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Chapter 29 - Respiratory Disease in Pregnancy
- from Section 4 - Maternal Medicine
- Edited by Tahir Mahmood, Charles Savona Ventura, Ioannis Messinis, Sambit Mukhopadhyay
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- Book:
- The EBCOG Postgraduate Textbook of Obstetrics & Gynaecology
- Published online:
- 20 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 02 December 2021, pp 236-243
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Summary
During the course of a normal pregnancy, the respiratory system undergoes both physiological and anatomical changes. These changes can predispose to the development of acute respiratory conditions; they can also affect the natural history of chronic pulmonary disease. Conversely, poorly controlled chronic pulmonary conditions can adversely affect the progress of pregnancy [1].
8 - Roads and the politics of thought: Climate in India, democracy in Nepal
- Edited by Luke Heslop, Galen Murton
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- Book:
- Highways and Hierarchies
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 13 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 September 2021, pp 197-220
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Abstract
The chapter presents the politics of thought as an analytical terrain through which to broach the themes at the heart of this volume: the inadvertent role of roads in reproducing and generating hierarchy, class inequality, and social disruption. In bringing together two major research projects led by the authors, we illustrate how roads have been engaged through critical social sciences as an epistemological as well as a material vector of change. By outlining methodological and conceptual approaches to large road and infrastructure projects in South Asia, we show how ideas build roads. The chapter draws attention to frequently overlooked aspects of road construction – such as how future environmental impacts are routinely ignored in the political processes and construction practices that constitute the making of roads.
Keywords: India, Nepal, Reunion, democracy, environment, methodology
Introduction
This chapter brings together two major research projects led respectively by Edward Simpson and Katharine Rankin: ‘Roads and the Politics of Thought: Ethnographic Approaches to Infrastructure Development in South Asia’and ‘Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal's Agrarian Districts’. Simpson is an anthropologist, whose UKbased collaborative project worked comparatively across South Asia, but the contribution here is written with India centrally in mind. Rankin is a geographer trained in anthropology and planning, whose project works in partnership with Nepal- and Canada-based researchers and collaborators to explore road development in vernacular terms.
We start by considering how roads have been engaged through critical social sciences as a key vector of change, epistemological as much as material, before moving to discuss the key theoretical and practical aims of the research projects. The projects are centrally concerned with the overarching themes of this volume, namely the inadvertent role of roads in reproducing and generating hierarchy, class inequality, and social disruption; uneven experiences of road development amongst the people in its midst; and the articulation of road building with state building and sociopolitical and geopolitical relations. The projects consolidate around the politics of thought as an analytical terrain through which to broach these themes.
4 - Labour and the Humanitarian Present: Thinking through the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes
- Edited by Michael Hutt, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Mark Liechty, University of Illinois, Stefanie Lotter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Epicentre to Aftermath
- Published online:
- 08 July 2021
- Print publication:
- 05 August 2021, pp 87-109
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Summary
Labour offers an important arena for studying the creation of aftermaths in the wake of disaster (see Liechty and Hutt, this volume). In this chapter, we track the collective agencies that shaped post-disaster labour upheavals and transformed socioeconomic relations in Dolakha district of central Nepal, one of the regions hardest hit by the 2015 earthquakes. The upheavals included a rapid, large-scale displacement of labourers at the site of a major infrastructure project, alongside massive increases in demand for labour to carry out reconstruction work—dynamics that, in turn, contributed to a significant and widely reported increase in wage rates. These seemingly ‘natural’ fluxes in supply and demand were also shaped by politics and agency, as various intermediary actors with interests at stake intervened to shape both pre- and post-disaster labour markets. The chapter highlights struggles among intermediaries for control over wages, efforts to exploit differences between sectors and among labourers, and the different implications for those trying to rebuild homes and livelihoods in the wake of the disaster.
Much of the critical analysis of humanitarian relief and reconstruction following the earthquakes has centred on the failure of the Nepali state to respond effectively. Amnesty International (2017) underscores the role of state-led reconstruction works in exacerbating processes of marginalization. Yogesh Raj and Bhaskar Gautam (2015) specify the deliberate negligence of an ‘amnesiac state’ that ‘remembers to forget’ existing data and information that could support the distribution of aid—lest it face the demands ofaccountability (see also S. Tamang 2015). Similarly, there have been ample accounts of donor complicity in the chaos and inequities surrounding both relief and reconstruction (for example, Bhattarai, Acharya, and Land 2018). Others have analysed the post-earthquake dynamics in Nepal through the lens of disaster capitalism, emphasizing how disasters can offer new opportunities for capital accumulation while extending processes of commercialization and financialization deeper into agrarian subsistence economies (D. Paudel 2017; Paudel and Le Billon 2018; Matthew and Upreti 2018; Le Billon et al. 2020; Paudel, Rankin, and Le Billon 2020). Recent scholarship has also explored everyday relations of expertise from the perspective of residents as well as the cadres of professionals and relief workers dispatched to affected areas (Limbu et al. 2019; see also chapters by Shneiderman et al.; Baniya; Gurung and Baniya; Oven et al.; Dhungana; Shakya; Ninglekhu, Daly, and Hollenbach; Lotter, this volume).
