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This paper explores recent strategies used by Dalits to escape some of the worst forms of dependency in rural Tamil Nadu, India. We discuss why Dalit attempts at carving out spaces for independent entrepreneurship within capitalist production regimes remain an uphill struggle.

Paper long abstract

While Dalits across India have mobilised a series of political and democratic tools to challenge some of the most oppressive forms of exploitation and discrimination, their aspirations to achieve economic independence within capitalist production regimes remain an uphill struggle. Despite the promises of neoliberal transformations and the skill development opportunities hailed by recent governments, Dalit attempts to escape relations of dependency and carve out spaces for independent entrepreneurship within capitalist production regimes remain heavily undermined by a sheer lack of access to assets and means of production.

Based on long-term ethnographic field research carried out in the rural hinterland of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, this paper explores three strategies recently used by Dalits to escape some of the worst forms of dependency on higher castes in the rural powerloom industry. These strategies include attempts 1) to run their own powerloom units rather than to work as labourers in the workshops of higher castes; 2) to escape forms of labour bondage by using microfinance to settle outstanding debts with powerloom employers; and 3) to take up garment work in Tiruppur, with the aim to escape powerloom work and village dependency altogether.

Using ethnographic case studies, the paper describes these strategies and explains why each of them ended up being a mixed success, if not altogether a failure. We discuss the ways in which higher-caste recruitment strategies, ongoing technological transformations, and Dalits' precarious fall-back position undermine the latter's attempts at challenging their dependent position within rapidly changing capitalist regimes.

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This paper examines how divestment activists target work to channel financial activities away from what are seen as more destructive forms of capitalism. It considers what the potentials are for this form of emergent resistance to financialized capitalism and its limits.

Paper long abstract

Financialization of the global economy has led to unprecedented forms of capitalist accumulation and new forms of dispossession. Given the expansion of financial capital into ever expanding domains of everyday life, it is increasingly contested. Movements like Occupy, which emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, have attempted to resist finance and powerful financial actors. Yet there are other resistance movements that challenge not financial markets themselves, but its forms of investment. These activists choose to participate in shaping financial flows rather than rejecting them. In particular, there has been a growing recognition of the role of finance and banking in sustaining, for instance, fossil fuel industries and their related impact on climate change.

Drawing on ethnographic research on global divestment activism, though predominantly situated in London, this paper examines how divestment activists target both the ubiquity of finance (e.g., in pension funds) and its dominance to re-channel financial activities away from what are seen as more destructive forms of capitalism, particularly in relation to climate change. Further, it attends to the way in which the spatial diffusion of finance makes it possible to target it from globally disparate spaces. FInally, it considers what the potentials are for this form of emergent resistance to financialized capitalism and the limits to working within the networks of finance.

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The paper explores how Pacific islanders are confronted with capitalism without giving up other ways of conceiving relations, economy and society. Specifically, how Kanak society organises the problematic coexistence of moral economies and capitalism in a period marked by decolonisation process.

Paper long abstract

The power of globalisation seems to have colonised, in different ways, the "political imaginations" (Gibson-Graham, 2002) of both realists and decostructionists. Focusing the ethnographic lens only on the human action of resource-extraction there is a risk of "extrahĕre" (from Latin 'draw out') even those margins and residues where capitalism and culture come into relation and contribute to create the "locality". Paradoxically, the land that is not removed is precisely the place where a culture hides and at the same time it loves to represent itself. New Caledonia appears as an interesting realm to look at the mining politics both of corporations and independent indigenous leaders. The Société minière du Sud Pacifique (SMSP), a local mining company whose major shareholder is the Northern Province under the control of Kanak separatist parties, owns 51% of one on-shore nickel project in New Caledonia and two more off-shore in South Korea and China. Building on ten months of fieldwork in the northern region of New Caledonia this paper seeks to explore the various forms through which the capitalist-mining economic system is articulated in a specific local context, focusing on the different ways in which social actors resist, transform and domesticate the hegemonic elements coming from outside. Analysing mining activity from the lens of kanak metaphysic - as a co-habitation of spaces in which visible and invisible, endogenous and exogenous forces are constantly negotiated and balanced - the aim is to identify an alternative space to the rigid dichotomy between subjection and resistance.

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This paper diverts from the common perspective that local politics is a subset of national or regional politics, by examining how people at the coal face engage with this mineral at the micropolitical level in eastern India.

Paper long abstract

Coal in India carries different values and meanings for different actors. Consequently, the politics of coal is manifested in multiple forms at multiple levels. Whereas the extraction of coal is accomplished both by larger resource politics involving a narrative of energy crisis and a need for ensuring resource security, people at the grassroots level - workers, security forces, the displaced, administrators, revolutionaries and a wide range of other actors - engage with the micropolitics of coal. Diverting from the perspective that local politics is a subset of national or regional politics, this paper examines the everyday micropolitics of coal in eastern India. In particular, it analyses three cases: the ways in which mining companies bypass due process to get access to the coal; the moral claims over the resource made by the indigenous and the poor; and the ways local politicians, gangsters, Maoists and businessmen exert control over coal trade and transport for monetary benefits. Methodologically we draw on ethnographic engagements across coalfields in eastern India to untangle everyday and long-term trajectories of coal politics. The paper shows the fluid and often interchangeable roles at the coalface of actors often considered each other's opposites; the revolutionary groups strive to become mining contractors, the contractors function as politicians to mediate claims, and the politicians don the role of revolutionaries. In this fluid setting, the actors of the micropolitics of coal are influenced by outside forces to different degrees, and are yet able to reimagine resource politics to their own advantage.

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I reflect on the essentialist conceptualisations of 'feminisation of agriculture' and "gender-sensitive water technologies", and explore the intersectional effects of technological and institutional water interventions, as they obscure complex and shifting power relations and gender norms.

Paper long abstract

The notion of a "Feminization of agriculture" is often used to focus international development research and practice towards gender-sensitive interventions and (water) technologies. However, the term builds on a dichotomous and essentialist notion of women and men, while social relations of shifting household and community structures in contexts of rural out-migration tend to be over-simplified.

This paper critically examines how the gendered discourse of "Feminisation of Agriculture" is used in an international water development program in Eastern India, Nepal and North Bangladesh to implement water intervention approaches such as solar irrigation pumps and drip irrigation technologies as well as institutional innovations such as collective farming.

Taking a feminist political ecology approach, I reflect on the essentialist conceptualisations of 'feminisation of agriculture' and "gender-sensitive water technologies", and explores the intersectional effects of technological and institutional water interventions, as they obscure complex and shifting power relations and gender norms in contexts of out-migration. I also reflect on my own positionality, being involved as a "gender researcher" in the formation and (technological) trainings of 16 farmer collectives in six villages in the Terai, North Bihar and Bengal, as part of a four-year transdisciplinary research project. Based on findings how gender, intersected by class, age, and caste, affect irrigation technology adoption, I argue that space to discuss critical feminist perspectives at both water development initiative and community level supports the integration and implementation of a more reflexive, processual and relational understanding of water technologies, changing power relations and gender constructions in time and space.

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Transborder living is precarious and an enormous challenge for Mexican origin women. Two case studies are presented that exemplifies the economic and social processes of constantly "slanting" and negotiating daily realities in the midst of a transnational capitalist context.

Paper long abstract

Two case studies accentuate how Mexican origin women of the U.S Mexico Region carry enormous transborder responsibilities and innovate to great lengths in order to not only survive but excel sometimes tragically. Women guide the unfolding of that quest and are often caught between multiple transborder contexts beyond their control as they seek to ensure that the next generation does not suffer what they suffer now, and as they sacrifice themselves, and even their children, in order for those children to eventually become successful. Often the only way for many women to take hold of self and space in these circumstances is by a "slantwise" manner. That is,they slide into the edges of interstitial spaces and places in between great structures of economy and polity, creating the connectivities and spaces that can be negotiated, manipulated, and traversed.

This is critical of the bipolar model used in many discussions concerning the agency versus domination opposites along an axis. More important is the emphasis on "slantwise" behaviors and strategies having much to do with "going around," underneath, sideways, or slipping by the structures of economy and power in order to access or to acquire needed resources and legitimacy in a context of alienation or marginalization. As the case studies show sometimes success has tragic consequences unforeseen in this quest for survival and achievement in a transborder world.

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