Articles by Meenakshi Thapan

Muslim women have remained invisible in the larger discourse on migration. This paper shows how Muslim women who have migrated to Jamia Nagar in Delhi are leading a more fulfilling life in their new locality, as is evident from the fact that they claim to have migrated for social security, well-being, better opportunities and higher education. Many of them are fleeing from small-town prejudices and overbearing families. However, it is also true that while Muslim women, belonging to different socio-economic backgrounds seek mobility, this is often achieved within the rubric of familial and community strategies of both migration and of living together as members of the same community in a territorial space marked out as their own. This has certain implications that both facilitate as well as impede their need for employment, safety and autonomy. Legal and policy frameworks must pay more attention to women migrants to create a gender sensitive migration policy.

Against the background of the experience of extreme and brutal violence against the Muslim community in 2002, and the rapid process of ghettoisation along religious divides in Ahmedabad, this study, based on the fieldwork in selected schools in the Muslim-dominated areas, focuses on understanding how secondary schools run by Muslim trusts seek to recover and establish identities of being Muslim through their pursuit of citizenship ideals.

Pedagogy has a crucial role in constructions of the self and the "good" or the "ideal" citizen. Civic education in schools seeks to build up notions of the good citizen, by outlining "ideal" norms of behaviour, for instance, towards parents, elders, the government, as also the nation. But the human subject is not always a passive recipient of pedagogic formulations. Rather as this article that bases itself on student responses in a test school in Delhi, establishes, students negotiate established pedagogy and received wisdom in a variety of ways. Their understanding of issues of citizenship is arrived at not merely through textbook instruction, but their reception to the very manner of this instruction that is exam-oriented, in their interactions with friends, peers and family as well as information received and interpreted through a variety of other sources. The article argues that to move beyond mere subjecthood and towards ensuring an individual's "agency" in the creation of "good" citizenship, pedagogy has to engage and debate widely with these varied sites of interaction.

Current sociological and social anthropological thinking now views the state as an object of ethnographic exploration. But can the state, a "macro subject", be explored by methods similar to that employed for the study of small-scale and bounded communities? A workshop in Delhi debated on the nature of the state as an entity that exists in and is also constantly created by society. It looked at aspects of representation and categories, through which the state seeks to define society and in turn, the latter's response to such bounded characterisation.

Pierre Bourdieu's absence will be felt in the sociology of the future and especially in the sociology of education, a discipline that he sought to establish at the centre of mainstream sociology. He repeatedly drew attention to the fact that without an adequate understanding of the processes within educational practice that shape habitus and perpetuate symbolic violence under an appearance of neutrality, we cannot fully establish a sociology of power that focuses on the dynamic of class relations.