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Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science

By Stephen Garton

Australians and New Zealanders were active participants in international dialogues and movements seeking to promote the propagation of the fit and prevent the multiplication of the inferior. This article deals with the reasons for failure of eugenics to have the influence its proponents hoped and its failure in achieving its aims. It also discusses eugenic ideas and policies as scientific, useful, and essential to the repertoire of policies that governments and reformers should pursue to promote social progress. It presents reasons for little success of eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand in enforcing even segregation. It discusses the conventional areas of eugenic concern namely, segregation, sterilization, marriage advice, maternal and infant welfare. It examines particular policies in detail, and more importantly shifts the focus from the discourses contesting to shape policy to the outcomes of those contests.

Read the article here.

Australia: Tainted Blood—Scientific Racism, Eugenics and Sanctimonious Treatments of Aboriginal Australians: 1869–2008

By Greg Blyton 

The Eugenics movement that emerged in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century was a continuance of European scientific racism sustained by a flotilla of political and academic ignorance that defined human credibility by hereditary traits, including colour and race. The movement may be defined as a European intellectual promotion to scientifically improve western societies through state systems that regulated human reproduction. In Australia, the foundations of the eugenics movement were heavily influenced by two former Cambridge University students, English scientists, Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882). It was a case of intellectual imperialism with colonial policymakers in Australia willingly adopting eugenics ideologies from their two English tutors. However, it would be unfair to blame a single man for the sanctimonious ways his concepts and theories were applied in policy and practice in relation to the treatment of Aboriginal Australians by Australian federal and state governments.

Read the full chapter here.

From Pessimism to Promise. Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech

By Payal Arora

When it comes to tech, the mainstream headlines are bleak: Algorithms control and oppress. AI will destroy democracy and our social fabric, and possibly even drive us to extinction. While legitimate concerns drive these fears, we need to equally account for the fact that tech affords young people something incredibly valuable—a rare space for self-actualization. In From Pessimism to Promise, award-winning author Payal Arora explains that, outside the West, where most of the world’s youth reside, there is a significant different outlook on tech: in fact, there is a contagion of optimism toward all things digital. These users, especially those in marginalized contexts, are full of hope for new tech.

As AI disrupts sectors across industries, education, and beyond, who better to shine the light forward, Arora argues, than the Global South, the navigator of all manner of forced disruptions, leapfrogging obstructive systems, norms, and practices to rapidly reinvent itself? Drawing on field insights in diverse global contexts such as Brazil, India, and Bangladesh, Payal describes what drives Gen Z to embrace new technologies. From Pessimism to Promise discusses the shift to relationally-driven approaches to design; how to create “algorithms of aspiration”; how to reimagine the digital space for sex, pleasure, and care; and, what we can learn from feminist digital activists and women’s collectives in the Global South on shared digital provenance and value, as well as indigenous approaches to sustainability, that challenges sacred ideas on degrowth, circular economy, and the doughnut economy.

Read the book here.

Imperial Theology, Colonization, Settler Colonialism, and the Struggle for Decolonization: A Review Essay

By Mehdi S. Shariati

This review essay introduces two books by Mitri Raheb which ground the contemporary predicament of Palestine in its historical and structural context. Raheb challenges the uncritical historical, theological, and ethnographic narratives regarding Palestine and its peoples. He delves into the history of Palestine showing it to be much older than the history of the Bible, and “Israel.” This version of history challenges the Eurocentric and deliberate misrepresentation and misreading of the bible by the traditional Christian theology, and variety of Christian and Jewish Zionists. As battleground between various empires for colonization, occupation, and control. Palestine as a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural land has survived the violence of competing empires and their theological constructs. The “Settler Colonial” design, however which began in the twentieth century with its own dehumanizing and demonizing language and analogies against the natives of Palestine is a refined version of the same script used by the Western colonial empires against Native Americans, and Africans, among other.

Read the essay here.

Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor

By Juned Shaikh

Juned Shaikh’s richly researched and perceptively argued monograph, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor, subverts the idea that the various processes of modernity, including urbanization and industrial capitalism, would eventually diminish caste hierarchies and engender new social dynamics. As Shaikh shows, such modernist hopes remained unfulfilled in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial center of Bombay. Instead, “caste hid in plain sight in the city” (5). It not only sustained the growth and expansion of capitalism by facilitating industrial investments through caste and kinship credit networks but was also vital for the recruitment, disciplining, and housing of the city’s labor force. The book examines this “symbiotic relationship” between caste and capitalism by focusing on the built environment—housing policies and urban planning—and the language of Bombay’s Marxist and Dalit literature. In existing social histories of capitalism and labor in Bombay, questions of caste appear as inconsequential. Shaikh rightly points out that in the historical narrative of modern Bombay “Dalits are a marginal presence because they appear fleetingly in [official] sources like the Labour Gazette” (35). Shaikh has addressed this gap by exploring an impressive Marathi language archive and by incorporating the insights of Dalit studies into his excellent work.

