A comprehensive textbook that deals with the issue of social movements from both theoretical and contextual points of view and analyses major cognitive concerns of social movements across disciplines.
In contemporary times, social movements are a matter of everyday discourse among researchers, teachers, planners and politicians, administrators and law-enforcing machineries, social activists and common people alike. The book begins by locating social movements within broad and contemporary social processes. It explains the meaning, basic features, origins and types, and the basic perspectives of social movements. It goes on to deal with the major experiences of nine social movements in India, namely, peasant, tribal, Naxalite, Dalit, working class, women, ethnic, student and youth, and environmental movements. The book also analyses the role of information technology, media, civil society, NGOs and the middle class in the spread and continuation of such movements. The experiences of queer, new religious, and anti-systemic and anti-displacement movements would also help readers understand how globalization has offered new avenues of protest to diverse sections of the population.
Key Features:
• Analyses the major theoretical concerns of social movements and uses them to analyse specific social movements in India and other parts of the globe
• Provides the genealogy, growth and impact of prominent social movements in India and abroad
• Includes pedagogically rich content, which closely follows UGC course curriculum guidelines for the subject
Professor Biswajit Ghosh is the senior-most Professor of Sociology at the University of Burdwan, Bardhaman, and has been teaching sociology since 1986. He did his Master’s from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, and MPhil and PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He has been associated with different universities and institutions of West Bengal and Northeast as an external expert. He has authored 93 articles, modules and reviews in reputed national and international journals and written three major policy documents of UNICEF, Government of West Bengal and Save the Children and has edited volumes entitled Interrogating Development: Discourses on Development in India Today (2012) and Pariveshvidya (2012). He has carried out three major research projects along with two other minor projects. He has also worked as a module coordinator of UGC e-Pathshala course for research methodology and social movement papers in sociology. He is an active member of the managing committee of the Indian Sociological Society and is currently acting as the vice-president of the Sociological Association of West Bengal.