3 - Expertise, Labour, and Mobility in Nepal's Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Law, Construction, and Finance as Domains of Social Transformation
- Edited by Michael Hutt, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Mark Liechty, University of Illinois, Stefanie Lotter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Book:
- Epicentre to Aftermath
- Published online:
- 08 July 2021
- Print publication:
- 05 August 2021, pp 49-86
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Introduction
How have people affected by Nepal's 2015 earthquakes experienced the reconstruction process on the ground? This chapter draws on ethnographic data collected during Nepal's post-earthquake reconstruction to inform theoretical questions about relationships between expertise, labour, and mobility in shaping post-disaster outcomes, including broader societal transformations. Based on a collaborative research project conducted between 2017 and 2020 in three of Nepal's earthquake-affected districts (Bhaktapur, Dhading, and Sindhupalchok), we point to legal, material, and financial processes that constitute lived experiences of reconstruction at the household level.
Since its inception in 2017, our project has explored the domains of law, construction, and finance to ask: How successful has Nepal's ‘owner-driven’ reconstruction model for households been at ensuring positive outcomes, on material, sociocultural, and subjective levels? How have domestic (that is, Nepali national) professionals, such as engineers, lawyers, and non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, served as mediators between earthquake-affected community members and institutional actors implementing reconstruction at the scale of local governance? How have relations of power and their material outcomes been negotiated? How have worldviews and practices been reshaped along the way? And how have fluctuating labour markets and conditions of high mobility shaped these interactions?
Such questions are important both for evaluating the often contradictory outcomes of reconstruction's multiple interventions and for examining the wider sociopolitical context of disaster and relief projects, such as Nepal's post-conflict process of state restructuring that devolved power to local governments in 2017. In this context, we suggest that political and material transformations—at local, regional, and national levels—must be understood as intersecting with each other, rather than as separate trajectories.
As detailed in the introduction to this volume (Liechty and Hutt), Nepal's earthquakes struck at a period of protracted political impasse which politicized and delayed the establishment of a central state agency to coordinate relief efforts by nearly seven months. The National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) only unveiled its first ‘four-phase plan’ in January 2016, and it took another three months for the first housing grants to be released, not least because an entire infrastructure of relief coordination needed to be erected (The Kathmandu Post 2015b, 2016c)
12 - Planning the social economy: the spatial politics of community economic development in Toronto
- Edited by Christian Berndt, Universität Zürich, Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Norma M. Rantisi, Concordia University, Montréal
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- Book:
- Market/Place
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
- Published online:
- 23 December 2023
- Print publication:
- 26 March 2020, pp 213-232
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What is the social economy and how can it reorient market-making to forge equitable local economies and reverse patterns of socio-spatial inequality?1 This chapter takes up these questions within a fundamentally Polanyian framework attentive to contemporary initiatives within urban planning and community development to build social economies that counter the commodification of land and labour with alternative institutions of accumulation and democratic community control. Empirically, the chapter investigates the recent flourishing of community economic development initiatives in the City of Toronto, as the potential site for a counter-movement to neoliberal market forms.
Theoretically, the chapter probes the concept of social economy to address the vexing paradox that community economic development seeks to mobilize local capacities and assets from within the very communities that have been most severely compromised by neoliberal governmentality. We argue that in order to reject a functional role for the social economy as a kind of neoliberal communitarianism – local communities and non-profit agencies fulfilling welfare functions more properly situated at the scale of state governance – some clear criteria are needed for articulating a more radical mode of market-making for social justice. To this end, we advocate an interpretation of social economy as comprised of three pillars of market-making, namely redistributive justice, economic democracy and relational autonomy (Rankin 2013). We suggest that the three pillars, which should be understood as normative principles, could serve as a conceptual framework for exploring actually existing market diversity.
Community economic development (CED) refers to a sector of practice and an associated literature that aims to analyse and mitigate the consequences of historic patterns of uneven investment, racial discrimination and gender oppression, and to catalyse economic development within marginalized and disinvested communities. CED encompasses critical debates about the appropriate scale and place for making markets as well as competing normative theories of action. We read the dynamic CED sector in Toronto against the notion of social economy in order to probe the conditions of possibility for CED to play a role in making socially just markets.
Fragmented Public Authority and State Un/making in the ‘New’ Republic of Nepal
- ANDREA J. NIGHTINGALE, ANIL BHATTARAI, HEMANT R. OJHA, TULASI SHARAN SIGDEL, KATHARINE N. RANKIN
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- Journal:
- Modern Asian Studies / Volume 52 / Issue 3 / May 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 18 June 2018, pp. 849-882
- Print publication:
- May 2018
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Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called ‘political transition’ has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests from groups who felt their needs were marginalized in the final version. In this article we are concerned to probe how struggles over different technologies of government help throw into relief the various terrains within which public authority is claimed and contested, and, as a result, help to expose the limits of the state. Using the forestry sector as an ethnographic lens, we argue that there is both a profound failure by the state to provide services and stable governance as well as an ability to reproduce itself and to function in some contexts. It is therefore important to understand public authority during this period as both stable and unstable—and at times, instability is what helps to perpetuate particular imaginaries of the Nepali state.