Read the full book here.

Decolonizing ‘the field’ in the anthropology of Central Asia: ‘Being there’ and ‘being here’

By Alima Bissenova

This chapter is written in the spirit of contributing to the decolonization of Central Asian anthropology. Drawing on an analysis of the works of the Russian orientalist, Aleksei Levshin (1798-1879), and his Kazakh critic, Chokan Valikhanov (1835-1865), it analyses historical practices of ‘entry into the field’, ‘being in the field’, and publication of the results, i.e., ‘descriptions and stories of the field’, in the West and Russia before the so-called ‘reflexive’ and ‘postcolonial turns’. It examines what Clifford Geertz terms the ‘gap between engaging others where they are and representing them where they are not,’ and discuss how this gap continues to inflect the anthropology of Central Asia today.

Read the full chapter here.

On writing Soviet History of Central Asia: frameworks, challenges, prospects

By Botakoz Kassymbekova and Aminat Chokobaeva

The article reviews major frameworks for re-evaluating Soviet Central Asian history in anglophone scholarship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It tackles recent popular concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ for analysing the Soviet past in the region. It questions the analytical value of the terms as well as their ability to capture the complexity of social, political and economic changes that Central Asia underwent in the course of seven decades between the October Revolution and the dissolution of the USSR. The article furthermore provides an overview of novel themes and approaches in the field and suggests themes for further research.

Read the full article here.

Digital Commentary Activities to Manage Mental Health and Identities Among Young South African Women and Girls (13-24) Living With(Out) HIV: Content and Thematic Analysis with Sociological Frameworks

By SunHa Ahn

This study, grounded in sociological principles, aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how young South African women and girls (YSAWGs) around HIV or sexual health or sexual activities, which are not easy to openly discuss in South African societies, use digital space in terms of their mental health or emotional management. This study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and explored YSAWG’s utilisation of Springster, a digital platform encompassing the digital commentary activities of socially marginalised voices, data collection spanned four months, yielding 135 stories. Through content analysis, the study quantified the frequency of repetitive words in these comments and identified main themes. These digital phenomena emerged as alternative substituting for the paucity of public school or (mental) health services, as well as the deficits of in-person intimate relational support, especially, among those who are struggling to seek non-judgemental peers or mutual relationships to navigate their emotional challenges in their life journey of HIV, sexual practices, and relevant health issues. This implies the need for educationally interactive processes in YSAWGs’ mental health, which have been epistemologically neglected since the apartheid period. Given the social and digital divided environments in South Africa, this demonstrates digital health practices’ potential for managing sexual health or practices for young women. However, there are mitigating risks to them, lessening the benefits, which means the urgent necessity of systematic interventions.

Read the full article here.

Decolonizing play: Rediscovering and revitalizing traditional play practices in post-colonial context

By Euis Kurniati and Sadick Akida Mwariko

This study examines the decolonization of play through the rediscovery and revitalization of traditional play practices in the post-colonial era. Through a comprehensive literature review, the research examines the historical suppression of indigenous play forms and their contemporary resurgence. The research highlights the cultural significance of these traditional practices, emphasizing their role in identity formation and social cohesion. Findings suggest that traditional play practices are integral to cultural heritage and offer substantial benefits when integrated into modern education, particularly in early childhood education frameworks. This study advocates for a paradigm shift towards a culturally responsive pedagogy that respects and incorporates indigenous knowledge. To achieve effective decolonization, educators, policymakers, and communities must collaborate in developing educational frameworks that honor and integrate diverse cultural traditions. This approach will not only preserve cultural heritage but also enhance educational equity and inclusivity. The revitalization of traditional play practices represents a significant step towards a more culturally aware and equitable educational environment, contributing to a richer and more inclusive early childhood education experience.

Read the full article here.

Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain

By Arunima Datta

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia.

Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, Arunima Datta illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment.

In doing so, Datta re-imagines the experience of waiting. Waiting is a recurrent human experience, yet it is often marginalized. It takes a particular form within complex bureaucratized societies in which the marginalized inevitably wait upon those with power over them. Those who wait are often discounted as passive, inactive victims. This book shows that, in spite of their precarious position, the travelling ayahs of the British empire were far from this stereotype.

Read the book here.

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