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Climate change is one of today’s most important issues, presenting an intellectual challenge to the natural and social sciences. While there has been progress in natural science understanding of climate change, social science research has not been as fully developed. This book breaks new theoretical and empirical ground by presenting climate change as a thoroughly social phenomenon, embedded in our institutions and cultural practices. Drawing on a variety of sociological literature, thirty-eight sociologists summarize existing approaches to understanding the social, economic, political, and culture dimensions of climate change, detailing the causes, impacts, and responses. Chapters 2 to 4 focus on factors that drive carbon emissions and situate these factors within social structure and processes. Chapters 5 to 7 examine the impacts of climate change and how sociological perspectives can inform the creation of just and equitable mitigation and adaptation strategies. Chapters 8 to 10 examine the factors that influence how society responds to climate change, including the movements that advocate for or against climate action and public opinion. Chapters 11 and 12 present an overview of debates within social theory about the significance of climate change and how to address it, followed by a review of methodological approaches for studying the relationship between societal and climate phenomena. The concluding chapter takes stock of all these sociological insights and how they fulfill the need for more social science research on climate (and global environmental) change, while also pointing to the importance of further sociological engagement with these topics.

The book asks to what extent Himalayan farmers and their institutions are prepared to face a future when external production conditions change. Because farming is particularly sensitive to climate, the main aim here is to relate present farming practices to projected future climate changes. Intensive, coordinated studies of six farming communities along the Himalayan range, from China in the east to Pakistan in the west, focus on their potentiality to adapt to climate changes that are projected for 2030, 2050, and 2100. But since climate projections are just projections, and since the context of farming is wider than just climate, the book also asks about farmers’ capacity to adapt to uncertainty in general. For that purpose, theories of ‘flexibility’ that have been applied in ecology, economics, and management science are accommodated to the present topic of farming systems. The assertion is that farmers and farming systems that are flexible are best prepared to face a future of climate change and other uncertainties.

In the popular imagination, Caribbean islands represent tropical paradise. This image underlies the efforts of many environmentalists to protect Caribbean coral reefs, mangroves, and rainforests. Much less attention is given to environmental conditions in urban areas, where the islands’ poorer citizens suffer from exposure to garbage, untreated sewage, and air pollution. Concrete Jungles explores why these issues tend to be ignored, demonstrating how mainstream environmentalism reflects and reproduces class and race inequalities. Based on over a decade of research in Kingston, Jamaica, and Willemstad, Curaçao, the book contrasts the “Uptown environmentalism” of largely middle-class professionals with the “Downtown environmentalism” of inner-city residents. It combines an original and sophisticated theoretical discussion of the politics of difference with rich ethnographic detail, including vivid depictions of Caribbean “ghettos” and elite enclaves. The book presents a novel approach to environmental injustice, combining a political economy perspective with attention to the cultural politics that naturalize socio-ecological inequalities. One of the first works to extend environmental anthropological theory to explicitly include the study of cities, the book shows how divergent forms of environmentalism articulate class, race, and urban space. Forms of environmentalism that implicitly or explicitly understand cities as opposed to nature, and poor people as a threat to environmental purity, contribute to “urban naturalisms” that naturalize social hierarchies and the unequal distribution of environmental problems.

Contested Knowledge argues that the structural coupling between science and media in the context of risk politics has led to the creation of a ‘scientific public sphere’ in the state of Kerala, India, and regional newspapers have become the most prominent site of public deliberation over science since the late 1990s. This new form of public engagement with science radically differed from its earlier form nurtured by the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP), the largest people’s science movement in India. The book discusses this shift and the resultant transformations of the ‘scientific-citizen public’ of Kerala by examining three public controversies over science deliberated in the regional dailies in the early 2000s. Public deliberations during the controversies over clinical trials in the Regional Cancer Centre (RCC), Thiruvananthapuram, a series of micro-earthquakes and well collapses, and the strange phenomenon of coloured rain are analysed to understand how risks were perceived, knowledge claims were contested, disciplinary rigidities were dismantled and trust in science and the credibility of scientific institutions were re-negotiated. The book thus explores how the public contestation of knowledge staged by the mass media contributes to deepening democracy by re-instilling politics into science. Democratization of science under the agency of the scientific-citizen publics, the book suggests, is nonetheless limited as it fails to account for alternative forms of engagement offered by multiple publics. The book contends that the theory of deliberative democracy is inadequate to capture the multiplicity of public engagement with science.

