Jane Dyson
Biographic Data
| ID | 182659 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jane Dyson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jane |
| FAMILY NAME | Dyson |
| SIGNATURE | DYSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4868-3229 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 323 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Unemployed Youth Agency and Geographies of Educational Support in Urban North India
The emergence of large numbers of educated unemployed people across the world remains a major social challenge. Research on unemployed young people has tended to emphasise a lack of agency. Many studies depict jobless youth as aimless and detached from their social and spatial situation. This paper uses an account of the practices of educated unemployed young people in Uttar Pradesh, North India, to challenge this depiction. Drawing on fieldwork …
Collaborative neoliberalism: Social mobility in rural North India
Neoliberal pedagogies of Pahari enterprise: Youth in provincial North India
Indian Youth and Social Mobility: Changing Trajectories
Viable youth futures
It has a life: Youth revaluing food ‘waste’ at an Australian university
Continuing existence: Viability and indigenous youth action in Himachal Pradesh, India
This paper uses field research conducted in Himachal Pradesh in 2021–2022 to analyse the efforts of Kinnauri young people to critique and address social and environmental crises in their region. The expansion of capitalism, poor governance, and climate change are contributing to major environmental loss and social crises in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Young people with origins in the region are becoming important in critiquing this process, especi…
Building viabilities: Youth social action in the Indian Himalayas
This paper examines the social action of young people in the north Indian village of Bemni, drawing on field research over a 20 year period. We argue that a cohort of young people in Bemni in the period 2004–2014 tended to focus on key issues of survival in their social action, what they often termed ‘lifelines’, related especially to infrastructure and schooling. A second cohort of young people involved in social action between 2015 and 2022 com…
Viable lives: Life beyond survival in rural North India
Many minoritised and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a ‘survivable life’ and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This paper addresses this gap by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build via…
Being the change: A young person’s guide to political and social action
Viable geographies
What is a viable life? This paper addresses this question with reference to viability as a concept and young people’s social action across the world. The notion of viability offers a framework for examining how young people ‘think across’ different domains of life – such as education, work, environment, politics and cultural practice – and develop ecosystems of practice that connect these domains together. In addition, the concept of viability dr…
Hunger for change: Student food insecurity in Australia
Student food insecurity has been a major social problem across the world. Building on interview-based research, this paper examines students’ experiences of food insecurity in Melbourne during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. It places particular emphasis on young people’s agency and students’ ‘relational’ understanding of food insecurity. Students experienced food insecurity in relation to other domains of life, such as work and h…
Fragments for the Future: Selective Urbanism in Rural North India
Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban-rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as per…
Reformist agency: Young women, gender, and change in India
This article uses long-term research in rural Uttarakhand, north India, to intervene in anthropological debates on agency. In the period between the early 2000s and late 2010s, many young women in the village of Bemni successfully sought opportunities to pursue their own goals. We highlight the manner in which young women's agency is 'reformist'. This term is useful, in part, because it directs attention to the subtle and persistent nature of you…
Geographies of the future: Prefigurative politics
This paper uses an examination of prefigurative politics – popularly imagined as ‘being the change you wish to see’ – to reflect on geographies of the future. We argue that prefigurative politics, which has become common since the mid-1990s, typically proceeds through multiple forms of improvisation. Successful prefigurative politics is usually institutionalised within organisations and movements and reshapes practices, discourses, and structures…
Between unemployment and enterprise in neoliberal India: Educated youth creating work in the private education sector
This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they hav…
Rethinking education as a contradictory resource: Girls’ education in the Indian Himalayas
Fresh contact: Youth, migration, and atmospheres in India
This paper uses long-term research in an Indian village to develop Karl Mannheim's notion of each generation's 'fresh contact' with their inherited social and environmental setting. I examine how a generation of young people re-apprehend their local environment following a period of migration. I argue that young people aged between 25 and 34 who have lived outside their locality re-appraise their village economically and spiritually when they ret…
Everyday prefiguration: Youth social action in north India
There has been a recent resurgence of what is often termed “prefigurative politics”: activity in which people channel political effort into demonstrating in the present the types of social relations and practices sought at a future point in time. This paper engages with literature on prefigurative politics through reference to everyday forms of political and social action in the north Indian village of Bemni, Uttarakhand. We show that young peopl…
Love Actually: Youth Mediators and Advisors in North India
This article uses ethnographic research conducted in Bemni, a village in Uttarakhand, north India, to make a distinctive contribution to geographies of love. Building on fieldwork with young people between sixteen and thirty years old who work as “mediators” or “advisors” in Bemni in relation to premarital or extramarital affairs, I argue that practices and narratives of romantic love are strongly implicated in processes of social change. In the …
Adjust
Now: Prefigurative politics through a north Indian lens
