‘Looking beyond Compliance’ assesses the role of an enabling environment as a major factor in the successful mainstreaming of gender. This article analyses the important role of political will in influencing the creation of an enabling environment. The article suggests that several role-players need to possess the political will to ensure that an enabling environment is created. Notably, the actions of an individual have an impact on the institutional reforms developed and vice versa. Political will is argued as the most (...) influential component in the development of an enabling environment and therefore creates the enabling environment through political buy-in. The argument specifically looks at the Department of Public Service and Administration located in the South African public service. (shrink)

'Looking beyond Compliance' assesses the role of an enabling environment as a major factor in the successful mainstreaming of gender. This article analyses the important role of political will in influencing the creation of an enabling environment. The article suggests that several role-players need to possess the political will to ensure that an enabling environment is created. Notably, the actions of an individual have an impact on the institutional reforms developed and vice versa. Political will is argued as the most (...) influential component in the development of an enabling environment and therefore creates the enabling environment through political buy-in. The argument specifically looks at the Department of Public Service and Administration located in the South African public service. (shrink)

The demand for online content in Indian languages is growing faster than for that in English. The proliferation of cheap smartphones with Indic keyboards and high-speed connectivity is feeding this trend. Moreover, there is increasing formal and informal collaboration between English and IL publishers to make educational and literary content available in regional languages. This currently is not financially viable or scalable and follows the logic of the print economy. The government is focused on online content delivery as part of (...) a larger Digital India programme. In the absence of IL content in the higher education arena, it must work with private players to develop quality technical and scientific content. Indian-language publishers need to be included in this process via training and incentives, since they have regional networks for effective outreach with this content. The biggest role of the government, however, is in the arena of regulation with the updating and implementation of intellectual property and copyright laws that need to extend to digital content; as well as in creating an environment where quality educational content is incentivized. (shrink)

Academic publishing must change quickly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In India, where publishing has a close and symbiotic relationship with the educational system, it has the means to do so. There is a young population, an aspirational nation, and a pandemic-induced opportunity to expand publishing’s digital footprint while rebuilding its traditional forms to provide blended learning and format-neutral options. There is no dearth of demand for academic content and expertise and the changing trajectories of learning and access provide (...) opportunities for collaboration and partnerships both within Indian publishing and with the wider educational and technology ecosystem. The resilience of Indian publishing, which celebrates 75 years in 2022, lies in this collaborative spirit and responsive approach. (shrink)

This article identifies the colonial imperative of ‘we must develop them, with or without their consent’, which is used by the Indian state in order to dominate Kashmiri Muslims, and argues that this notion of development combines patriarchal silencing of the subjugated as well as a gendered fantasy of liberating oppressed Kashmiri women and minorities. While the colonial nature of Indian rule over Kashmir has been a long-term phenomenon, the focus in this article will primarily be on a specific political (...) transformation imposed by the Indian state since August 2019, when even the pretence of autonomy and recognition was given up, and all phenomena constituting coloniality became conspicuous and acute. Adopting a feminist lens, I highlight nine features of contemporary Indian coloniality in Kashmir: denial of consent, paternalism, violence, enforced silencing, lack of accountability, arbitrariness, divide and rule, humiliation and a specious idea of development. I further argue that such a notion of coloniality as development is better understood as ‘econonationalism’ (akin to homonationalism and femonationalism), where the supposed liberatory ideas are rhetorically deployed to mask a dehumanising subjugation. (shrink)

It is possible to be ‘irrational’ without being ‘uneconomic’? What is the link between ‘Value’ and ‘values’? What do economists do when they ‘explain’? We live in times when the economic logic has become unquestionable and all-powerful so that our quotidian economic experiences are defined by their scientific construal. This book is the result of a multifaceted investigation into the nature of knowledge produced by economics, and the construction of the category that is termed ‘economic’ with its implied exclusions. It (...) is an attempt to think economics Otherwise, that is, a questioning of economics as if difference mattered. Nitasha Kaul re-examines certain understood ways of thinking about economics as a discipline, especially in elation to questions of identity and difference. This book explores the notion that economics is not a timeless, universal, objective science but a changing response to the problems of knowledge and administration. The epistemological inheritance of economics is ‘rooted’ in the enlightenment, and it also inherits the liberal paradoxes of that age. Kaul argues that the juxtaposition of identity with economic is essential, and can only be achieved by critiquing establishment economists’ discourse on identity, and taking feminist poststructural and postcolonial work seriously. The author challenges the assumption that there is a simple linkage between the category economic, the entity economy and the study of economics. She envisions an economics in the plural: contextual, social, political—econo-mixes. The book brings together some of the most urgent topics of the day—the power of economics as a discipline, the questions of difference and the politics of identity, and feminist perspectives on this. It will be particularly relevant to heterodox economists, feminist theorists, postcolonial studies scholars, social and cultural theorists, philosophers and history of ideas or intellectual history of thought scholars. (shrink)

This book is the result of a multifaceted investigation into the nature of knowledge produced by economics, and the construction of the category that is termed ...

This article attempts to make sense of India's obsession with Kashmir by way of a gendered analysis. I begin by drawing attention to the historical and continuing failure of Indian democracy in Kashmir that results in the violent and multifaceted dehumanisation of Kashmiris and, in turn, domesticates dissent on the question of Kashmir within India. This scenario has been enabled by the persuasive appeal of a gendered masculinist nationalist neoliberal state currently enhanced in its Hindutva avatar. I focus on understanding (...) how the violence enacted upon Kashmiri bodies is connected to feminised understandings of the body of Kashmir in India's imagination of itself as a nation state. I argue that the gendered discourses of representation, cartography and possession are central to the way in which such nationalism works to legitimise and normalise the violence in Kashmir. I conclude with a few reflections on how Kashmir is a litmus test for the discourse on (anti-)nationalism in contemporary India. (shrink)