Irrigation management for agriculture and rural development has a long history in South Asia, yet today it asserts a critical paradox: new scarcities are emerging, but irrigated agriculture still contributes vitally to food security and agro-industries. This collection of case studies from India and Nepal shows how irrigation management operates across complex dynamics of ecology, technology, and society, documenting interdisciplinary research approaches to study these. It takes the reader through irrigation technologies developed in different agro-ecological zones: large-scale public canal systems in semi-arid zones; small-scale farmer-managed canal systems in hill environments, ponds, and tank irrigation systems; and groundwater-based systems developed from borewells and in conjunctive use settings. It also includes a study of micro-hydel systems developed alongside irrigation. The case studies analyse these technologies in relation to processes of change through public policy and local action. They examine the design choices of irrigation agencies and farmers in irrigation provision, and show the forces of agrarian change acting on water access, property rights, and water institutions. Some review recent state policies for reforming irrigation management that introduce new organizational forms, but also promote markets and cost recovery. In this way, the volume documents the wider development policies acting onto irrigation management. The volume offers new scientific understanding of the complex interrelationships between water as a crucial resource in irrigation-based livelihoods, and the technologies and institutions that regulate its use. For emerging questions of equitable access to water and water productivity in South Asia, such interrelated understanding of technology and institutional choices is fundamental.

This book blends critical theoretical insight with a historically grounded comparative study to examine the form, trajectory, and contradictions of redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, the book contends that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic “crisis cities,” representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly influential in our current, crisis-prone urban age. This approach, the book terms “crisis-driven urbanization,” emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid, devolution of recovery responsibility to the local state, and use of corporate tax incentives and grants to spur revitalization. Rather than target the populations and ecosystems most heavily impacted by the disasters, deregulated aid dollars subsidize luxury development and urban rebranding campaigns that accelerate gentrification and displacement and advance urban agendas long sought by growth coalitions, By exposing both the pre- and post-history of the two disasters, the book shows how long-neglected landscapes of risk and vulnerability combine with starkly inequitable redevelopment to turned sudden disaster into long-term crises. Such uneven and contradictory redevelopment only exacerbates risk of future crisis—and is not inevitable.

Darjeeling occupies a special place in the South Asian imaginary with its Himalayan vistas, lush tea gardens, and brisk mountain air. Thousands of tourists, domestic and international, annually flock to the hills to taste their world-renowned tea and soak up the colonial nostalgia. Darjeeling Reconsidered rethinks Darjeeling’s status in the postcolonial imagination. Mobilizing diverse disciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this definitive collection of essays sheds fresh light on the region’s past and offers critical insight into the issues facing its people today. While the historical analyses provide alternative readings of the systems of governance, labour, and migration that shaped Darjeeling, the ethnographic chapters present accounts of dynamics that define life in twenty-first century Darjeeling, including the Gorkhaland Movement, Fair Trade tea, indigenous and subnationalist struggle, gendered inequality, ecological transformation, and resource scarcity. The volume figures Darjeeling as a vital site for South Asian and postcolonial studies and calls for a timely re-examination of the legend and hard realities of this oft-romanticized region.

The forest sector in India is currently going through an unprecedented churning. Every dimension of forest-related decision-making, including rights of local communities, conversion of forests to non-forest uses and setting aside forests for wildlife conservation, has become the subject of intense scrutiny, debate and change. The involvement of multiple actors, from local communities to the Supreme Court, marks a shift in the discourse from forest management to forest governance. Questions of forest rights, responsibilities, regulatory structures, transparency and accountability have increasingly become central to the discourse. The need to democratize all these components of forest governance is being repeatedly articulated. This book highlights this shift in the discourse and analyses the complex issues involved in bringing about democratic governance of forests in India. The chapters in this book review developments over the last two decades along four dimensions: forests for local management, forests for wildlife conservation, conversion to non-forest purposes, and the wider socio-economic context and how it poses challenges to the idea of democratic governance. The themes range from the relevance of the Joint Forest Management programme, the contribution of the Forest Rights Act, the complexities of the Godavarman case and the changes in the Wildlife Act to challenges posed by shifting cultivation, scientific versus traditional knowledge, and the effect of economic growth on forest dependence.

This book, Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life, is concerned with the home, but it is not bounded by the home. While the home provides a necessary anchor point for our empirical and theoretical work, we are well aware that the home is not self-contained but is a node in multiple commercial, cultural, and technical networks, all of which interact, and all of which have local implications and global reach. The home’s socio-technical ecology operates in recursive relations with these much larger ecologies, none of which can be ignored if the home is to be understood. This book unearths this digital domesticity through accounts of evolving socio-technical relations as they unfold in processes of adopting and adapting to innovations; using, maintaining, and neglecting the complex of technologies in the home; and confronting the obsolescence of particular technologies and failure of systems of consumer technologies.

