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Many minoritised and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a 'survivable life' and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This paper addresses this gap by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build viable lives in an area of the Indian Himalayas. We highlight the importance for these young people of building life as 'jeevan', an idea particularly associated with survival. We also highlight the significance they attach to protecting a wider, 'puri life' ('whole life'), a process that affords opportunities for enjoyment and ethical fulfilment beyond survival. This account of life thought 'on the ground' provides a basis for reflecting on Agamben's (Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press; 1998) arguments about the prevalence of 'bare life' in the contemporary world. This paper examines how young people develop ideas of life in contemporary rural north India. It highlights their tendency to imagine life in terms of the relationship between 'jeevan' (core, human life) and 'puri life': the wider social, environmental and spiritual/cultural milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities. This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector in north India. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests, but we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a drinking water supply project in rural Rajasthan, India, that deliberately sought to create greater equality across caste for water users through a combination of public taps and payment for water. Later, in the post-construction phase of the project, those goals were undermined by the counter-technologies of upper caste households and the village-scale institutions that supported them. The paper brings together geographic research on neoliberal water governance and caste processes in modern rural India to illuminate how neoliberal subjectivities deepened in the post-project phase. It shows the ways that caste norms, village water governance and state power converged to produce 'new' ways of thinking about water access and payment that undermined the social goals and the physical infrastructure of the project. The paper contributes to research on neoliberalisation and the creation of subjects by demonstrating the mutual constitution of caste inequalities and successfully marketised drinking water over the construction and post-construction phases of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 15 years, "rights of nature" as a concept and legal apparatus has spread across various sites and scales of environmental governance throughout the world. This paper examines the rights of nature phenomenon, focusing on a recent decision by the High Court of Uttarakhand, India to grant legal personhood to the Ganga (Ganges) and Yamuna rivers and associated natural entities. Arguing against "diffusionist" and "global" approaches to understanding the rights of nature phenomenon, and drawing on the concept of translocal assemblages, I emphasise the place‐based specificities of these decisions in addition to their translocal connections. Through a close reading of the Uttarakhand case, I demonstrate the need to situate translocal social movements in place by attending to the manner in which "rights of nature" becomes articulated through specific practices, cultural meanings, material networks, human–environment relations, legal regimes, governance structures, and political projects in culturally and geographically specific ways with often counterintuitive outcomes. Rather than seeing "rights of nature" as a global movement or network manifesting at various scales, I consider it as a boundary object connecting translocal assemblages of environmental governance through acts of translation. In doing so, I push assemblage geographies to engage theoretical problems of difference, boundaries, and translation that have yet to be addressed in this emerging paradigm. In the last 15 years, "rights of nature" as a concept and legal apparatus has spread across various sites and scales of environmental governance throughout the world. This paper examines the rights of nature phenomenon, focusing on a recent decision by the High Court of Uttarakhand, India to grant legal personhood to the Ganga (Ganges) and Yamuna rivers. Arguing against "diffusionist" and "global" approaches to understanding the rights of nature phenomenon, I consider it as a boundary object connecting translocal assemblages of environmental governance through acts of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) – differences that are mobilised for accumulation. Labour migration scholarship has mainly explored sites of production. We extend recent social reproduction theory (SRT) and an older literature on labour migration and reproduction to argue that the intimate relationship between production and social reproduction is crucial to the exploitation of migrant labour and that this means we have to place centre‐stage the analysis of invisible economies of care which take place across spatiotemporally divided households, both in the place of migration and in the home regions of migrants. Furthermore, we develop recent work on SRT and migration to argue that an analysis of kinship (gender over generations, not just gender) is crucial to these invisible economies of care. This analysis is important in showing the machinations of capitalist growth and for political alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2004-5, 2010 and 2012 to examine the recent expansion of higher education markets in north India. It focuses on a group of young men who attended university in the city of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. Faced with dismal job prospects, they began to improvise, making money ad hoc by acting as small-scale political brokers on campus. However, some of them subsequently utilised these improvisational skills to try and attain loftier economic ambitions. As India's education sector was liberalised, they honed in on an opportunity to establish their own profitable colleges. Our paper points to a paradox that resonates far beyond India; namely, that the continued expansion of private education is, in some cases, happening in spite of and even because of poor job growth. We also extend recent work on the theme of improvisation. By examining long-run changes, we show that improvisation is not indelibly linked to the activities of 'youth', but rather a set of practices that they may perform and abandon as they move through the life course. As such, improvisation can serve as a staging post in the efforts of young people to obtain a more secure foothold in the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst greatly valuing recent critiques of the vertical imaginary and reified ontology of scale theory, and of the unfettered flows of network theory, this paper argues against a human geography without scale. Rather, four propositions from the theoretical literature are used to provide a tool-kit to analyse the practical negotiation of scalar politics, namely that: scales should be considered as effects, not frames or structures, of practice; networks must be considered in all their complexity and heterogeneity; networks can be interpreted as assemblages, the more re-territorialising and re-scaling of which can be analysed as apparatuses; and that state apparatuses work to create the impression that scales are ahistorical, hierarchical and possess exclusive relationships. These propositions are used to explore a period of history when the scalar constitution of the world was under intense debate. The interwar era saw the imperial scale clash with that of the international, both as ideological worldviews, and as a series of interacting institutions. The assemblages of internationalism and imperialism were embodied by apparatuses such as the League of Nations and the colonial Government of India respectively. Attempts by the League to encourage the abolition of tolerated brothels in an attempt to reduce the trafficking of women and children led to intense debates between the 1920s and 1930s over what constituted the legitimate domains of the international and the ‘domestic’. These explicitly scalar debates were the product of League networks that threatened the scalar sovereignty of the Raj, most directly through the travelling Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East in 1931. