Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Startup Futures: Entrepreneurs, Investors And Imaginaries Of Care In Global India, Ipshita Ghosh

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines the emerging cultures of venture capital-driven, technology-infused startups in India and the multiple ways in which they shape the nation's entrepreneurship landscape. Based on findings drawn from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Delhi's startups, I argue that entrepreneurship serves as a cultural and ideological formation that creates a new regime of values and reshapes our social, political, and civil life. In this sense, I suggest that previous studies on entrepreneurship which focus purely on its economic impacts (or lack thereof) tend to undervalue the long-lasting cultural transformations created through it. One of the primary ways in …

Three Essays On Demand-Side Health Policies In India, Raghav Puri

Dissertations - ALL

Demand-side health policies, such as conditional cash transfers and public health insurance, aim to increase the utilization of healthcare services by providing financial incentives and higher purchasing power to under-served populations. With their increasing popularity in developing countries, there is a need for more research on their implementation and impact. In this dissertation, I examine demand-side health policies in India by evaluating the impact of these policies, identifying challenges in their implementation and proposing ways to improve their effectiveness in increasing utilization of healthcare services.

In the first chapter, I measure the impact of conditional cash transfers on health-seeking behaviors. …

Tailor Made In India: Jaipur's Masters Of Cloth, Doctors Of Clothing, Alisa Weinstein

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is about Jaipur’s tailors, making custom-crafted clothing for individual customers in a rapidly changing and globally fashion-informed India. Indian-crafted clothing and textiles are a source of pride domestically and have long been used and admired throughout the world. So how is that India’s tailors, the people whose knowledge, abilities, and hard work form the backbone of this industry, receive so little thought or recognition? Although tailors are a seemingly well-respected and integral part of shaping Jaipur’s cultural landscape, my inquiries often revealed that tailors and their labor are popularly characterized as mundane. While considerable attention gets paid to …

Starved For Information: The Conflict Between Mobilizing Hunger Strikes And Distracting Media Frames, Alicia Wright

Theses - ALL

This study considers the newspaper coverage of Irom Sharmila's on-going, 13-year hunger strike in India to question how information from the media plays a role in generation of social movement conflict. With specific attention paid to the cultural context and method of protest, the study applies theories of conflict, social movement planning, and framing to examine whether the hunger strike elicits coverage that includes salient frames generated by the movement. Such coverage could signify a potential shift in the protest paradigm applied to English-language newspapers in India. Through a quantitative content analysis, articles pertaining to Irom Sharmila's hunger strike against …

India’S Digital Diaspora Diplomacy: Operationalizing Collaborative Public Diplomacy Strategies For Social Media, Bhattiprolu Murti, R.S. Zaharna

Exchange: The Journal of Public Diplomacy

This study examines how India uses digital media to connect with its diaspora as part of its diaspora diplomacy. In order to analyze the strategy and its effectiveness, the study operationalized Cowan and Arsenault’s (2008) theoretical framework of three layers of public diplomacy – monologue, dialogue and collaboration – by identifying corresponding layers of social media components. The study draws a more distinctive line between dialogue and collaboration in digital strategies: dialogic entail relationship-building and knowledge sharing, while collaboration creates ownership, relationship transformation and knowledge creation. This analytical lens was then applied specifically to assess the website of Overseas Indian …

A Subcontinent's Sunni Schism: The Deobandi-Barelvi Rivalry And The Creation Of Modern South Asia, William Kesler Jackson

History - Dissertations

This work presents the first-ever history of the 150-year religio-political rivalry between the Deobandis and the Barelvis--arguably the most important schism in the "Muslim world," and certainly the most significant within Sunni Islam. More recently, that rivalry has often been expressed by means of bullets and bombs, especially in Pakistan. But beyond the headline-grabbing violence of the Deobandi-Barelvi schism lies the story of a century-and-a-half-long religious antagonism: at first over converts, later for competing visions of the political future, then for a place within a new "Islamic" polity--for dominance within its political structure. For Deobandis, the rivalry was defined by …

The Effects Of Infrastructure Development And Taxation On Current And Future Earnings, Mukta Mukherjee

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of three essays, each of which studies a policy in India that provides a unique circumstance affecting directly or indirectly earnings. The purpose of this work is to analyze how taxation and infrastructure development aspects the current and future earnings using these policies

In the first essay, I use a national infrastructure development program initiated in India in 2001 to construct new all-season roads (roads that can be used in all-weather especially monsoons) in villages that previously had only had dry-season roads (roads that are difficult to use in monsoons). In the second, I use …

Medvedev Vs. Putin In Kremlin-Sponsored Advertorials In The U.S. And India, Evhenia Viatchaninova

Exchange: The Journal of Public Diplomacy

This essay explores the image making of Vladimir Putin vs. Dmitri Medvedev in the Kremlin-sponsored advertorials the "Russia Now" and the "Russia India Report" circulated as free supplements to The Washington Post, and The Times of India, India, in 2011. Advertorial content mentioning each politician was analyzed using basic qualitative and quantitative techniques, and several image making messages highlighting Putin's vs. Medvedev's leadership were deduced. Both advertorials served as a platform for mediated public diplomacy aimed at influencing foreign publics' perceptions of Russia's leadership in the wake of a major presidential election.

Contests As A Tool Of Public Diplomacy: The “India Is…” Global Video Contest, Navdeep Suri

Exchange: The Journal of Public Diplomacy

There is a growing recognition amongst public diplomacy practitioners for the need to reach young people. In large parts of the developing world - in Africa, in South and Southeast Asia, in the Caribbean and elsewhere - persons below the age of thirty-five constitute approximately seventy percent of the population. Among them, the educated, urbanized youth are growing up in an era in which connectivity and information on the go are taken for granted. India or Indonesia, Nigeria or Nicaragua, the phenomenon is rapidly gathering momentum.

How do we engage with this new generation? How do we encourage them to …

Laubach In India: 1935 To 1970, S. Y. Shah

The Courier

Dr. Frank C. Laubach, missionary and adult educator, dedicated his life to the cause of literacy for development and world peace. During his travels to 103 countries, he worked toward helping some 60 to 100 million people become literate. In addition, he founded or helped found four literacy organizations, including Laubach Literacy International; wrote forty books on adult education, Christian religion, world politics, and culture; and co-authored literacy primers in more than 300 languages. He was awarded four honorary doctorates—one of them from Syracuse University.

Although Laubach worked in many other countries, it is said that his heart was always …