Radical Imaginaries of Life Beyond 'Growth'

Antje Linkenbach, anthropologist and sociologist, is long-term Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany.Vidhu Verma, political scientist, is currently Professor, Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

“With her characteristic brilliance and perspicacity, Mary E. John makes a signal contribution to feminist scholarship in this book. Her genealogy of child marriage draws upon historical, comparative, and intersecting analytical frameworks. This deep and nuanced contextualization compels us to consider afresh what we had long assumed we knew about a familiar subject. Her argument about "compulsory marriage," which she introduces to reframe the discussion of child marriage, offers an important conceptual advance that will likely become a valuable new resource in the feminist toolkit. This is one of the most original and exciting feminist interventions to come along in a while.” — Mrinalini Sinha, Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA“This elegantly incisive book by Mary E. John, one of India’s leading feminist scholars, challenges us to interrogate some of the myths of reason and progress that we complacently live by. Her object of study is public discourse and social policy on the issue of child marriage, a ‘social problem’ which, for close on two centuries, has been an object of attention by Indian social reformers, women’s movement activists, and latterly, in a global context, by international development agencies. In a tour de force, John decodes the intricacies of various data sets and the assumptions that drive them, to suggest that it is not child-marriage that is the problem for Indian women, but rather the ‘compulsory’ nature of marriage itself which must be the frame of reference for genuine change.” — Patricia Uberoi, Retired Professor, Institute of Economic Growth & Chairperson, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi, India

• Thinking and Acting Beyond Growth - A Kaleidoscope of Trajectories: Introduction Section A Growth and its Critique Section Introduction 1. The Growth Mystique, and the Convenient Silences of Theory 2. Better Living without Growth: Assessing the Degrowth Criticism of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Green New Deal Section B (De-)Growth from a Decolonial Perspective Section Introduction 3. Degrowth in an African Periphery: Centring the Victims of Capitalocene and the Pluriversal Pathway Forward 4.Capital and the Global South Section C Life beyond Growth: A Radical Holistic Imaginary Subsection C.1: Substantive Economics or Economics of Permanence Subsection Introduction 5. Elements of an Indian Theory of ‘Degrowth’: Revisiting South Asian Roots of Substantive Economics 6.Towards a Village-centered Post-growth Economy in India: Institutional Changes for Sustainability Subsection C.2: Agroecology. Solidarity Economy, Approaches to Food Sovereignty Subsection Introduction 7. Agroecology: Transforming Food Systems in Latin America 8. Alternative Development, Social and Solidarity Economy, and Resignifications in the Post-COVID-19 World: A Reflection Based on Family-farming Cooperatives in Brazil Subsection C.3: Appropriate Knowledges, Technologies and Education Subsection Introduction 9. and the Postgrowth Possibilities of a Tendrel Logic of Intervention in Bhutan 10. Appropriate Technology, Traditional Cultures and Degrowth 11. Unlearning Growth: Alternative Education for a Post-Growth World Subsection C.4: ‘Living Well’ in a Pluriversal World Subsection Introduction 12. Relational Subjectivities in a Post-Growth Society: Decolonizing the Monological Self 13. In Search of Alternatives to Development: Learning from Grounded Initiatives