A study of how an individual learns to be a woman or a man, and not simply a human being.

The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture provides a comprehensive synopsis of theory and research on human development, with every chapter drawing together findings from cultures around the world. This includes a focus on cultural diversity within nations, cultural change, and globalization. Expertly edited by Lene Arnett Jensen, the Handbook covers the entire lifespan from the prenatal period to old age. It delves deeply into topics such as the development of emotion, language, cognition, morality, creativity, and religion, as well as developmental contexts such as family, friends, civic institutions, school, media, and work. Written by an international group of eminent and cutting-edge experts, chapters showcase the burgeoning interdisciplinary approach to scholarship that bridges universal and cultural perspectives on human development. This "cultural-developmental approach" is a multifaceted, flexible, and dynamic way to conceptualize theory and research that is in step with the cultural and global realities of human development in the 21st century.

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the authors portray the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and social transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

Democracy Revisited is a critical as well as uncritical approach to the study and review of democracy today. The objective of the first chapter is to deal with some theoretical reasons of the decline of democracy such as lack of holistic approach, omission of civil society and varied forms of democracy. Out of many theoretical defects the book especially highlights the problem of precision regarding the meaning and nature of democracy and omission of civil society in democracy. Omission of civil society in democratic discourses has been a direct cause of the decline of democracy. That the people are ignored in practical democracy is due to the fact that civil society is absolutely omitted from the democratic narratives. The book also highlights some of major practical problems that are downgrading the importance, implication and relevance of democracy today in reality. Such practical problems are corruption, rule of the elites in lieu of rule of the people, inequality of race, gender and religion and lack of leadership. Under this perspective, it is necessary to have an open look towards the positive points of democracy. Since, there is no much better alternative than democracy we must have to highlight its strong points such as scope of debate, discussion, participation and formation of opinion by which democracy can be a people-friendly political system as well as an ideology and a cultural practice. Thus, this book is not only a criticism of democracy, but also a call for revisiting its strength by which democracy can still claim to be a suitable alternative of all types of statecraft, political systems and social and cultural pattern of life.

Never accept culture on its face value! It is because culture carries with it both retrogressive and progressive values. Progressive values of culture can cause development of society; but retrogressive elements of culture can play role against development and that is what has happened in case of folk literature. Various forms of folk literature have depicted many an instances of gender inequality, gender discrimination and have undermined the status of women in society. The book ‘Women in Folk Literature: Exposition of their Status through Gender Lenses’ is the result of my prolonged research and thinking and a record of the presence of gender inequality in folk literature in general and folk songs, fairy tales and folk tales, proverbs and riddles in particular. I have noticed that most of the discussion on folk literature is presented from uncritical entertainment viewpoint. Most of the folklorists have very carefully avoided the discussion of retrogressive features of the various forms of folk literature. Society is the maker of culture and on the other hand culture also reconstructs society. In terms of such mutual interaction between society and culture, the identification of the retrogressive features of folk literature and the sociological observation and reassessment of their origin, evolution and social influence is urgently needed and should be an important cultural agenda of the day. Everybody, especially women love to hear, read and perform various rites like vow-rhymes, folk songs and thereby want to get innocent pleasure; but the hidden messages of gender inequality extended in different shades and layers of these various forms of folk literature affect their innocent mind and direct them towards gender socialization by indoctrinating them in the ideology of masculinity and femininity. So, it is high time to unmask the actual objectives of folk literature and to assess them from a critical approach through gender lenses especially.

This study investigates Indian working women's sense of the discourses surrounding work and careers. In interviews conducted with seventy-seven women across socioeconomic statuses, castes, classes, and occupational and generational categories in the city of Pune, India, women express how feeling bound by tradition confronts excitement about ongoing changes in the country. The work lives of these women are influenced symbiotically by India's sociocultural practices and the contemporary phenomenon of globalization. Using feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical lens, Suchitra Shenoy-Packer explores how women deconstruct, coconstruct, and reconstruct systems of knowledge about their worlds of work as embedded within and influenced by the intersections of society, socialization, and individual agency. The meanings that Indian women associate with their work as well as their definition of a career in twenty-first-century India will be of interest to students and scholars of feminist theory, women's studies, globalization, Asian studies, and labor studies.

In today’s world, it is crucial to understand how cities and urban spaces operate in order for them to continue to develop and improve. To ensure cities thrive, further study on past and current policies and practices is required to provide a thorough understanding. Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East examines the poetics and politics of city and urban spaces in contemporary South Asia and the Middle East and seeks to shed light on how individuals constitute, experience, and navigate urban spaces in everyday life. This book aims to initiate a multidisciplinary approach to the study of city life by engaging disciplines such as urban geography, gender studies, feminism, literary criticism, and human geography. Covering key topics such as racism, urban spaces, social inequality, and gender roles, this reference work is ideal for government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.