Paula Banerjee – författare

A sudden announcement was made by the government on 24 March 2020 of a complete lockdown of the country, due to the spectre of Coronavirus. India’s Migrant Workers and the Pandemic was being written as the crisis was unfolding with no end in sight. Migrant workers from different parts of India had no choice but to trek back hundreds of kilometres carrying their scanty belongings and dragging their hungry and thirsty children in the scorching heat of the plains of India to reach home.How did caste, race, gender, and other fault lines operate in this governmental strategy to cope with a virus epidemic?The eight papers in this collection, highlight the ethical and political implications of the epidemic—particularly for India’s migrant workers. What were the forces of power at play in this war against the epidemic? What measures could have been taken and need to be taken now?Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century autonomy has become one of the major concerns of our social and political existence. The right to autonomous life is now a political, cultural and social call of both the individual and the group – a rare conformity that points to the crucial importance of autonomy in the agenda of critical thinking. Though the notion of autonomy in the modern era was at first applied in a political context, the term was quickly taken up in the context of individual rational persons, their rights and existences. In the wake of anticolonial movements, the term gained new perspectives and meanings which would imply new rights and new responsibilities. It became the emblem of group rights, in particular minority rights. In time the idea of autonomy became not only the standard of rights and responsibilities, but also an issue of governmentality.The present volume is a critical attempt to understand autonomy from both historical and analytical perspectives. An international group of scholars seeks answers that go beyond the thinking of Immanuel Kant or a simple hermeneutic reading of the principle of autonomy. Autonomy, in this collective reading, emerges as deeply rooted in social practices and contentious politics.

The book focuses on voices of displaced women who constitute a critical part of the migration process through an unravelling of the engendered displacement.

The postcolonial compendium aims at a compilation and brief explication of key terms used in the multidisciplinary field of forced migration and refugee studies. There have been significant debates, contributions, and interpretations in recent years which have reshaped the way academia analyses and maps refugee and migration studies, at the same time, expanding its scope. Research on refugees and forced migrants has had a long history cutting across disciplines, exploring multiple dynamics such as forced and voluntary movements, displacement and dispossession, heterogeneity and agency of forced migrants, human rights, humanitarianism, protection, practice and policy. In addition, academics, policy makers and practitioners are still contending with the diverse challenges that remain in the aftermath of a global pandemic and continue to permeate the refugee and migrant space exacerbating the precarious state of public health, particularly in the global south with far reaching consequences.At this critical juncture/crossroads, migrant and refugee studies as a field of enquiry is rapidly expanding and diversifying, concomitantly, its terminology is constantly evolving to keep pace with the burgeoning discipline, which found its moorings as a separate entity in the early 1980s. With the development of refugee and forced migration studies, academic research as well as advocacy in terms of the rights of migrants and refugees have acquired a global reach which in turn has induced the emergence of a rapidly growing literature focused on the same, including handbooks devoted to the study of refugees and forced migrants from an interdisciplinary perspective. In comparison, the vocabulary or terminology of refugee and forced migration studies, which has amplified by leaps and bounds in scope and importance, has not yet found a separate, focused and comprehensive compendium dedicated to itself. The Postcolonial Compendium: Keywords in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies intends to fill this lacuna/void.

This book looks at the current crises of life and livelihood following the global epidemiological crisis and various strategies to manage them as a long unfolding of past trends and future possibilities of epidemiological governance, restructuring of global economy, public health, systems of protection and care and the role of state in that, and precarities of the migrants and the refugees. It brings together scholars from different fields to think of our present in the time of COVID-19 pandemic in a longer temporal frame. The essays compiled in this book investigate issues mentioned above, covering a period from the colonial past to the postcolonial present with an aim towards encouraging scholarly debates on protection, care and justice. Although the experiences of last two years have inspired some very important academic and scholarly interventions, this book compiles original research to contextualise the present in a longue duree framework and arrive at a more complex understanding of it. It is a must-have resource for researchers of developmental studies especially in the above mentioned areas, as well as policy makers, think tanks and other non-governmental organizations interested in these areas.