Welcome Viewers!!
The Subject Association, Department of Sociology is once again organising it's annual academic festival, KARVAN-E-FIKR 2012-13.
Unlike, last year, this time we are going to have a 3 day event, which includes a full day of 'Cultural Programme' and two days of 'Inter University Students Seminar'.
7th March: Cultural Programme (Poster-Making, Essay Writing, Quiz, Photography Competition cum Exhibition, Just a Minute, Movie Screening and Discussion followed by a Cultural Show in the Evening.)
Students interested to participate in the above mentioned events should contact the respective 'Event Coordinators', the names and nos. of each coordinator shall be uploaded soon.
13th & 14th March: Inter University Students Seminar on the theme ''The Informal City''.
Abstracts (250-300 words) for the Seminar are to be submitted by 14th February, 2013. You can choose any of the three languages, English, Hindi or Urdu.
Send your entries to: karvanefikr@gmail.com
We are still to include many other things. Keep visiting our page for further information.
Concept Note For the Students Seminar has been included.
KARVAN-E-FIKR,
2012-13
THE
INFORMAL CITY
March
13-14, 2013.
A Two day Inter-University Student Seminar, organised by the Subject
Association, Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi as part
of its Annual Fest, “Karvan-e- Fikr” -
2012-13.
Concept
Note :
|
The Informal City till a couple of decades
ago, by implication, meant only informal settlements. Today, it applies to a
plethora of services and activities that the informal sector provides to the
city and to the formal sector. A look at the literature will reveal varied
attempts by structuralists and neo-liberals to describe and explain the
causes of urban informality, as it is academically referred to.
The attention given by ILO to the term
informal sector since its anthropological inception by Hart in 1970s led to
its wide acceptance and popularity in academic and policy circles. While the
introduction of the term “informal” served its explicit purpose of
dismantling the notions of “culture of poverty” and “marginality” associated
with the urban poor, it had one severe handicap. We are here referring to the
dualism of formal vs. informal and
its varied avatars and forms such as occident/orient, “homo economicus”/“homo
socialists”, industrial/agricultural, city/ countryside, dynamic/ static,
legal/illegal, manifest/hidden, licenced/unlicenced and
organised/unorganised that have been
reproduced till the end of the previous century. This dual conceptualization
tended to obliterate the complex differentiation in the economy. Some of the
recent research, taking note of this lacuna seems to avoid viewing the
informal and formal as being on two opposite poles. There is a growing
realisation to look instead at the “interstitial spaces” where the two merge
to fully comprehend the fragmented character of the economy. Despite the
ambiguity of the concept of informal, today it can safely be established that
informal is not just something that resides outside the formal, organised,
capitalistic, industrial, official and regulated. The inter-linkages between
formal and informal, urban and rural, immigrants and city dwellers, legal and
illegal are only beginning to emerge in the contemporary works surrounding
informality. This entails looking at questions of inclusion, equity,
sustainability, ecology, gender, diversity, and plurality with respect to
processes of urbanisation and urban development.
Informality is not a purely urban
phenomenon, as made out earlier. However, its various manifestations in the
context of cities are an emergent concern because for the first time, in
human history, the urban population surpassed its rural counterpart in the
second half of last decade. The rate of urbanization also accelerated at an
unprecedented rate for the first time since industrialization began. The
majority of this urban growth is centred in metropolitan cities of the South.
The implications of these facts on urban housing, employment, workforce,
public health, sanitation, infrastructure, goods and services are quite
scary. Further, given the spurt in illegal urbanisation of agricultural land
and accelerated informal development within as well as outside the cities
under the conditions of globalisation and liberalisation, the focus of
epistemological enquiry has now shifted to “urban”. There is no doubt that
issues that are clubbed under the rubric of “informal” have well marked
historical
|
antecedents in the Marxist and Liberal
thought. The contemporary discourse, however, is centred in the Latin
American empirical and planning tradition which some researchers hold can be
a great source of analytical framework especially relevant to South Asia,
Africa and Middle East. This framework goes beyond providing descriptive
accounts of urban informality as seen in numerous monographs of slums in
cities across the globe but also provides cues to address the political
economy of the informality. The Brazilian planning experiments to
rehabilitate and relocate the famous or rather infamous favelas, that have been heralded by critics, surely offer a
critical ontological perspective to evaluate the role of different
stakeholders and actors in urban governance to create a “slum free India”.
Empirical reports by international agencies such as ILO, World Bank, and UN
attest to the immense contribution of the informal sector to growth of the
economy despite it being outside the purview of the official parlance. In
this seminar, we propose to arrive at fresh insights based on theoretical,
empirical and ethnographic work in the context of contemporary urban milieu.
Original
academic and research papers are invited around the following themes:
·
Theoretical debates around urban
informality.
·
Political economy of land acquisition,
housing for urban poor, public health and sanitation.
·
Issues surrounding the eviction, relocation
and rehabilitation of residents of informal urban settlements such as slums,
JJ clusters , redeveloped colonies at the centre and the periphery of the
city.
·
Implications of the spatiality of informal
work and labour on gender, class, and ethnicity.
·
Interventions by civil society, artists,
filmmakers, journalists, architects, planners and informal urban actors to
subvert the formal city.
·
Politics of urban space and challenges for
inclusive urban planning, development and governance.
·
Debating the policies of and processes of
de- informalisation in a comparative context.
.
|
Guidelines
for paper presenters:
Please note that the
outlined themes are indicative and suggestive only. Papers touching upon other relevant issues around the theme of
“The Informal City” can also be considered for presentation. The call for
papers is open to UG and PG students, research scholars or research
assistants/associates, studying in government approved educational institutions
from all streams such as social sciences, humanities, law, management, art,
architecture and planning. The presentations may use audio-visual materials
wherever relevant. The expected length of the final paper to be submitted my
range from 2500 – 4000 words to be presented in 15 minutes. Local TA will be
paid to the paper presenters, chairs and discussants. The interested
participants should e-mail an abstract of 250-300 words to be screened by the
Faculty of the Department of Sociology, JMI to the following by February 14th,
2013
Dr. Kulwinder Kaur Ishita Sinha
Student Advisor Vice President
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