Aparna Sundar

Civil Wars in South Asia

In this article we argue for greater attention to the practice of (nature-culture) conservation as a specific form of intervention with implications for development. Outlining the dominant frameworks through which the often vexed relationship between conservation and development has been understood, the article offers an alternative analytical fram...

In this paper, we use livelihoods as an organizing concept which brings together questions of production, social reproduction, and the conditions for these, to describe and reflect upon three ‘moments’ of displacement and contention in India. Our first moment, a massive flash strike by workers in the export garments industry in Bangalore, is locate...

Artisanal cultures of work and skills transmission provide a useful point of contrast from which to think about the renewed interest in skills development as a formal, institutionalized process of training and certification for discrete and standardized skills. This article traces the transformation of practices of skill in the context of technolog...

This report presents the findings of a study undertaken to examine the health impacts of precarious work on racialized immigrant women. There is an emerging consensus that precarious working conditions have become a determinant of poor health. The study seeks to understand this relationship in the case of racialized immigrant and refugee women who...

Recent struggles over coastal zone policy in India make it a fertile site within which to map the actors, institutions, and knowledges involved in contemporary ecological governance. In 2007, the government drafted a coastal zone policy that marked a shift from the previous regulation approach based on hard boundaries and prohibitions, to a managem...

A priest whose commitment to justice was a way of living his faith and working hard for the betterment of fishworkers, Thomas Kocherry was a firebrand among social workers on Kerala's coast for over three decades. His talent lay in translating ideas into a language that could inspire and mobilise, and move people to action. Rightly known for his co...

Narratives of crisis in the fisheries tell us about declining catches, vanishing species, and displaced fishers. We hear little about the agency of fishing communities themselves, and their long history of militant mobilization at a variety of scales in defense of their resources, livelihoods, and communities. This paper seeks to fill this gap. It...

This article re-opens the debate on secularism in India by looking at a religion and a region that has historically been marginal to this discourse, focusing on the way in which the Catholic Church has historically mediated the relationship between individuals and the state, among the fishing communities of South India. The Catholic Church’s domina...

'If half my heart is here, doctor, the other half is in China, with the army flowing towards the Yellow River' writes Nazim Hikmet, in his famous poem, Angina Pectoris: 'I look at the night through the bars, and despite the weight on my chest, my heart still beats with the most distant stars.' Partha Chatterjee's 'Politics of the Governed' and in p...

Written for the Dept. of Political Science. Thesis (M.A.). Bibliography: leaves 185-198.