ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5999-3850
Current Organisation
University of Newcastle Australia
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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 31-12-2021
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 2012
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2012
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-11-2012
Abstract: Scholars have noted the ways in which Delhi’s transformation into a global city has enclosed urban spaces excluding the urban poor, labourers and migrants. One of the neglected aspects of this focus is the way in which Delhi’s transformation has created new opportunities for migrants from north-east India. This article is an ethnographic account of migrants from the north-east in Delhi. It is argued that employment opportunities in the neo-liberal spaces of the global city are fuelling a rapid increase in migration from the north-east, the very limit of India’s geographical and cultural imaginary. Outside these spaces of economic inclusion, north-east migrants continue to live as exceptional citizens and experience racism, discrimination and violence. The experiences of north-east migrants in Delhi suggest that the exclusionary city narrative is an incomplete view of urban change in India, and reveal how neo-liberal transformation is connecting heartland cities to frontier regions in ways previously unimagined.
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 2016
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 05-07-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2012
Abstract: Violence against women (VAW) in India is commonly attributed to an overarching metacultural patriarchal framework. Focusing on this national culture of violence obscures the experiences of VAW among ethnic minority women. This article focuses on VAW in Northeast India, a region populated by large numbers of Scheduled Tribes with different cultural norms, and where society has become militarized by ongoing insurgency and counterinsurgency. Though tempting, militarization alone is not a sufficient explanation for VAW instead, this article focuses on the interplay between nonfamilial and familial contexts in creating a “frontier culture of violence” in which VAW is experienced and contested.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 12-10-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-12-2018
Publisher: Hogrefe Publishing Group
Date: 03-2014
DOI: 10.1027/0227-5910/A000244
Abstract: Background: Suicide is and has been a major public health problem in Sri Lanka and has generated a wide range of literature. Aims: This review aimed to systematically appraise what is known about suicide in Sri Lanka. The patterns and content of articles were examined and recommendations for further research proposed. Method: The paper describes the systematic search, retrieval, and quality assessment of studies. Thematic analysis techniques were applied to the full text of the articles to explore the range and extent of issues covered. Results: Local authors generated a large body of evidence of the problem in early studies. The importance of the method of suicide, suicidal intention, and the high incidence of suicide were identified as key foci for publications. Neglected areas have been policy and health service research, gender analysis, and contextual issues. Conclusion: The literature reviewed has produced a broad understanding of the clinical factors, size of the problem, and social aspects. However, there remains limited evidence of prevention, risk factors, health services, and policy. A wide range of solutions have been proposed, but only regulation of pesticides and improved medical management proved to be effective to date.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-03-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-05-2023
Publisher: Humanities Commons
Date: 2011
DOI: 10.17613/M6SX1Z
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 02-2022
Abstract: India’s urban infrastructure is maligned for its breakdowns, inefficiencies, and inequities, and popular resentment at dysfunctional infrastructure is constant in public life. This article focuses on the surprising desire for India’s urban infrastructure among skateboarders. Skateboarders are drawn to India’s urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction, its seemingly unfinished nature. I explore these relationships by analysing four skate videos and making three arguments. First, infrastructure attracts skateboarders for possibilities of creative interpretation and appropriation, on‐camera aesthetics, and the encounters generated between mostly foreign (though not always “western”) skaters and local urban dwellers. Second, far from isolated moments, the appropriation of India’s infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard videos. Third, skate video presents urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination although over two decades India’s cities have drifted closer to skateboarding’s core concrete and steel replacing cows and festivals on screen. The article closes by exploring the implications for skateboarding—a subculture built on disrupting the city, hacking its infrastructure, moving against its flows—when operating in spaces where disruption is the essential condition of everyday life, and how this is transmitted to an adjacent viewing public.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 02-12-2010
DOI: 10.1002/JID.1537
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-12-2011
Abstract: In this article, the author examines the challenges to masculinity prompted by migration from the Northeast frontier of India to the capital city Delhi. Northeast India has been characterized by insurgency, counterinsurgency, and ethno-nationalism since Indian Independence in 1947. In this militarized environment, masculinity has been shaped by historical constructions of a warrior past fused with contemporary constructions based on ethno-nationalism and armed struggle. A dramatic increase in migration out of the region by young men and women to the urban centers of India to work in the retail and call center industries poses a major challenge as it ruptures the masculine norms of home. In response, men attempt to enforce these masculine norms with varied results. At the same time, new expressions of masculinity are evolving alongside conventional expressions demonstrating the fluidity of masculinity even among men from a region where masculine norms appear rigid.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 11-2017
Publisher: Humanities Commons
Date: 2016
DOI: 10.17613/M6Q38Q
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-09-2023
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-06-2023
DOI: 10.1111/AREA.12883
Abstract: In cities around the world, skateboarders repair surfaces and objects for the purposes of play using techniques to fill, smooth, and fabricate. Research in social and cultural geography focuses on the ways citizens repair and care for material objects using do‐it‐yourself (DIY) practices. Despite continuities, repair work by skateboarders does not strive to improve neglected, absent, or dysfunctional infrastructure for the common good, as in cases from literature on DIY urbanism, nor to subvert objects, texts, and surfaces to make political statements, as in cases from literature on tactical urbanism. Skateboarders do repair and care work to prepare surfaces for playful damage benefitting other skaters and onlookers enjoying the spectacle. By exploring these widespread but under‐researched acts of repair and care and the circuits of knowledge that reproduce them, this paper makes four arguments. First, skateboarders do repair and care work to generate ‘spots’ for skateboarding from assemblages of objects and surfaces intended for other purposes. Transforming spots brings otherwise mundane patches of the city to life through thousands of tiny acts of repair and care. Second, repair and care work by skateboarders is most effective when barely visible to people outside the culture. However, repaired surfaces make their way to large audiences, often millions of viewers, through skateboard photography and video, giving some of them an outsized life across time and space. Third, knowledge about techniques of repair and care are considered an important part of skate culture to be learned and shared. Protocols of care shape acceptable degrees of modification to surfaces and objects, and as skateboarding globalises so too do these protocols. Fourth, acts of repair and care have no guarantees of longevity. Hours of labour can be destroyed by direct acts to stop skateboarding and by indirect acts emanating from dynamics of urban change.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 2017
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Date: 2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2012
DOI: 10.1177/026272801203200103
Abstract: Based on fieldwork, this article examines various aspects of tribal migration from the Northeast frontier of India to Delhi, a phenomenon which increased rapidly in the last half decade or so. This offers insights into four important interlinked processes. First, such migration indicates significant changes taking place in the Northeast itself. While many migrants leave the region to escape conflict, many more simply seek to find work, pursue education and fulfil changing aspirations. Second, tribal migration to Delhi reveals the ways in which the city itself has been changing. While tribal migrants search out employment opportunities in neoliberal capitalist spaces, employers in such spaces have specific reasons to desire tribal labour, particularly in shopping malls and call centres. Third, tribal migrants encounter racism and discrimination in Delhi and their experiences reveal how racial issues function and are debated today within India. Fourth, tribal migrants themselves embody the dramatic discord between the ways tribals see themselves and the ways they are perceived in India.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2007
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 22-12-2020
DOI: 10.1111/AREA.12602
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2020
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 22-03-2021
Publisher: New York University Press
Date: 31-12-2020
Publisher: Humanities Commons
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.17613/M6DM5Z
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2013
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 14-01-2022
DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X2000027X
Abstract: This article focuses on cross-border medical connections between Myanmar and Manipur, India. Non-state actors have been instrumental in creating the networks to bring bodies and body parts back and forth, first bypassing, then enmeshing, state actors. I focus on the movement of patients and medical s les across the border—from western Myanmar to Imphal city and back again—and the health infrastructure that enables it. Analysing these connections makes several contributions to the study of border governance. First, movement from Myanmar to Manipur is primarily for treatment or diagnosis, and these connections project particular ways of thinking about each place—western Myanmar as poor and remote, Manipur as advanced and networked. Second, both Manipur and western Myanmar can be considered in ‘transition’—as territories being recalibrated by political dynamics emanating elsewhere yet becoming connected through shared needs. Third, patients and s les move through territories controlled by paramilitary forces, underground groups, and different tribal councils. Routes are sometimes blocked or passage treacherous, testing the limits of conventional notions of bilateral border governance. Finally, cross-border medical connections between Manipur and Myanmar draw attention to the risky cross-border medical mobility of the poor. Rather than seeking to minimize cost, patients utilize Manipur's health infrastructure out of necessity, providing insights into the contours of cross-border medical care in times of transition.