Citizen participation has undergone a radical shift since anxieties about “bowling alone” seized the nation in the 1990s. Many pundits and observers have cheered America’s twenty-first-century civic renaissance—an explosion of participatory innovations in public life. Invitations to “have your say!” and “join the discussion!” have proliferated. But has the widespread enthusiasm for maximizing citizen democracy led to real change? This book examines how participatory innovations have reshaped American civic life over the past two decades. It looks at the public engagement industry that emerged to serve government, corporate, and nonprofit clients seeking to gain a handle on the increasingly noisy demands of their constituents and stakeholders. The beneficiaries of new forms of democratic empowerment are not only humble citizens but also the engagement experts who host the forums. Investigating public engagement practitioners’ everyday anxieties and larger worldviews shows the strange meaning of power in contemporary institutions. New technologies and deliberative practices have democratized the ways in which organizations operate, but this book argues that they have also been marketed and sold as retrenchment tools that facilitate cost-cutting, labor control, and other management goals. Public deliberation has burdened everyday people with new responsibilities without delivering on its promises of empowerment.

The encounter of “personalized experiences”—targeted advertisements, tailored information feeds, and “recommended” content, among other things—is now a common and somewhat inescapable component of digital life. More often than not however, “you” the user are not primarily responsible for personalizing your web engagements: instead, with the help of your search, browsing, and purchase histories, your “likes,” your click-throughs, and a multitude of other data you produce as you go about your day, your experience can “conveniently”—and computationally—be personalized on your behalf. This book explores a host of new questions that emerge from web users’ encounters with these forms of algorithmic personalization. What do users “know” about the algorithms that apparently “know” them? If personalization practices seek to act on users’ behalf (for instance, by deciding what content is personally relevant), then how do users retain or relinquish their autonomy? Indeed, what kinds of selfhoods are made possible when personalization algorithms intervene in identity construction? Making It Personal is the first full-length monograph to critically analyze the sociocultural implications of algorithmic personalization through the accounts and testimonies of web users themselves. At the heart of the book are interviews and focus groups with web users who—through a myriad of resistant, tactical, resigned, or trusting engagements—encounter algorithmic personalization as part of their lived experience on the web. The book proposes that for those who encounter it, algorithmic personalization creates new implications for knowledge production, autonomy, cultural capital, and formations of self.

In rapidly urbanizing India, cities are places of conflict between people and nature. What is the future for conservation in Indian cities? Nature in the City examines the past, present, and future of nature in Bengaluru. One of India’s largest and fastest growing cities, Bengaluru was once known as the Garden City of India. The city’s ecology and environment have been degraded and destroyed in recent years. Yet nature still exhibits a remarkable tenacity. The book has a broad historical focus. Moving from early settlements in the 6th century CE to the 21st century city, it concludes by outlining a vision of a better future. The book draws on extensive research, integrated with stories of people, places, and examples of positive change. Detailed chapters demonstrate how nature has looked, behaved, and has been perceived differently in the home gardens, slums, streets, parks, sacred spaces, and lakes of Bengaluru. Nature in the city is shaped by human preferences and prejudices, as the book demonstrates. Of interest to local residents, visitors, and outside readers alike, the present volume provides an accessible, informative, and interesting tour of the social spaces where nature thrives and strives in Bengaluru. With heterogeneous environments, population densities, and urban poor, cities like Bengaluru must pay attention to the cultural and social contexts within which nature is embedded. The book further suggests an organic approach for urban conservation in the Indian context that builds on the capacities of people and communities, drawing on the close integration of the socio-cultural and ecological in urban India.

In this book, the author shows how employees, organizations, and even friends and family are struggling to understand how the expected norms for mobile-communication connectedness function when people are working. Until the early 2000s workplaces provided most of the computers and portable devices that employees used to do their jobs and communicate with others. Now, people bring their own mobile devices to work, use them to circumvent official organizational channels, and create new norms for how communication occurs. Managers and organizations set policies, enforce rules, and create their own workarounds to navigate the ever-changing mobile-communication environment. This book draws on over two decades of research studies and fieldwork, consisting of 150 distinct interviews and focus groups, representing people in over 35 different types of jobs, to claim that people assume mobile communication is a uniform practice. Instead, the book reveals underlying—often hidden—issues of control and power that shape how people are permitted and expected to use mobiles to communicate while working. The stories and extended examples reveal a wide-ranging account of how these portable tools are used across work environments today. The book develops a grounded theory describing the ongoing negotiation for control when people use their personally owned devices while working. These lifelines integrate information, communication, and data, and they connect people in unexpected and often conflicting ways.

