1st Edition

Checkpoint Sociology A Cultural Reading of Policies and Politics

By Dipankar Gupta Copyright 2023
246 Pages
by Routledge

246 Pages
by Routledge

246 Pages
by Routledge

Relying on many years of fieldwork and on his involvement with several national level policy making bodies, this book presents a cultural interpretation of how public life and state interventions in India should be viewed. While commending statistical interventions in governmental decision making, it detects a marked deficiency in the understanding of how cultural factors impress upon and... Read more

Preface

1. Smell Check Your Numbers: Public Policy andSociological Sensitivity

2. Numerical Thresholds as Industrial Inhibitors: Raising Capacity and Formalizing the Economy

3. The Changing Villager: What the Numbers Do Not Tell

4. Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations

5. Beyond Numbers to Citizenship: Overcomingthe Majority-Minority Divide

6. Urban Planning for "Citizens": Emphasising Space Over Non-Space

7. Individuals Possess Rights, Governments Perform Duties: Citizenship and Social Policy

8. Confidence Crisis: Liberalism as a State of Exception

9. Source Credibility and Campaign Redundancy:The Merits of Slow Thinking

10. The Public and Private in Policy Making: Lessons for Media and Covid Control

11. Culture War Won: Defying Arithmetic in 2019 Elections

12. Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications

13. Checkpoint Sociology: Three Theses on Method

Appendix

Vignettes: Policy against Prejudice

References

Index

Biography

Dipankar Gupta taught in the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for three decades. He has authored numerous books on caste, modernity, rural India and ethnicity. His current interest lies primarily in understanding how sociology can help understand and assist social policy.