Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Climate change is a global issue with diverse regional impacts threatening the survival of both human and non-human species. While the academic discourse on climate change predominantly focuses on macro-level studies, it often neglects the vital role of local environmental practices and the perspectives of affected communities. This paper presents insights from ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the Bishnoi community in Khejarli Village, Jodhpur, in the Thar Desert of India. This study utilizes participant observations, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and case studies to explore local environmental knowledge and practices aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change. Findings reveal the Bishnois’ deep-rooted relationship with nature and the pivotal role of religious beliefs in shaping their conservation efforts. Since the 15th century, the Bishnois have been committed to protecting local species, such as plants and animals, which has been crucial for sustaining the desert ecosystem and combating climate change. Moreover, their religious teachings and principles have helped conserve values among younger generations, ensuring a lasting culture of environmental stewardship. This paper supports integrating micro-level ethnographic studies into global climate change dialogues, urging the recognition of local knowledge as an essential resource for addressing contemporary environmental challenges

The self-oriented moral injury concerning the other’s suffering casts Western soldiers “not as perpetrators, but as victims of war devastation” (68). One can also draw parallels to the present, where nation-states employ collective victimhood to gather solidarity and sentiments on a global level. The ongoing war inflicted on Palestine by Israel is a timely example where Israel has been claiming and performing victimhood to justify both direct and structural violence against Palestinians. The review delves deeper into understanding the book 'Wronged: Weaponisation of Victimhood' in the contemporary global context.

With minimal access to legal protections, support, and exploitative conditions, Malayali women domestic workers in the Gulf struggle to forge meaningful connections and a sense of home in the UAE. This study aims to understand the experiences and perspectives of Malayali women, with a specific focus on the ways in which their idea of home and belonging are shaped by factors such as identity, diaspora, gender, and motherhood. The work also intends to comprehend how a sense of belonging helps the women to navigate through the sense of grief, guilt, and shame. Through their narratives, the article exposes how the migration of Malayali women domestic workers entail losing belonging, occupying liminal spaces, and relinquishing home.

In this Element, the authors write about the everyday production and experiences of banal inequality. Through a series of sections, each comprising of a blogpost written for Disruptive Inequalities, and a commentary from the author on the predicaments they encountered in the writing process, this Element shares, and confronts, the ways we fabricate stories and use writing to resist. It makes visible the choices, practices, and reflections that have led to the writing of our stories and offers the tools we have used to fabricate them, to all those who may find them meaningful to appropriate, adapt, and translate to fight the struggles that they want to fight. These tools are formulated in a way for writers to develop their own methods of storytelling and activism. The authors hope this Element contributes to an ongoing debate on how writing serves banal resistance.

The feminisation turn in migration studies has been instrumental in shifting the gaze towards the global economies of care and migrant domestic work. Among the fastest-growing occupations globally, domestic work is highly gendered and racialised, dominated by female workers from the Global South. There is now a rich body of empirical scholarship that demonstrates unequal global hierarchies, structural vulnerabilities of workers, their exploitation and unfreedoms associated with this work that often, simultaneously, contribute to pathways out of poverty and social and economic mobility. Through Henderson's work, the review critically analyses the asymmetric power relations between source and destination states that result in the latter dominating the policy discourse on migrant labour.