Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone

Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone PDF Author: Sandya Hewamanne
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202252
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent time in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. "They were poor women from rural areas," Hewamanne writes, "who migrated to do garment work in transnational factories of a global assembly line. Their difficult work routines and sad living conditions have been examined in detail. When I was with them I often wondered whether anyone noticed the smiles, winks, smirks, gestures, tones of voice, the movies they saw, or the songs they sang." Hewamanne deftly weaves theories of identity, globalization, and cultural politics throughout her detailed accounts of the workers' efforts to negotiate ever shifting roles and expectations of gender, class, and sexuality. By analyzing how these workers claim political subjectivity, Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone challenges conventional notions about women at the bottom of the global economy. The book offers a fascinating journey through the vibrant subaltern universe of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, from the FTZ factory shop floor to boarding houses, from urban movie theaters to temples and beaches and back to their native rural villages. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone captures the spirit with which women confront power and violence through everyday poetics and politics, exploring how female workers construct themselves as different while investigating this difference as the space where deep anxieties and ambivalences over notions of nation, modernity, and globalization get played out.

Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone

Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone PDF Author: Sandya Hewamanne
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202252
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent time in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. "They were poor women from rural areas," Hewamanne writes, "who migrated to do garment work in transnational factories of a global assembly line. Their difficult work routines and sad living conditions have been examined in detail. When I was with them I often wondered whether anyone noticed the smiles, winks, smirks, gestures, tones of voice, the movies they saw, or the songs they sang." Hewamanne deftly weaves theories of identity, globalization, and cultural politics throughout her detailed accounts of the workers' efforts to negotiate ever shifting roles and expectations of gender, class, and sexuality. By analyzing how these workers claim political subjectivity, Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone challenges conventional notions about women at the bottom of the global economy. The book offers a fascinating journey through the vibrant subaltern universe of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, from the FTZ factory shop floor to boarding houses, from urban movie theaters to temples and beaches and back to their native rural villages. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone captures the spirit with which women confront power and violence through everyday poetics and politics, exploring how female workers construct themselves as different while investigating this difference as the space where deep anxieties and ambivalences over notions of nation, modernity, and globalization get played out.

Discourse Analysis as a Tool for Understanding Gender Identity, Representation, and Equality

Discourse Analysis as a Tool for Understanding Gender Identity, Representation, and Equality PDF Author: Mahtab, Nazmunnessa
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522502262
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Today, gender and gender identity is at the forefront of discussion as the plight of women around the world and issues of gender equality and human rights have become an international concern for politicians, government agencies, social activists, and the general public. Discourse Analysis as a Tool for Understanding Gender Identity, Representation, and Equality provides a thorough analysis of what language use and linguistic expression can teach us about gender identity in addition to current discussions on topics related to women’s rights and gender inequality. Focusing on issues related to women in developing countries, workplace inequalities, and social freedom, this publication is an essential reference source for researchers, graduate-level students, and theorists in the fields of sociology, women’s studies, economics, and government.

Sri Lanka's Global Factory Workers

Sri Lanka's Global Factory Workers PDF Author: Sandya Hewamanne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134850948
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
In Sri Lanka, the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) employs thousands of unmarried rural women, and their migration has aroused deep anxieties over female morality and ideal conduct. This book focuses on the global factory workers based in the FTZ, and analyzes intersections of gender, class and sexuality by looking at the sexual lives and struggles of the female workers. Exploring the alternative sexual world created by Sri Lanka’s female global factory workers who engage in practices—such as premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, and, to a lesser extent, lesbianism—that mainstream Sinhalese Buddhist culture considers taboo, the author demonstrates that the articulations of good and bad women in relation to sexual behavior has rendered global workers’ sexual lives "unutterable," leading to zones of silence, contradictory articulations and performances. Taking the reader into the forbidden zones of sexual discourses, choices, acts, and texts enacted and expressed in visible arenas yet remain unseen, unread or misread by onlookers, the book critically investigate how cultural, economic and political processes are implicated in the construction and expression of working class female sexualities. An important contribution to the field of gender studies, the book addresses issues surrounding sexuality, particularly how it is shaped by global production networks as well as patriarchal nationalist projects. It is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies and Gender Studies.

Garments without Guilt?

Garments without Guilt? PDF Author: Kanchana N. Ruwanpura
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009032313
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Sri Lanka's apparel sector holds an enviable place in the imaginary of its competitors for having a niche position amongst global retailers, given its claims of producing 'garments without guilt'. Exploitative labour conditions are not part of the industry's portfolio – ethicality, eco-friendly production and unblemished conditions of work are. Sri Lanka's transition away from a protracted ethnic war has meant that the industry portrays itself as investing in the former war zone to create jobs without reflection on how its vaunted mantle, the deployment of ethical codes effectively, themselves may be under duress. This book uses an analytical framing informed by labour and feminist perspectives to explore how labour struggles in the post-1977 period in Sri Lanka provided important resistance to capitalist processes and continue to shape the industry both within and outside of the shop floor. It studies contextual moments in the country's recent history to rupture the dominant narrative and record the centrality of labour in the success of the country's apparel industry.