This paper focuses on 'prefigurative politics' – embodying in the present one's vision of the future – among young people in north India. In so doing it contributes to wider debates on oppositional politics, temporality, India and youth. Building on recent fieldwork in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, we highlight the ubiquity of civic-minded everyday forms of prefigurative politics among a subset of young men and young women. We examine the tempor…
Life on the hoof: Gender, youth, and the environment in the Indian Himalayas
This article examines how young people in the Indian Himalayas understand, appreciate, and discuss their environment. Building on intensive ethnographic field research in Bemni, Uttarakhand, I point to the changing ways in which young people use the everyday practice of herding to acquire knowledge and engage in playful activity. I emphasize that age and gender shape the capacity for young people to interact creatively with their local environmen…
Working Childhoods: Youth, Agency and the Environment in India
Working Childhoods draws upon research in the Indian Himalayas to provide a theoretically-informed account of children's lives in a remote part of the world. The book shows that children in their pre-teens and teens are lynchpins of the rural economy, spending hours each day herding cattle, collecting leaves, and juggling household tasks with schoolwork. Through documenting in painstaking detail children's stories, songs, friendships, fears and t…
I serve therefore I am: Youth and Generative Politics in India
This paper uses qualitative research in Uttarakhand, India to highlight the vitality of civil society and the involvement of young people in everyday 'civic' politics. Much recent academic literature emphasizes the ubiquity of narrowly self-interested patronage politics in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as captured in the saying sometimes attributed to politicians in Cameroon: 'I graze therefore I am.' But in specific moments or conjunctu…
Geographies of the future: Prefigurative politics
This paper uses an examination of prefigurative politics – popularly imagined as ‘being the change you wish to see’ – to reflect on geographies of the future. We argue that prefigurative politics, which has become common since the mid-1990s, typically proceeds through multiple forms of improvisation. Successful prefigurative politics is usually institutionalised within organisations and movements and reshapes practices, discourses, and structures…
Friendship in practice: Girls' work in the Indian Himalayas
In this article, I examine the relationship between friendship, cultural production, and social reproduction through reference to the everyday practices of girls working in the Indian Himalayas. I build on 15 months of ethnographic research in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand. Focusing especially on girls' work collecting leaves, I stress the importance of contextualizing friendship with reference to lived everyday actions and environments. Frie…
Everyday prefiguration: Youth social action in north India
There has been a recent resurgence of what is often termed “prefigurative politics”: activity in which people channel political effort into demonstrating in the present the types of social relations and practices sought at a future point in time. This paper engages with literature on prefigurative politics through reference to everyday forms of political and social action in the north Indian village of Bemni, Uttarakhand. We show that young peopl…
Now: Prefigurative politics through a north Indian lens
This paper focuses on 'prefigurative politics' – embodying in the present one's vision of the future – among young people in north India. In so doing it contributes to wider debates on oppositional politics, temporality, India and youth. Building on recent fieldwork in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, we highlight the ubiquity of civic-minded everyday forms of prefigurative politics among a subset of young men and young women. We examine the tempor…
Zigzag capitalism: Youth entrepreneurship in the contemporary global South
Harvesting Identities: Youth, Work, and Gender in the Indian Himalayas
An examination of young people's lichen collection in the Indian Himalayas shows how youth in the global South can imbue their work with meaning, manage their work practices, and sometimes transgress established norms in specific work settings. Building on fifteen months' intensive field research in the high Himalayas, this article describes how young men and women have used the opportunity provided by lichen collection to contest or reaffirm gen…
Between unemployment and enterprise in neoliberal India: Educated youth creating work in the private education sector
This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they hav…
Fresh contact: Youth, migration, and atmospheres in India
This paper uses long-term research in an Indian village to develop Karl Mannheim's notion of each generation's 'fresh contact' with their inherited social and environmental setting. I examine how a generation of young people re-apprehend their local environment following a period of migration. I argue that young people aged between 25 and 34 who have lived outside their locality re-appraise their village economically and spiritually when they ret…
Reformist agency: Young women, gender, and change in India
This article uses long-term research in rural Uttarakhand, north India, to intervene in anthropological debates on agency. In the period between the early 2000s and late 2010s, many young women in the village of Bemni successfully sought opportunities to pursue their own goals. We highlight the manner in which young women's agency is 'reformist'. This term is useful, in part, because it directs attention to the subtle and persistent nature of you…
Love Actually: Youth Mediators and Advisors in North India
This article uses ethnographic research conducted in Bemni, a village in Uttarakhand, north India, to make a distinctive contribution to geographies of love. Building on fieldwork with young people between sixteen and thirty years old who work as “mediators” or “advisors” in Bemni in relation to premarital or extramarital affairs, I argue that practices and narratives of romantic love are strongly implicated in processes of social change. In the …
The other Side of the Knowledge Economy: Reproductive' Employment and Affective Labours in Oxford
A marked feature of current narratives about economic change is their epochal or transformative character. An older rhetoric about the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has been replaced by a widely accepted story about the 'new' knowledge economy, as well as a less-dominant narrative about new forms of affective or immaterial labour. In both cases, as with post-Fordist claims, the significance of women's changing labour-market participation pat…
Rethinking education as a contradictory resource: Girls’ education in the Indian Himalayas
I serve therefore I am: Youth and Generative Politics in India
This paper uses qualitative research in Uttarakhand, India to highlight the vitality of civil society and the involvement of young people in everyday 'civic' politics. Much recent academic literature emphasizes the ubiquity of narrowly self-interested patronage politics in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as captured in the saying sometimes attributed to politicians in Cameroon: 'I graze therefore I am.' But in specific moments or conjunctu…
Viable geographies
What is a viable life? This paper addresses this question with reference to viability as a concept and young people’s social action across the world. The notion of viability offers a framework for examining how young people ‘think across’ different domains of life – such as education, work, environment, politics and cultural practice – and develop ecosystems of practice that connect these domains together. In addition, the concept of viability dr…
Fragments for the Future: Selective Urbanism in Rural North India
Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban-rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as per…
Life on the hoof: Gender, youth, and the environment in the Indian Himalayas
This article examines how young people in the Indian Himalayas understand, appreciate, and discuss their environment. Building on intensive ethnographic field research in Bemni, Uttarakhand, I point to the changing ways in which young people use the everyday practice of herding to acquire knowledge and engage in playful activity. I emphasize that age and gender shape the capacity for young people to interact creatively with their local environmen…
Viable lives: Life beyond survival in rural North India
Many minoritised and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a ‘survivable life’ and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This paper addresses this gap by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build via…
Hunger for change: Student food insecurity in Australia
Student food insecurity has been a major social problem across the world. Building on interview-based research, this paper examines students’ experiences of food insecurity in Melbourne during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. It places particular emphasis on young people’s agency and students’ ‘relational’ understanding of food insecurity. Students experienced food insecurity in relation to other domains of life, such as work and h…
Continuing existence: Viability and indigenous youth action in Himachal Pradesh, India
This paper uses field research conducted in Himachal Pradesh in 2021–2022 to analyse the efforts of Kinnauri young people to critique and address social and environmental crises in their region. The expansion of capitalism, poor governance, and climate change are contributing to major environmental loss and social crises in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Young people with origins in the region are becoming important in critiquing this process, especi…
Managing Tragedies: Understanding Conflict over Common Pool Resources
Conflicts over the management of common pool resources are not simply material. They also depend on the perceptions of the protagonists. Policy to improve management often assumes that problems are self-evident, but in fact careful and transparent consideration of the ways different stakeholders understand management problems is essential to effective dialogue.
Harvesting Identities: Youth, Work, and Gender in the Indian Himalayas
An examination of young people's lichen collection in the Indian Himalayas shows how youth in the global South can imbue their work with meaning, manage their work practices, and sometimes transgress established norms in specific work settings. Building on fifteen months' intensive field research in the high Himalayas, this article describes how young men and women have used the opportunity provided by lichen collection to contest or reaffirm gen…
Friendship in practice: Girls' work in the Indian Himalayas
In this article, I examine the relationship between friendship, cultural production, and social reproduction through reference to the everyday practices of girls working in the Indian Himalayas. I build on 15 months of ethnographic research in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand. Focusing especially on girls' work collecting leaves, I stress the importance of contextualizing friendship with reference to lived everyday actions and environments. Frie…
The other Side of the Knowledge Economy: Reproductive' Employment and Affective Labours in Oxford
A marked feature of current narratives about economic change is their epochal or transformative character. An older rhetoric about the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has been replaced by a widely accepted story about the 'new' knowledge economy, as well as a less-dominant narrative about new forms of affective or immaterial labour. In both cases, as with post-Fordist claims, the significance of women's changing labour-market participation pat…
Zigzag capitalism: Youth entrepreneurship in the contemporary global South
Working Childhoods: Youth, Agency and the Environment in India
Working Childhoods draws upon research in the Indian Himalayas to provide a theoretically-informed account of children's lives in a remote part of the world. The book shows that children in their pre-teens and teens are lynchpins of the rural economy, spending hours each day herding cattle, collecting leaves, and juggling household tasks with schoolwork. Through documenting in painstaking detail children's stories, songs, friendships, fears and t…
I serve therefore I am: Youth and Generative Politics in India
This paper uses qualitative research in Uttarakhand, India to highlight the vitality of civil society and the involvement of young people in everyday 'civic' politics. Much recent academic literature emphasizes the ubiquity of narrowly self-interested patronage politics in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as captured in the saying sometimes attributed to politicians in Cameroon: 'I graze therefore I am.' But in specific moments or conjunctu…
Life on the hoof: Gender, youth, and the environment in the Indian Himalayas
This article examines how young people in the Indian Himalayas understand, appreciate, and discuss their environment. Building on intensive ethnographic field research in Bemni, Uttarakhand, I point to the changing ways in which young people use the everyday practice of herding to acquire knowledge and engage in playful activity. I emphasize that age and gender shape the capacity for young people to interact creatively with their local environmen…
Now: Prefigurative politics through a north Indian lens
This paper focuses on 'prefigurative politics' – embodying in the present one's vision of the future – among young people in north India. In so doing it contributes to wider debates on oppositional politics, temporality, India and youth. Building on recent fieldwork in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, we highlight the ubiquity of civic-minded everyday forms of prefigurative politics among a subset of young men and young women. We examine the tempor…
Adjust
Everyday prefiguration: Youth social action in north India
There has been a recent resurgence of what is often termed “prefigurative politics”: activity in which people channel political effort into demonstrating in the present the types of social relations and practices sought at a future point in time. This paper engages with literature on prefigurative politics through reference to everyday forms of political and social action in the north Indian village of Bemni, Uttarakhand. We show that young peopl…
Love Actually: Youth Mediators and Advisors in North India
This article uses ethnographic research conducted in Bemni, a village in Uttarakhand, north India, to make a distinctive contribution to geographies of love. Building on fieldwork with young people between sixteen and thirty years old who work as “mediators” or “advisors” in Bemni in relation to premarital or extramarital affairs, I argue that practices and narratives of romantic love are strongly implicated in processes of social change. In the …
Between unemployment and enterprise in neoliberal India: Educated youth creating work in the private education sector
This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they hav…
Rethinking education as a contradictory resource: Girls’ education in the Indian Himalayas
Fresh contact: Youth, migration, and atmospheres in India
This paper uses long-term research in an Indian village to develop Karl Mannheim's notion of each generation's 'fresh contact' with their inherited social and environmental setting. I examine how a generation of young people re-apprehend their local environment following a period of migration. I argue that young people aged between 25 and 34 who have lived outside their locality re-appraise their village economically and spiritually when they ret…
Geographies of the future: Prefigurative politics
This paper uses an examination of prefigurative politics – popularly imagined as ‘being the change you wish to see’ – to reflect on geographies of the future. We argue that prefigurative politics, which has become common since the mid-1990s, typically proceeds through multiple forms of improvisation. Successful prefigurative politics is usually institutionalised within organisations and movements and reshapes practices, discourses, and structures…
Being the change: A young person’s guide to political and social action
Viable geographies
What is a viable life? This paper addresses this question with reference to viability as a concept and young people’s social action across the world. The notion of viability offers a framework for examining how young people ‘think across’ different domains of life – such as education, work, environment, politics and cultural practice – and develop ecosystems of practice that connect these domains together. In addition, the concept of viability dr…
Hunger for change: Student food insecurity in Australia
Student food insecurity has been a major social problem across the world. Building on interview-based research, this paper examines students’ experiences of food insecurity in Melbourne during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. It places particular emphasis on young people’s agency and students’ ‘relational’ understanding of food insecurity. Students experienced food insecurity in relation to other domains of life, such as work and h…
Fragments for the Future: Selective Urbanism in Rural North India
Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban-rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as per…
Reformist agency: Young women, gender, and change in India
This article uses long-term research in rural Uttarakhand, north India, to intervene in anthropological debates on agency. In the period between the early 2000s and late 2010s, many young women in the village of Bemni successfully sought opportunities to pursue their own goals. We highlight the manner in which young women's agency is 'reformist'. This term is useful, in part, because it directs attention to the subtle and persistent nature of you…
Building viabilities: Youth social action in the Indian Himalayas
This paper examines the social action of young people in the north Indian village of Bemni, drawing on field research over a 20 year period. We argue that a cohort of young people in Bemni in the period 2004–2014 tended to focus on key issues of survival in their social action, what they often termed ‘lifelines’, related especially to infrastructure and schooling. A second cohort of young people involved in social action between 2015 and 2022 com…
Viable lives: Life beyond survival in rural North India
Many minoritised and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a ‘survivable life’ and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This paper addresses this gap by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build via…
Continuing existence: Viability and indigenous youth action in Himachal Pradesh, India
This paper uses field research conducted in Himachal Pradesh in 2021–2022 to analyse the efforts of Kinnauri young people to critique and address social and environmental crises in their region. The expansion of capitalism, poor governance, and climate change are contributing to major environmental loss and social crises in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Young people with origins in the region are becoming important in critiquing this process, especi…
Collaborative neoliberalism: Social mobility in rural North India
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (17 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · Social science (10 works) · Geography (8 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Law (7 works)