This book highlights various dimensions of human habitats in 21st Century India. The human habitats in the country are marked by perceptible inequality in social and economic spheres. This is occurring in tandem with rapid socio-economic transformation across both rural and urban landscapes. There is a plurality of transformative characteristics in terms of social and economic classes, gender and space. Inequality in access to natural resources such as land and water is still a big factor in socio-economic differentiation in rural habitats. This constructs a pedestal of unequal opportunities and access to basic human necessities such as healthcare, education, potable water and sanitation. Human habitats experiencing socio-spatial segregation and exclusion based on caste, community and gender are detrimental in formation of a civil society and its sustainability in long terms. The ideal situation for this would be formation of an inclusive society that celebrates age old socio-cultural diversities, reduces inequalities and reveres composite culture.

Gendering the Massification Generation examines why young people from the same families and communities in India experience different decision-making processes regarding higher education access because of their gender. In India and other contexts where higher education is massifying, and gender parity of enrolment has been reached at undergraduate level, there are still many questions to be asked about gender and access to higher education. Based on an exploratory study of gendered higher education access and choice within the state of Haryana, India, the authors explore gender inequalities of higher education access and choice in the Indian context and connect this with the broader international phenomenon of widening participation. Through an in-depth analysis of the ‘massification generation’, where young people from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds are accessing higher education, often for the first time in their families and communities, readers are encouraged to apply a lens of social disadvantage and gender, and to recognise the norms and transgressions of femininity and masculinity in relation to higher education access and choice. With global implications for the ways in which gender is analysed and framed in widening participation research and policy, this is the ideal book for scholars, students and policy makers working on higher education, as well as researchers and NGOs specialising in gender, school-to-higher education transitions, international development, sociology and area studies.

In the annals of India’s history, a monumental uprising unfolded in 2020, echoing the resilience and coming together of large sections of its agrarian base. Instigated by the contentious farm laws of 2020, the Farmers’ Movement burgeoned into a year-long saga of protest and perseverance, ending only in December 2021 after the passing of the Farm Laws Repeal Bill, 2021 by the Indian Parliament. From the initial demand for law repeal to the multifaceted growth of the movement, the book traces the journey of the Farmers’ Movement, as each essay dissects the socio-political dynamics, cultural nuances, and mass solidarity that underpinned the protests, including focused analyses from Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom. This anthology chronicles the ebb and flow of a nation’s spirit, encapsulating the symbiotic relationship between theory and praxis, between change and continuity. It serves as a testament to the power of collective resistance and a roadmap for future struggles, ensuring that the legacy of the Farmers’ Movement endures beyond the pages of history. This volume is an interdisciplinary project and will be of interest to scholars from diverse fields such as economics, sociology, public policy, political science, history, political geography, gender studies, cultural studies, international studies, architecture, media studies, psychology, and ethnomusicology.

This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.

Drawing on ecosystem thinking, complexity and postnormal science, Ecological Health offers a radical new way of thinking about the health issues of the 21st Century. This volume reflects on recent social scientific engagement with Ecosystem Health research and practice and sets out a vision for the future.

Encapsulation the essence of the deliberations held by various sessions of the 91st Indian Science Congress at Chandīgarh from January 3-7, 2004; includes interviews with leading scientists conducted by the team of NISCAIR scientists.

This book is about the love and hate relations that humans establish with their habitat, which have been coined by discerning modern thinkers as topophilia and topophobia. Whilst such affiliations with the topos, our manmade as well as natural habitat, have been traced back to antiquity, a wide range of twentieth-century cases are studied here and reflected upon by dwelling on this framework. The book provides a timely reminder that the qualitative aspects of the topos, sensual as well as intellectual, should not be disregarded in the face of rapid technological development and the mass of building that has occurred since the turn of the millennium. Topophilia and Topophobia offers speculative and historical reflections on the human habitat of the century that has just passed, authored by some of the world’s leading scholars and architects, including Joseph Rykwert, Yi-Fu Tuan, Vittorio Gregotti and Jean-Louis Cohen. Human habitats, ranging broadly from the cities of the twentieth century, highbrow modern architecture both in Western countries and in Asia, to non-architect/planner designed vernacular settlements and landscapes are reviewed under the themes of topophilia and topophobia across the disciplines of architecture, landscape studies, philosophy, human geography and urban planning.