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Contesting Urban Citizenship: The Urban Poor’S Strategies Of State Engagement In Chennai, India, Subadevan Mahadevan, Ijlal Naqvi
Contesting Urban Citizenship: The Urban Poor’S Strategies Of State Engagement In Chennai, India, Subadevan Mahadevan, Ijlal Naqvi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Existing accounts of how the urban poor in the global south engage with the state fall short on two fronts. Firstly, the literature lacks an overarching framework articulating the urban poor’s strategies for engaging the state. Secondly, these accounts typically capture singular instances of state engagement pursued by the urban poor and theorise on that basis. Using Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil and political society as our theoretical point of departure, we draw on ethnographic evidence from Chennai’s informal settlements to demonstrate how and when the urban poor deploy different strategies of state engagement to advance their claims to urban …
No-Place, New Places: Death And Its Rituals In Urban Asia, Lily Kong
No-Place, New Places: Death And Its Rituals In Urban Asia, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In many Asian cities, particularly those that confront increasing land scarcity, the conversion from burial to cremation has been encouraged by state agencies in the last several decades. From Hong Kong to Seoul to Singapore, planning agencies have sought to reduce the use of space for the dead, in order to release land for the use of the living. More secular guiding principles regarding efficient land use in these cities had originally come up against the symbolic values invested in burial spaces, resulting in conflicts between different value systems. In more recent years, however, the shift to cremation and columbaria …