Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Moving Crops and the Scales of History
    (01-01-2023)
    Bray, Francesca
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    Hahn, Barbara
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    Saraiva, Tiago
    A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop. Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”: the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop. The cropscape is a method of reconnecting the global with the local, the longue durée with microhistory, and people, plants, and places with abstract concepts such as tastes, ideas, skills, politics, and economic forces. Through investigating a range of contrasting cropscapes spanning millennia and the globe, the authors break open traditional historical structures of period, geography, and direction to glean insight into previously invisible actors and forces.
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    Icts for rural development?: Answers from below- a microlevel study of five ictenabled villages in tamil nadu
    (01-01-2010)
    Arivanandan, M.
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    This paper explicates some of the perceptions and usage patterns concerning the rural information cen tres /kiosks and the limitations in effective implemen tation of the 'Information for Development'(14D) mantra. This has been done through an empirical study of five ICT enabled villages in the Thiruvallur district in Tamil Nadu. The findings are based on extensive interactions with various stakeholders like the kiosk operators and various sectors of the rural community. Various parameters such as gender and caste; and issues such as cost, technology choice and sustainability have been considered. The findings highlight the potentials of 04D, the expectations and attitudes at the receiving end, the challenges, limitations and suggestions for more effective implementation in future.
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    Cropscapes and history: Reflections on rootedness and mobility
    (01-06-2019)
    Bray, Francesca
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    Hahn, Barbara
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    Saraiva, Tiago
    Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of "cropscapes": the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public understanding of mobility and history.
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    India and foreign language teaching: Enhancing A2K through m-learning
    (01-01-2021) ;
    Czarzasta, Rishika
    The first chapter in this part examines the use of mobile technology in language learning. It seems appropriate to position a chapter on language learning before all the other chapters, since one can argue that language is a basis for knowledge. John Bosco Lourdusamy and Rishika Czarzasta take on the interesting concept of language learning in a foreign, non-immersive setting and study its effectiveness when information and communications technologies (ICT)-especially mobile technologies-are adopted to aid such learning. Their investigation consists of field studies on learning the French language in Chennai, a city in South India. They argue that the use of new technologies not only expands access to the knowledge of the language in question, but “also widens the horizons of the learner to knowledge in general.”.
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    Colonialism and the development of electricity: The case of madras presidency, 1900-47
    (01-01-2010)
    Rao, Srinivasa
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    Drawing from the social constructivist approach to the study of science, technology and society, this article tries to examine the role of legal, economic, political and environmental factors in determining the course of the development of electricity in the Madras Presidency under British colonial rule. Apart from these factors, the impact of historical events such as the two World Wars on the trajectories of electrification is also analysed. The combination of circumstances that influenced the development of electricity in a colonised territory was quite peculiar in many ways and significantly shaped its ultimate character.
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    Rise of Siddha medicine: causes and constructions in the Madras Presidency (1920–1930s)
    (18-01-2023)
    Kanagarathinam, D. V.
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    This essay aims to situate the emergence of Siddha medicine as a separate medical system in the erstwhile Madras Presidency of colonial India within a broader socio-economic context. Scholars who have worked on Siddha medicine have stressed more on political dimensions like nationalism and sub-nationalism with inadequate attention to the interplay of various (other) factors including contemporary global developments, changes in the attitude of the colonial State and especially to the new promises held by the greater deference shown to indigenous medical systems from the 1920s. If the construction of ‘national medicine’ based on the Sanskrit texts and the accompanying marginalisation of regional texts and practices were the only reasons for the emergence of Siddha medicine as presented by scholars, it leaves open the question as to why this emergence happened only during the third decade of the twentieth century, though the marginalisation processes started during the first decade itself. This paper seeks to find an answer by analysing the formation of Siddha medical identity beyond the frameworks of nationalism and sub-nationalism. Further, it explicates how material factors served as immediate cause along with the other, and more ideational factors related to the rise of the Dravidian political and cultural movement.
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    Purposeful learning is transformative: How experience with media production tools at a digital agricultural extension in India suggests an approach for deepening the impact of educational ICT4D projects
    (19-09-2011)
    Kizelshteyn, Boris
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    While researching Internet adoption by rural and remote communities in India we detected a disconnect between people's perception of computers and Internet access as a means to social mobility and their usefulness to them personally. We then observed an ICT4D program where a successful union between technical skill and purposeful activity was established, as gauged by the young workers reporting far more satisfaction and engagement than any others in our survey. We suggest that future efforts at bringing technology education to the bottom of the pyramid build in clear personal motivators for the students to amplify opportunities for success. © 2011 IEEE.