Visiting Scholar Smitha Radhakrishnan of Boston University's Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, the hub of our UNITWIN Network, has just had her book Appropriately Indian published. ‘Appropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a “global Indianness” by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of “Indian” norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the “good” Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian.’
Read more at http://www.appropriatelyindian.com/
You can find Smitha's Boston Univeristy bio at http://www.bu.edu/wgs/community/womens-studies-family/visiting-scholars/
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and an affiliate of our UNITWIN Network, has recently had her article "The Transformation of Citizenship in India in the 1990s and Beyond" published in a peer-reviewed collection on the political economy of 21st century India. 'This paper discusses how the three central transformations of the 1990s – Hindu nationalism, backward caste mobilization and economic reform – have shaped practices of citizenship in India in recent times. Women enter this story in three ways: lower middle class women experience a new feeling of freedom by being able to enter the market; women experience social empowerment through their participation in and leadership of panchayats; but, as victims of sex-selective abortion, they are also disadvantaged in practices of biological citizenship. The article is published in the volume titled "Understanding India's New Political Economy: A Great Transformation?”, Sanjay Ruparelia, et al. eds. (Routledge, London, 2011)'. -Niraja Gopal Jayal
You can find Niraja's bio at: http://www.jnu.ac.in/Faculty/ngjayal/Address.html
