to an urban transformation.
A): With ‘Gender, Everyday Life and the Making of the Cityscape’ as the backdrop for discussion and debates, the panel explored the trajectory of women’s
Public Lecture II
The Generic City: Meta-political Remarks on the Future of the City at the Time of Absolute Capitalism
Public Lecture III The Urban Turn
Workshop
Towns and Migrants: Explorations of an Urban Future (27 December 2017)
26 December 2017
27 December 2017
Brief Reports of Sessions
Frontier Towns as the Edge of a Complex Urbanity [Chair: Pushpendra Kumar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Patna]
He noted that borders between states are the result as well as the cause of political sentiments of the ruling class as well as the common citizens. The apparent failure of the "Look East/Act East" policy in the development of the Northeast is largely due to the fact that the volume of trade with Myanmar and Bangladesh has decreased, and the focus is mainly on the small ASEAN countries, while a number of regions of Myanmar have been ignored. Monirul Hassan: Monirul Hassan noted that the substantial migration of people from the state of Assam to various parts of India is primarily due to the lack of jobs in the area.
Another crisis in Assam is that of the Muslim farmers, who started rioting immediately after partition, but the feeling of being "undesirable" has not disappeared even today. The multi-boundary nature of the city makes it imperative to use a nuanced method to distinguish the political, social, economic and functional boundaries. Singh emphasized the ongoing contested nature of the city, which encourages and encourages the construction and deconstruction of borders, which in turn provides for the creation of borders on an almost daily basis.
Small Towns: The Neglected Dimension of Indian Urbanisation [Chair: Atig Ghosh, Visva-Bharati University]
She spoke about the city of Osh in Central Asia, which has been in the news twice recently (in 1999 and 2010), mainly due to ethnic violence. Manish Jha: Citing his example, Manish Jha spoke about how his involvement with a small town came from the experience of growing up in one. The politics of city formation, the changing urban landscape and the impact of local politics is something we probably want to include in our discussions about small towns, he suggested. The discursive engagement of the small town is suitable for the space of subsistence and multiplication of commercial production and capital.
Pushpendra Kumar: Pushpendra Kumar also shared his experience of seeing how the transformation from a block town to a district town happens through a set of influential people, usually involved in some kind of industry in the place, who can constantly fight for the status of the town. Iman Mitra: One of the points that Ritam Sengupta makes emphatically in the paper is an attempt to critically understand the small town as a hyphen between the rural and the urban within the linear history of urbanization in India, Iman Mitra said. He pointed out some of the difficulties in placing the problematic of the small town in the larger discourse of urban development in India.
Urban Activism: City and the Changing Face of Revolt [Chair: Sibaji Pratim Basu, Vidyasagar University]
The first problem arises with the desire to study the small city in isolation from the metropolitan one, which he considers a major mistake of subaltern urbanism. It is the space of the city that gives space to protest and protest. Nasreen Chowdhory: What Chowdhory gathered from Ishita Dey's paper was that he was trying to introduce the idea of urban activism.
We talked about the city, the making of the city and whether or not migrants should have any sense of aspiration towards the city, she says. According to her, this urban activism is very much linked to the idea of rights to the city that arose in the 70s, in a different context in France. And if we speak of claiming the city, then we must ask by whom, and what is it that you have lost.
List of Translations & Publications (2017) Translations
Publications
THE RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
RESEARCHERS,
DISCUSSANTS AND CHAIRS
Researchers, Discussants and Chairs List of Researchers, Discussants and Chairs
Ramaswamy, Calcutta Research Group
Srinivasan, Chennai Metro Union for Construction and Unorganized Workers Xonzoi Barbora, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati
