India And The United States Research Articles

Utopie postcoloniali: Small Island di Andrea Levy

Postcolonial utopia is a notion only recently explored, connecting the original meaning of utopia as a literary genre concerned with hope for a better world to contemporary postimperial conditions. This article reads Andrea Levy’s successful novel Small Island (2004) as a postcolonial utopia. The interaction of stories Small Island develops mirrors the rise of postwar multiracial and multicultural Britain. Levy’s work conveys a counternarrative reshaping the relationships between colonizers and colonized, black and white subjectivities in the context of Caribbean migrations to the United Kingdom, and, ultimately, reconfigures Britain’s hybrid identity itself. The plot oscillates between 1924 and 1948 and moves across multiple geographical locations: London, rural England, Jamaica, India and the United States. Small Island follows the interwoven stories of Gilbert Joseph, a black Jamaican who joins the RAF during the Second World War and in 1948 arrives in London as an immigrant aboard the Windrush, Hortense Roberts, his Jamaican wife, Queenie Bligh, their white landlady, and Bernard, Queenie’s English husband. The first-person narratives of the four protagonists overlap and intersect; Queenie’s house in Nevern Street, a space shared by the migrants and the English, becomes the point of convergence of multiple, interrelated experiences and, finally, the place of the conception and birth of a mixed-race baby. Queenie’s lodgings represent the re-conceptualization of the British nation as a whole as a utopian site. The “happy ending” suggesting the centrality of a hybrid family structure thanks to a deep solidarity between whites and blacks seems to overcome racial discrimination and cultural and emotional dislocation, and to create a new rhetoric of national belonging

Theory of Professional Competence in Teaching of Mathematics: Development and Explication through Cross-cultural Examination of Teaching Practices in India and the United States

This paper describes the theory of professional competence in teaching of mathematics developed through a cross-cultural examination of teaching practices of mathematics teachers recommended as competent by their principals in two selected high-achieving high schools of India and the United States. A detailed study of teacher cases from both of the research settings yielded a rich conceptualization of the relationship between teachers’ professional knowledge base and professional competence in the teaching of mathematics. The substantive theory explains the processes of both the development and the display of professional competence and enables predictions of the ways teachers would most likely utilize to meet the performance expectations of their work environments. The study makes a unique contribution to the field of teacher education and views professional competence as a dynamic interplay of various components of teachers’ professional knowledge base activated in actual teaching situations in the context of the classroom, school, and wider social culture.

Review Article: Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson, (ed.) Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States

Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson, (ed.) Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States, OUP, Delhi, 2012, pp. 311, ₹ 750, ISBN 0-19-807747-5.

Creating an Adaptable Workforce: Evidences from India and the United States

Creating an Adaptable Workforce: Evidences from India and the United States

Book Review: Slate, Nico, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India

Slate, Nico, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (USA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Pp. 321. Price $39.95.

Interpreting the global bio-economy

THIS BOOK IS AN INSIGHTFUL and theoretically ambitious anthropological study of the genomics and biotech industries in the United States and India. These and related science-based sectors form part of the bio-economy, a larger complex of manufacturing, service, and research and development (R&D) activities, grounded increasingly in advancements in the biological sciences. In his groundbreaking study, Kaushik Sunder Rajan seeks to explain the intersection between biological knowledge ? the new knowledge of life itself ? and the economic accumulation process in which large pharmaceutical firms are dominant actors. The most striking manifestation of the bio-economy is the emergence of thousands of small biotechnology and other science-intensive start-up firms. These populate areas close to major universities in the developed parts of the world ? in California, Massachusetts, the Cambridge region in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere ? but have emerged also in some centres in developing countries. This is described in Sunder Rajan?s empirical analysis which investigates the global evolution of the bio-economy, with a particular focus on India and California. He explains the interdependencies between giant pharmaceutical companies and small dedicated biotechnology firms, which operate in conjunction with a myriad of intermediaries, such as venture capitalist firms that provide funding for promising science and facilitate interaction between different bio-economic actors.

Cross-cultural differences towards diversity issues in attitudes of graduating social work students in India and the United States

English Attitudes of graduating social work students towards diversity issues, as well as their practice perceptions in different social work scenarios, from two contrasting cultures (India and the United States), were quanti.ed. Signi.-cant differences in both groups showed that the social climate of a country has an important impact on shaping the attitudes of students. French Cette é tude quantitative mené e aupre` s d'é tudiants diploômé s en travail social de deux cultures contrasté es (l'Inde et les Etats-Unis) porte sur leurs attitudes à l'é gard des questions de diversité et sur leurs perceptions quant à leur pratique dans diffé rents scé narios de travail social. Les diffé rences significatives entre les deux groupes expliquent que le climat social du pays a un impact important sur le dé veloppement des attitudes des é tudiants. Spanish Se cuantificaron las actitudes de los estudiantes graduados de trabajo social hacia los temas de la diversidad, asícomo la percepción de su prá ctica en diferentes escenarios del trabajo social entre dos culturas (India y los Estados Unidos). Las diferencias significativas encontradas en ambos grupos permiten explicar que el clima social del país tiene un impacto importante en la formación de las actitudes de los estudiantes.

Where Have All the Young Girls Gone? Preconception Gender Selection in India and the United States

A comparative study of the social, ethical and legal reasons why India has banned all forms of gender selection, and how those reasons apply in the context of a constitutional analysis of gender selection in the United State. India presents a unique example of the problems that can arise given unrestricted usage of gender selection. After decades of permitting gender selection, India has experienced drastic social ramifications in the form of a markedly skewed sex ratio, thus drawing international attention to their practices of selective abortion and female infanticide, the purposeful killing of unwanted female newborns. This paper also focuses on the potential effect of new technologies that allow gender selection to be performed prior to fertilization.