This book testifies to a multiplicity of struggles, individual and collective, through which South Asian women, across divisions of class, community, age and religion, are seeking to take control of their lives. It looks at the role of the British state, of relentless pressures of the market, and of the politics of South Asia on shaping gender relations over the last thirty years; and discusses how South Asian masculinities have been reconfigured by multicultural policies and by politicised religion. It explores the interaction of institutionalised racism and South Asian patriarchy in the context of immigration policy, state interventions such as Forced Marriage Intiative, and psychiatry. It analyses the experiences of low-paid Asian women workers in the global market; and looks at how dominant representations of South Asian women have and have not changed.
What can you learn from over 80 Olympic athletes about Goal Setting, Planning, Attitude, Success and Fighting for your dream? Learn the secrets of success from top achievers from around the world. Foreword by Scott Hamilton.
First published in 1978, and winning the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women's lives and struggles in Britain. This new edition includes a preface by Meena Kandasamy, some historic photographs, and a remarkable new chapter by young South Asian women.
A riveting look at the real reasons Americans feel inadequate in the face of their dreams, and a call to celebrate how we support one another in the service of family and work in our daily life. Jay's days are filled with back-to-back meetings, but he always leaves work in time to pick his daughter up from swimming at 7pm, knowing he'll be back on his laptop later that night. Linda thinks wistfully of the treadmill in her garage as she finishes folding the laundry that's been in the dryer for the last week. Rebecca sits with one child in front of a packet of math homework, while three others clamor for her attention. In Dreams of the Overworked, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian offer vivid sketches of daily life for nine families, capturing what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of impossible expectations, now amplified unlike ever before by smart devices. We are invited into homes and offices, where we recognize the crushing pressure of unraveling plans, and the healing warmth of being together. Moreover, we witness the constant planning that goes into a "good" day, often with the aid of phones and apps. Yet, as technologies empower us to do more, they also promise limitless availability and connection. Checking email on the weekend, monitoring screen time, and counting steps are all part of the daily routine. The stories in this book challenge the seductive myth of the phone-clad individual, by showing that beneath the plastic veneer of technology is a complex, hidden system of support—our dreams being scaffolded by retired in-laws, friendly neighbors, spouses, and paid help. This book makes a compelling case for celebrating the structures that allow us to strive for our dreams, by supporting public policies and community organizations, challenging workplace norms, reimagining family, and valuing the joy of human connection.
If you only had three wishes that you think can change your current life dramatically, what would they be? Will you then be happy and satisfied, knowing that you can go back into your past and change your present life or even make your dreams come true? We are growing in a world that provides us with the resources and knowledge of how to make it all better. We strive to be and feel happy and fulfilled, searching outwardly for answers, not knowing that all the answers and our sought-after treasures lie and are already available to us within us. The book It Is Not a Dream to Change Your Past is an eye-opener and an exploration for all you spiritual seekers who wish to know and explore past life regression, as well as dreams and their interpretations, therapies, and benefits. This book is intended for you to give you a direction, a new point of view, tools, and a road map that will be useful for your own private life. We are going to learn together how to empower yourself to be able to change your lifethat is, with grace, harmony, and peace of mind to know how to be able to navigate our own ship to quiet waters and embrace lifes challenges with inner quietude and knowledge that, yes, you can. Join us for a great journey.
The thesis has one main focus, the purity laws of a religious group in Europe, an original piece of research never done before in the UK. The thesis uses diasporic theories of identity; theories of women and the body; theories of women, their bodies and patriarchal religion and theories of women, purity and pollution in religion, to explain why European Zoroastrian women continue to support six of the purity laws of Zoroastrianism in the year 2003. Purity and pollution are at the heart of the Zoroastrian religion and the research demonstrated that Zoroastrians belief in and knowledge of the six purity laws was strong in 2003. Zoroastrians are a diasporic religious group whose modern origins are in Iran and the sub-continent of India. They have been visiting and settling, from the sub-continent, in Europe, and especially in London, in small numbers since the middle of the nineteenth century. There have been three quantitative surveys of the Zoroastrian community in Europe, in 1976, 1985 and 2003, with each survey building on the last one. Thus, the analytical, quantitative research leading up to the thesis covers a period of nearly 30 years. In the 2003 survey, new questions, never posed before in academic research, were asked about six of the Zoroastrian purity laws, which yielded data for the main focus of the thesis. The women support the six purity laws more than the men and the majority of both women and men affirmed four of the purity laws and rejected two of them. The conclusion of the thesis is that the six Zoroastrian purity laws examined in this research are used in the creation of a hybrid, immanent and liminal religious identity and in some cases ethnic identity, by the women of the European Zoroastrian community; purity laws are known about and matter to these women in Europe in 2003.
In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at such matters and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of local, multi-local and trans-local dynamics is explored through a devolved and regionally-accented comparison of five British Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham. Analysing the ‘writing’ of these differently configured cities since the 1960s, its main focus is the significant discrepancies in representation between differently-positioned texts reflecting both dominant institutional discourses and everyday lived experiences of a locality. Part I offers a comprehensive, yet still highly contested, reading of each city’s archives. Part II examines how the arts and humanities fields of History, Religion, Gender and Literary/Cultural Studies have all written British Asian diasporas, and how their perspectives might complement the better-established agendas of the social sciences. Providing an innovative analysis of South Asian communities and their multi-local identities in Britain today, this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Migration, Ethnic and Diaspora Studies, as well as Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography.
Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination, and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. In Eastern Europe, where states often tried to control music, the hundreds of thousands of Estonians who gathered in Tallinn between 1987 and 1991 are a part of the "singing revolutions" that encouraged a sense of national consciousness, which had years earlier been crushed when Soviet policy declared Baltic folk music dead and ordered its replacement with mass song. Examples of this nature, where music has the power to enlighten, to mobilize, and perhaps even to change, suggest that popular music's response to issues of human rights has and will continue to be profound and sustained. This is the second volume published by Ashgate on popular music and human rights (the first volume covered British and American music). Contributors to this significant volume cover topics such as Movimento 77, Nepal's heavy metal scene, music and memory in Mozambique and Swaziland, hybrid metal in the muslim world, folksong in Latvia, popular music in the former Yugoslavia, indigenous human rights in Australia, Víctor Jara, protest and gender in Ireland, rock and roll in China, and the anti-rock campaigns and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
Literature on sex, intimacy and sexuality in later life has been heavily influenced by perspectives from more affluent regions, perpetuating the belief that the West is more sexually progressive and liberal than other cultures. This book challenges this belief by exploring diverse cultures and perspectives from the majority world, which are often overlooked. It highlights the importance of learning from cultures in the global South and East, dismantling stereotypes that frame them as sexually conservative or inferior. Variously drawing on structuralist, postcolonial and decolonial theory as well as social anthropology, the book critically examines binaries related to culture, age, sex and intimacy, highlighting the need to decentre Western perspectives as the benchmark while other cultures and practices are misunderstood.