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Date: 23-11-2011
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2013
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 08-11-2007
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 23-05-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2014
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-04-2017
DOI: 10.1111/GEOJ.12209
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-10-2018
DOI: 10.1111/DECH.12450
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2006
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2008
DOI: 10.1177/097317410800300201
Abstract: Although scholarly interest in Northeast India is growing there is still relatively little discussion of the high levels of poverty in the region and the failures of development. When mentioned they are viewed instrumentally as causes and/or symptoms of ongoing insurgency and counter-insurgency. However this does not fully explain how a region that receives an extraordinarily large amount of development funding from the Indian Government, has its own development ministry, has some of India’s highest human development indicators, and has an array of institutional layers assuring autonomy and decentralisation has poverty levels well above the Indian national average. Using the state of Meghalaya, this article examines the factors underpinning the development agenda in the region and the political space for contesting this agenda. The argument presented is three-fold the regional development agenda is underpinned by national security imperatives which characterise relations between the various levels of governance ensuring minimal deviation, contestation of the development agenda is limited by national security from above and ethno-nationalism from below narrowing the political space for negotiating development alternatives, and this situation is the result of material and ideational factors embedding development in the politics of state-formation and ethnic identity.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-06-2014
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2016
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 20-12-2015
Publisher: Humanities Commons
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.17613/M66382
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-01-2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 30-06-2019
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Date: 2021
DOI: 10.5117/9789463726238_CH07
Abstract: Imphal, the capital city of Manipur, was one of 100 cities awarded bids in India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM). The extension of the SCM to the borderland is an extension of zone-logic, enrolling the recalcitrant frontier into economic networks that cross India. Through a reading of Imphal’s smart city bid and implementation strategy, this chapter makes three main arguments. First, unlike zone-making projects in other parts of Asia where local elites, brokers, and/or local governments doggedly pursue the granting of zones, the extension of the SCM to Imphal has been driven more by obligation than desire. Second, the idea of an “open city” is counter to the lived reality of surveillance, checkpoints, and limits on mobility and assembly that characterise life in the city. Third, Imphal’s meagre bid and lack of preparedness is barely relevant to the smart city award, as the geopolitical imperatives outweigh all other factors.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-08-2009
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 29-05-2023
Abstract: This article explores the centrality of China’s cities to skate video the most popular form for capturing, circulating, and consuming skateboarding. China’s urban growth produces endless spots to skate a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding maneuvers (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industry. After skateboarding left the skatepark for the streets in the 1990s, and once video became easier to circulate digitally through streaming platforms in the mid-2000s, the search for spots to perform and capture unsanctioned street skateboarding spread to China’s urban landscapes, beginning with Shenzhen. China’s cities are sites of global desire among skateboarders for the perfect surfaces and obstacles created in the built environment and the speed at which they are produced. Using skate video as an archive I make four arguments. First, China’s cities imputed with a mythical character endless spots produced with miraculous speed. Second, skate videos re-map China’s cities through the skater’s gaze, a form of urban knowledge both unique and widely shared. Third, the search for spots indexes urban development in China, privileging the recent and shunning the past. Fourth, skateboarding in China’s cities create spaces for inter-cultural encounter between skateboarders and authority, the public and other skateboarders. The article concludes by discussing the utility of skate video as an alternative visual archive of urban China for foreign audiences and increasingly for skate communities in China itself.
Publisher: Humanities Commons
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.17613/M6XM47
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-08-2009
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-02-2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 17-09-2017
Publisher: Queen's University Library
Date: 05-09-2022
Abstract: Skate-stoppers are ubiquitous objects installed on outdoor surfaces in built environments all over the world. Skate-stoppers are an essential part of low-tech security of urban surfaces at a micro-scale—a single bench, handrail, or ledge—with the sole-purpose of protecting these surfaces from skateboarders. As such skate-stoppers are an extension of human and electronic surveillance systems, though in many patches of the urban landscape, skate-stoppers are a low-cost substitute for more sophisticated technologies. This interplay of control and liberation draws attention to surfaces in urban space and specific tactics adopted to secure and protect them through surveillance. In this article, we explore the criticality of skate-stoppers and tactics for removing them to advance the study of surveillance of small spaces. We argue that skate-stoppers are aggressive attempts to control urban space by interrupting the flow of bodies and boards along particular surfaces, namely the “spots” desired by skateboarders. Second, we argue that the installation of skate-stoppers has shifted from reaction to anticipation of skateboarders, and new construction projects now come with skate-stoppers already installed as part of surveillance infrastructure. Third, we argue that skateboarders have become adept at liberating spots from skate-stoppers, restoring flow to surfaces through both organised activism and covert acts, underscoring the limitations of surveillance using objects. We conclude with some thoughts on the disjuncture between the embrace of creative cities and the proliferation of skate-stoppers, suggesting creative play and its desired affective properties are regulated by the control of surfaces in the same spaces.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2011
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-10-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 22-02-2023
Abstract: Post-Soviet cities vary dramatically yet share common elements desired by skateboarders and filmers as ‘spots’ assemblages of objects, obstacles and surfaces offering the chance to perform difficult skateboard tricks in public space. Memoryscapes are desired as spots for their scale, smooth surfaces, in-built obstacles and aesthetic appeal on video. As more skateboarders travel to post-Soviet cities in Central Asia and the Caucuses, their reinterpretation of memoryscapes reveal the ludic lives of memoryscapes, the interplay between memory and place, and the tension between hegemonic memory practices of state and state-like agents and the seemingly apolitical reinterpretation by skaters. This article explores two contrasting post-Soviet memoryscapes as seen on skate video, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and Sukhumi (Abkhazia) to make three arguments. First, while battles are fought over public memory online and offline, skaters approach the landscape as ludic space as playgrounds for unsanctioned performance, capture and circulation. Second, these memoryscapes are enrolled in global circulations of skate culture, giving memoryscapes an adjacent existence online detached from their intended meanings and counter-meanings. Third, in some cases the friction between ludic approaches and the power of memory unravels the singular focus on spots, even for skaters with limited knowledge of the context.
No related grants have been discovered for Duncan McDuie-Ra.