Governing Population - The Integrated Child Development Services Program In India- Akhil Gupta
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Facts:
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ICDS: response to India’s high infant mortality, morbidity and malnutrition. Goal: nutrition and education for the poor, children under 6; nutrition n health for pregnant women.
Organization: 1 block = 1 project = 100 villages = 86 Angawadi workers+ 86 helpers
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Issues
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Produces new subjects n new resistance
Governmentality through the ICDS program - Enumeration, surveillance, monitoring
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Summary
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SHORT summary of Akhil Gupta’s Ethnography on the Integrated Child Development Services Program in India
She first gave us an introduction to the ICDS program, the reasons for its creation as well as the structure. One of the main reason is that it is intended to control india’s population growth. A secondary reason is to act as an instrument for collecting data on one of India’s most poorly researched segment: women and children. In doing so, the ICDS creates new subjects and modes of resistance - bureaucrats, anganwadi workers, and the women and children targeted by the program.
Gupta then takes us through the concept of governmentality, claiming that the ICDS is one of the best examples of governmentality, for it is not only about discipline and regulation, but about the ways in which behaviours of social agents are reinforced.
She details how children has been painted as assets, with the synergies the ICDS plays with other developmental projects such as the “Wheat-based” program linked to the Food Corporation of India. The recruitment of Anganwadi from villages themselves.
There is a heavy element of surveillance involved in ICDS, which creates new subjectivities mentioned above. Stories of inspection trips with a CDPO Asha was accounted, detailing her various difficulties in making sure the ICDS are actually staffed, as well as her reluctance/difficulties in firing. This went on for many pages.
In the section called state mechanism, a number game, it was highlighted how record keeping is made, in class Indian bureaucratic manner, as an end in itself. Enumeration as a critical modality of governmentality. It is mentioned that for the first time in history, detailed records on women and children in rural areas has been made; although there are limitations. Some refuse to corporate. Second, it is unsure if the data is processed.
Resistance is partially constructed in terms of anganwadi workers “reimagining” their roles as teachers, or else qualitatively from housework. Semiotic struggle about the meaning of their work. Oka.
Finally, Thomas Blum Hansen summarized Akhil Gupta’s ethnography as showing how “ostensibly technocratic schemes have profoundly political effects. Gupta shows how the program problemtizes gender inequality as a developmental problem, and how the official depiction of increased independence of women as a possible source of development and economic gain slowly encroaches on older discourses on gender”. This summary betrays his lack of knowledge with the ethnography - indeed, has he not read the entire thing? Arguably, Gupta’s main point is on governmentality. She obviously sees the ICDS as a brilliant example of how the conduct of the population is controlled, how it creates new subjectivities, how attempts at surveillance and monitoring infiltrates at different levels of bureaucracies…
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ANC’s Bid to Reform the South African State - Steffen Jensen
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Facts:
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Casts a critical glance at ANC’s attempts at changing post-apartheid South Africa, claiming that not only is it not doing enough, it constantly engages in various strategies to affirm the population that change has occurred - for instance in recycling the the past as metaphors of the struggle and other “state spectacles” which affirms the party’s historic mission
Steffen Jensen also criticises how ANC lacks the vocabulary to talk about the truly fragmented nature of South African society.
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Issues
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States in Transition
Changing Ideological State apparatus
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No
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Imagining the State as a space: Territoriality and the Formation of the State in Ecuador - Sarah Radcliffe
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Facts:
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Sarah Radcliffe takes us through 4 main periods where the “state” has been geographically constructed. The first period spans from 1860-1875. Here, she cites attempts at scientifically mapping the country. Even though there were attempts at consolidating statehood (e.g. In national currencies and anthems), they were “largely meaningless to the population. The second period is the period of modernisation, spanning from 1930s to 1940s. Further state concretisation is firmly rooted in cold-war historical analysis, which I did not read much into, for it presumes some knowledge of the history of Ecuador.
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Issues
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Spatial formation of state
Nation building as profoundly spatial project
Cartography, inventory, census data, physical integration via currency, transport, education - as tools of the state to confirm its power over - and knowledge of - its subjects
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Ratio:
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Questions
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