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My comment addresses a theme in several of the papers in this collection that gestures to the limits of queer theory, as a body of scholarship developed mainly from within Euro-American feminist frameworks. I will ask if perhaps groundedness in place and historical specificity might suggest registers of 'queerness' that exceed the potentials of queer theory. Particularly considering precarity - a sense of embodied vulnerability to each other - this piece will examine the potentials of frameworks that are rooted in place-based ideas about reciprocity, kinship, and intimacy as integral to understanding queer precarities. Indeed, such a view might suggest that what is 'queer' is often framed through a normatively modern and often colonial rendering of binary gender, and sexuality as fixed in sexual identity. It will ask what an archive of queer precarity might look like, and what geographies it might suggest if we decentred queer theory. Simultaneously, the essay will ask how forms of reciprocity, indebtedness, kinship, and homemaking that exceed the limits of coloniality might open up registers for queerness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protestant communities in South India were vocal in dissenting against colonial rule and in expressing their discomfort with the demographic politics of nationalist discourse. Within this context, this paper focuses on young Christian women in Madras, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, articulated an internationalist ethic and a geography of ecumenical belonging that drew on their positioning within internationalist humanitarian, Christian socialist and global student Christian networks. Critiquing the narrowly regional and national geographies within which minoritised communities in South Asia have tended to be studied, I argue that these young women drew on social gospel theology to imagine an expansive international geography of social action, while critiquing their positioning as 'minorities' within the emergent Indian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recurring floods and erosion result in displacement, which adversely impacts women who are 'left behind' when men migrate. Policy and programme measures for disaster response and climate adaptation often perceive women as homogenous, vulnerable groups, instead of addressing underlying structural and conceptual barriers and strengthening their adaptive capacities to disasters and displacement. This article draws upon a political ecology lens to understand gendered recovery processes following disasters across four districts in Assam, northeastern India using empirical research from 2012 to 2018. The findings add nuances to the displacements of women in Assam as being 'climate-induced' by showing the different mechanisms of displacement and how it impacts particular groups of women, as well as their differential ways of coping with these changes. This article draws on sustained long-term qualitative research among rural villagers, particularly women, in Assam where migration is connected to riverbank erosion, exacerbated by the construction of a new embankment, and disrupted due to waterlogging caused by embankments and government relocation schemes in order to construct further dams/embankments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in constructing the terms of political engagement for young Christian women in South Asia. It focuses on a periodical called The Young Women of India and Ceylon, published between 1908 and 1916, which typically carried didactic essays and short aphoristic pieces of writing by Western educators and social workers, addressing a predominantly South Asian readership. Through this magazine, as well as through its Bible-study groups, social events, sporting gatherings and social work activities, the YWCA sought both to create opportunities for women's participation in public life in South Asia and to articulate the boundaries of proper Christian womanhood in this practice. In particular, I argue that the writing in this magazine emphasised ideals of enterprise, positivity and professionalism. The article also examines the effects of this discourse, considering how South Asian Christian women inhabited an ethic of religious womanhood and showing that they engaged in a balancing act that both reiterated and contested the missionary ideal of 'good' womanhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancing an emergent scholarship on brands as having spatial and scalar effects, this paper examines the brand as an assemblage. In doing so, it focuses on youth engagement with the brandedness of motorbikes in the South Indian city of Chennai to examine in particular how brand assemblages shape gendered engagements with risk in Indian cities. Scooters and Motorbikes are important markers of 'youth' and middle classness in urban South Asia, representing freedom, mobility and fun. The Scooter has further been celebrated for putting women – literally and otherwise – in the driver's seat: creating the possibility for transgression and rebellion. This article complicates this narrative, by positioning scooters and motorbikes instead as sites upon which 'respectable' femininities are calibrated and articulated through young women's engagement with brands. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which brand assemblages enliven the agency of commodities and participate in the disciplinary processes that shape gendered urban geographies of risk and respectability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women's participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the 'good life', it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as 'unsafe' for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what 'counts' as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the 'risk' of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

West Africa is a region characterised by high species diversity and endemism, making it an ideal region to study the evolution of genetic and phenotypic differentiation. Species in this region often vary in morphology and genetics; however, the specific drivers of these differences have not been clearly identified. Focusing on populations in Ghana, we tested for correlations between geography, genetic diversity, morphology and ecology in the West African rainbow lizard (Agama picticauda). Genetic data were collected from 102 specimens using double-digest restriction site-associated DNA sequencing (ddRADseq) and the final data matrix included 5 976 loci and 20 624 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Morphological data were collected from 42 specimens and included 6 meristic and 4 mensural characters. Ecological data were obtained from the WorldClim database to a resolution of 30 arcseconds. Population structure analyses supported up to five distinct populations of A. picticauda in Ghana. Discriminant function analyses were used to classify samples using the morphological data and ecological data. Ecology showed the strongest correlation with population genetic structure, whereas morphological data were only able to weakly differentiate three populations. We discuss the factors that might be responsible for correlations between phenotypes and genotypes in the context of A. picticauda natural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The savannah and tropical forest biomes of Africa have a long history of expansion and contraction, and the recent and rapid spread of dry savannah habitats has influenced the spatial and temporal diversification of vertebrate taxa across this region. We used a combination of species tree and phylogeographic methods to describe the spatio-temporal changes through time and across space (= species diffusion) in a clade of seven West African lizard species in theAgama agamaspecies group. A Bayesian species tree diffusion approach was used to compare the relative rates at which species ranges changed across the landscape. We found that some species have high diffusion rates characterized by significant movement in their range location and minor changes to their overall range size, whereas other species show little movement in their range centre with an exponential increase in range size. This discrepancy between the rates that range locations shift versus change in their relative area could be linked to populations tracking their preferred habitats through time. A continuous Bayesian phylogeography approach using a relaxed random walk model was used to estimate the timing and rate of population size change and geographic diffusion inA. picticauda, the single species in the group with an extensive African distribution from Mauritania to Ethiopia. The mean dispersal rate ofA. picticaudaincreased dramatically throughout the Pleistocene, and a Bayesian skyride analysis supports exponential population growth over this same time period. A comparison of genetic diversity across different loci and species suggests thatA. lebretoniexperienced a mitochondrial selective sweep that has caused a deficit of variation at this locus in relation to nuclear loci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the uses and meanings of the English term ‘tension' in Indian context, discussing its psychological usage such as stress or anxiety and political use such as social or national conflict.