Capturing the politics and poetics of everyday life....

  The question that I have posed here is one that has been bothering me for quite some time. Though I belong to a humanities discipline, I have always been fascinated by laws and their impacts. The deep interest in bringing laws into the everyday life of students in my department inspired me to offer elective papers on women specific laws in India. My classroom discussions with students on the possibilities and limitations of different laws for making qualitative changes in the lives of women have caused me to think critically about the text of a few laws. It was during one of those interactions that my focus turned to the constitution of the Internal Complaints Committee under the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. The Internal Complaints Committees have been made mandatory at workplaces to ensure a just and impartial handling of the complaints of harassments raised by women employees against any one of their male co-workers. In spite...

  Life happens in the everyday. The way we spend our everyday defines our tastes, desires and even our anxieties. Our everyday life is punctuated with a variety of routine performances that reinforce these emotions. Everyday life is also the abode of the most ordinary to the most shocking experiences, with infinite shades in between. Everyday is most intimate to us. The ‘residues and leftovers’ of everyday life which are often disregarded offer endless possibilities for social analysis. The myriad activities that we perform are our interactions with the cultural and political logic of the times. The everydayness of this space and its materialities present before us the critical vocabulary to philosophise on the world in which we live in.   The world around us creates different forms of disruptions to our everydayness. When we are informed of diverse kinds of global and local issues, it is their proximity to our everyday life that mostly define our affective responses to them. ...