The scope of criminal justice surveillance, from policing to incarceration, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and marketing. While law enforcement’s use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences. This book offers an inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world—the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations from over two years of fieldwork with the LAPD, the text examines the causes and consequences of big data and algorithmic control. It reveals how the police use predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to deploy resources, identify criminal suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven practices. While big data analytics has the potential to reduce bias, increase efficiency, and improve prediction accuracy, the book argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

This book is an ethnographic study of the processes of agrarian change in the Malwa region of central India over the last forty years, beginning with the introduction of soyabean cultivation in the 1970s, known as the ‘yellow revolution’, and new information technology based markets in the 2000s, called the choupals. Examining the claims of prosperity and empowerment of farmers through the yellow revolution and the information revolution, this book challenges the notion that science and technology can bring unparalleled economic growth and prosperity to rural India. It argues that both techno-managerial ways of understanding and evaluating agriculture as well as those which emphasize the lenses of caste, class, and gender are inadequate in capturing the diverse processes at work in shaping the lives of rural people. Highlighting the role of the environment and technology, not in deterministic ways, but as non-human forces working upon and with human agents, it suggests that both the social and the technical must be considered together to understand the specific trajectories of agrarian change and the possibilities of rural transformation. Drawing upon science and technology studies (STS), together with critical scholarship on the political economy of development and agrarian change, this book shows how people and things have reconfigured each other in producing the world they live in, thus contributing towards new theoretical framings of agriculture and rural transformation.

For the past three decades scientists have urged us to abandon fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. Despite these pleas, the global energy sector has retained a familiar profile, dominated by the use of oil and natural gas. Only states have powers that are commensurate with rapidly reshaping societies in sustainable ways, but how do their politics enable these surges in sustainability? Shocks, States, and Sustainability answers this question through a comparative historical study of four radical environmental reforms: in the Dust Bowl during the New Deal, in Britain after World War II, in Cuba after the Soviet collapse, and in the Gulf of Maine after the Depression. This analysis suggests that states reform environmental practices in the aftermath of focusing events that draw popular attention to environmental degradation and suggest sharp limits in the availability of natural resources. These crises prompt the creation of encompassing coalitions of diverse peoples who push through laws and regulations that conserve natural resources.

This book emphasizes the significance of various ways of resource use in India. This book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the several forms of restraint on resource use reported from human societies. In the second part, a new interpretation of how the cultural and ecological mosaic of Indian society came together is discussed. The last part presents a socio-ecological analysis of the new modes of resource use which were introduced by the British, and which have continued to operate, with modifications, after Independence in 1947. It also indicates that the British colonial rule established a crucial watershed in the ecological history of India. Generally, this book reports new data along with new interpretations of old data, and, most importantly, it shows a new and alternative framework for understanding Indian society and history.

Colleges and universities in the United States play a profoundly important role in American society. Currently, that role is being hampered by a climate that constrains teaching, research, hiring, and overall discourse. There are three core beliefs that define this climate. First, any initiative framed as an antidote to historical societal ills is automatically deemed meritorious, and thus exempted from objective scrutiny of its potential effectiveness. However, to use a medical analogy, not all proposed cures for a disease are good cures. Second, all differences in group-level outcomes are assumed to be due entirely to discrimination, with little tolerance given to exploring the potential role of factors such as culture or preferences. Third, everything must be interpreted through the lens of identity. Non-identity-centered perspectives, regardless of how worthy they might be, are viewed as less legitimate or even illegitimate. All of these beliefs are well intentioned and have arisen in response to important historical and continuing injustices. However, they are enforced in uncompromising terms through the use of social media, which has gained an ascendant role in shaping the culture of American campuses. The result is a climate that forecloses entire lines of research, entire discussions, and entire ways of conducting classroom teaching. The book explains these three beliefs in detail and provides an extensive list of case studies illustrating how they are impacting education and knowledge creation—and increasingly the world beyond campus. The book also provides a detailed set of recommendations on ways to help foster an environment on American campuses that would be more tolerant of diverse perspectives and open inquiry. A note about Covid-19: While the production of this book was done in spring and summer of 2020, we completed the manuscript in 2019, well before the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered American college campuses in March 2020. To put it mildly, the dynamics of campus discourse are very different when dorms have been largely emptied and instruction has been moved to Zoom. Of course, at present we cannot know when students will be able to return to campus in significant numbers. That said, we are confident that our call for a culture of more open discourse in higher education will remain relevant both during the pandemic and after it has passed.

This book explores the implications of urbanization and climate change for peri-urban water security in South Asia. Focusing on four locations in the region, namely Kathmandu (Nepal), Khulna (Bangladesh), and Hyderabad and Gurgaon (India), the book describes how climate change and urbanization shape peri-urban water security. The research documents the socio-technical mediation of water insecurity, describing both technological and institutional adaptive responses. In describing adaptation, the focus is both on planned and autonomous adaptation. The book further documents the differential vulnerabilities of peri-urban communities, describing the factors that disadvantage certain men, women, and groups of people as compared to others. With a focus on peri-urban contexts, the book bridges an important gap in current studies of adaptation and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change that tend to focus on purely agrarian or urban contexts. It thus contributes to the emerging body of work on peri-urban issues as well as to the literature on vulnerability and adaptation. The research presented is interdisciplinary in nature, employing a wide range of research tools and methods across the natural and social sciences.