Social Capital and Peace-Building

Social Capital and Peace-Building PDF Author: Michaelene Cox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135971129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This new edited collection illustrates the paradoxical power of social capital in creating and resolving conflict. This is the first book to bring the two faces of social capital together in a single volume, and includes previously unpublished case studies, statistical analyses, and theoretical essays. The book is divided into three sections. The first investigates the role of social capital in inciting and/or furthering violence; the second examines the contributions of social capital to peace building; the third explores the complexities and ambiguities of roles social capital may play in peace and conflict. Policy implications and recommendations are included in many of the discussions in the chapters. The volume tackles some key issues, such as: to what extent is social capital related to peace and conflict? What forms does social capital take in these associations, and how can the relationships be explained? What impact does this have on the state and/or state relations, and what policy prescriptions might be made in light of the link drawn between social capital and peace/conflict? .

The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations

The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations PDF Author: Alison Pullen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136746242
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations synthesizes and extends existing research on ethics in organizations by explicitly focusing on ‘ethico-politics’ - where ethics informs political action. It draws connections between ethics and politics in and around organizations and the workplace, examines cutting-edge areas and sets the scene for future research. Through a wealth of international and multidisciplinary contributions this volume considers the broad range of ways in which ethics and politics can be conceived and understood. The chapters look at various ethical traditions, as well as the discursive deployment of ethical terminology in organizational settings, and they also examine large scale political structures and processes and how they relate to different forms of politics which affect behaviour in organizations. These many possibilities are united by a focus on how ethics can be used to inform and justify the exercise of power in organizations. This collection will be a valuable reference source for students and researchers across the disciplines of organizational studies, ethics and politics.

Styling South Asian Youth Cultures

Styling South Asian Youth Cultures PDF Author: Lipi Begum
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838609180
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
For South Asia, fashion and consumption have come to play an increasingly important role in the lives of young people and in the formation of youth cultures. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all, in related and distinctive ways, been producing confident young fashion consumers, who are proving to be an important market for fashion.This book explores South Asian youth cultures and fashion across the countries of this region and their diasporas from a transnational perspective. Through visual and textual analysis of film, photography and digital cultures, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, the expert contributors look at how gender, sexuality, class, the media and faith intersect with and style youth cultures. By establishing the heterogeneous nature of South Asia and its youth cultures, they also dismantle grand western narratives that tend to understand the region's diverse cultural modernity through the lens of homogeneity.

The Political Economy of Post-COVID Life and Work in the Global South: Pandemic and Precarity

The Political Economy of Post-COVID Life and Work in the Global South: Pandemic and Precarity PDF Author: Sandya Hewamanne
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030932281
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This edited volume highlights cascading effects of the pandemic and lockdown on informal economies of varied countries in the Global South. Uneven development after colonization, imperialism, and externally influenced conflict have caused many countries in the formally colonized or semi-occupied countries in the world to lag behind in wealth accumulation, investments in manufacturing, and technology. The fact that these countries were dragged into world market dynamics on an equal footing with already developed countries exacerbated these inequalities and saw the rapid burgeoning of informal economies. COVID-19 and the lockdown of western countries unravelled global production chains, resulting in hordes of workers in the Global South losing their livelihoods. Even people engaged in traditionally locally-bound economic activities, such as domestic work and sex work, found their livelihoods disappear. This volume brings together case studies from India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to analyze global economic disruptions as they affected informal sector workers who were already largely invisible within state development policies. The chapters question whether existing models of neoliberal development are still conducive within the post-pandemic Global South as it grapples with rebuilding economies, livelihoods, institutions, and systems of governance.

Handbook of Research on Women's Issues and Rights in the Developing World

Handbook of Research on Women's Issues and Rights in the Developing World PDF Author: Mahtab, Nazmunnessa
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522530193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Equal rights for women are an essential aspect for establishing strong societies. By making strides on these issues, nations are helping to create valuable civilizations for their own population to establish livelihoods in. The Handbook of Research on Women's Issues and Rights in the Developing World is a pivotal scholarly resource that discusses the current issues facing women’s rights in developing nations, as well as suggestions for improvements on these problems. Featuring in-depth discussions on relevant topics such as working-class women, gender theories, and international migration, this publication is an ideal resource for academicians, students, and researchers that are interested in learning more about the current challenges to the women’s rights movement, and how to best combat them.

Tea and Solidarity

Tea and Solidarity PDF Author: Mythri Jegathesan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295745665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Beyond nostalgic tea industry ads romanticizing colonial Ceylon and the impoverished conditions that beleaguer Tamil tea workers are the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their families and lives in line houses on tea plantations since the nineteenth century. The tea industry’s economic crisis and Sri Lanka's twenty-six year long civil war have ushered in changes to life and work on the plantations, where family members now migrate from plucking tea to performing domestic work in the capital city of Colombo or farther afield in the Middle East. Using feminist ethnographic methods in research that spans the transitional time between 2008 and 2017, Mythri Jegathesan presents the lived experience of these women and men working in agricultural, migrant, and intimate labor sectors. In Tea and Solidarity, Jegathesan seeks to expand anthropological understandings of dispossession, drawing attention to the political significance of gender as a key feature in investment and place making in Sri Lanka specifically, and South Asia more broadly. This vivid and engaging ethnography sheds light on an otherwise marginalized and often invisible minority whose labor and collective heritage of dispossession as “coolies” in colonial Ceylon are central to Sri Lanka’s global recognition, economic growth, and history as a postcolonial nation.