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the resilience of distinctive local consumption cultures, this paper challenges some of the more sweeping claims that have been advanced in the name of ‘globalization’. Thinking about a ‘globalizing’ rather than a fully ‘globalized’ world encourages us to examine the deeply contested nature of the concept and to explore the geographically uneven nature of recent economic, political and cultural transformations. This paper approaches globalization as a site of struggle rather than as an established fact, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded studies of the impact of ‘globalization’ on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts. The paper examines the way that producers have ‘customized’ their products for different markets (drawing on evidence from China and South Africa). It then reviews case study evidence from three contrasting consumption cultures: consumption and ‘public culture’ in India, ‘consumer nationalism’ in China, and ‘artful consumption’ in Russia. The paper concludes by identifying some current debates and outlining some directions for future research, including a re-emphasis on consumption and material culture; an exploration of consumption as social practice; the delineation of commodity-specific consumption cultures; and some reflections on the political, ethical and methodological issues that are being raised in contemporary consumption research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital, understood as norms of reciprocity and associational life, is supposed to provide a bottom-up approach to poverty alleviation world-wide. The World Bank says that social capital is a necessary condition for long-term development and that social capital is the capital of the poor. This paper will argue that much of the literature is too sanguine of the benefits of social capital for the poor. It is, of course, important to look at the extent to which social capital can help the poor. But how the conditions of the poor people can also affect their social capital is equally important to examine, and this has often been neglected by many scholars who have been busy to prove that social capital is a new paradigm of development. Based on qualitative interviews in two rural areas in Orissa, eastern India, this paper seeks to examine whether and to what extent poor people of the daily wage labour class benefit from their social capital. It then goes on to unpack the mechanisms in which the economic-political conditions under which poor people live and the spatiality of these conditions affect the production of social capital. By seeking to unpack the dialectical relation between social capital and poverty, the paper aims at problematizing the overly optimistic claims about social capital. It shows that it is untenable to posit social capital as an independent variable and poverty as a dependent variable because the economic-political conditions of poor people have an enormous constraining effect on social capital itself and its supposed material benefits for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research critically engages with existing theories of class and urban governance, and is empirically located in Delhi, India. The paper argues that existing theories of urban participatory governance in the global South, which polarise urban citizens and their mobilisation strategies into the elite, typically understood as guilty of 'capturing' participatory structures; and the poor, conceptualised as excluded from formal governance mechanisms but active in more politicised forms of mobilisation, are incomplete. This research identifies urban citizens who fit neither the 'elite' nor 'poor' conceptual binary, and explores how such 'ordinary' citizens engage in participatory urban governance. Empirically, research addresses Delhi's unauthorised colonies (UCs), residential areas that have evolved mostly on private land that is not classified 'residential' in the Delhi Master Plan. Housing roughly a quarter to one-third of Delhi's population and comprising a mix of classes, UCs are technically illegal locations for residential development, are consequently excluded from Delhi's network of basic urban services (water, roads, electricity) and face potential demolition. UCs are conceptualised as representing India's 'missing middle' both empirically, highlighting the multiplicity of the middle class, and conceptually, revealing the failure of binary concepts to accurately describe participatory urban governance for those in 'the middle'. In addition, analysis highlights how UCs' invisibility (linked to their heterogeneity - i.e. their empirical and conceptual 'middle-ness') functions as both an asset and a limitation in terms of participation in urban governance. The paper calls for greater recognition in academic and policy debates regarding the nuances in everyday life that are overlooked by neat binaries. As the Delhi case shows, a large proportion of urban populations are neither 'poor' nor 'elite', and arguably a similar trend is likely to exist in cities throughout the world where segments of populations demographically in 'the middle' are 'missing' from academic and policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks how labour markets are changing in the context of wider transformations in the rural economy. Drawing on evidence from two villages in southern India, which are both close to, and deeply affected by, a major textile industry cluster, the article examines local labour markets, arguing that labour market segmentation is not simply caste-based. While some Dalits from one village have gained access to jobs in export markets, the same group of Dalits from another village have not. Furthermore, different groups of Dalits have had very different experiences of accessing jobs in urban areas, and the article shows that barriers to entry are located more in the rural social economy than in the urban industry. It is argued that villages only a few miles apart have very different local labour markets because they are uniquely and variously embedded in local institutions that interact with economic transformations in contingent ways. The article shows that having an industry on your doorstep means very different things for different people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the ‘global war on terror’ by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the ‘enemy other’ in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]