Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

561

Reimagining Human Rights in India

RC48 Social Movements, Collective Actions and Social Change (host committee)

Language: English

This session explores how people living in India reimagine and negotiate concepts of human rights by focusing on their everyday practices. As some scholars working on formations of human rights concepts in western countries have clarified, rights can be meaningful only after people come to take care of others’ rights. There are sufficient numbers of analyses of the legal system itself or detailed case studies about situations around human rights. 
In the context of India, these previous studies have paid little attention to processes of how the human rights have been “invented”. It is important to explore realms where people have unique experiences which arose at the contact zone between the “universal” modern legal system and local contexts in order to understand dynamics of social changes in contemporary India.
How do minorities living in India such as refugees reimagine or seek for such rights based on human rights as citizenship in contexts of everyday lives? How do socially, linguistically or economically marginalized groups challenge existing policies and demand an equal share in state resources? Why and how, in the Right to Information movements in India in the 1990s, the notion of the right to information has been considered primarily as a matter of a right to life rather than a matter of freedom of expression? These themes would also examine the plausibility of “inclusive development” in Indian society. Submissions are welcome to offer diverse approaches and, most importantly, researches based on intensive fieldworks. Posters: