G Carswell
Biographic Data
| ID | 40836 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Carswell |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Carswell |
| SIGNATURE | CARSWELL G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8570-1337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 385 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Informal, individual and cumulative labour agency: Reconceptualising capital's socio-spatial fix in the south Indian garment industry
This paper reconceptualises labour agency by examining the cumulative impact of informal and individual worker agency on capital’s search for a social-spatial fix in the Tiruppur garment industry in Tamil Nadu, India. The study foregrounds everyday micro-acts—such as choosing, refusing, and exiting work—as significant forms of agency, especially when viewed in aggregate. Based on ethnographic research, we explore how these acts influence the soci…
Training for employment or skilling up from employment? Jobs and skills acquisition in the Tiruppur textile region, India
This paper explores how skills for garment work are acquired in the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, one of India’s largest garment manufacturing clusters. Drawing on a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with garment workers in Tiruppur’s hinterland, we document the informal pathways of skill acquisition for garment work and advocate a demand-driven approach to vocational training. Such an approach, first, unsettles linear policy assumpt…
Transparency, exclusion and mediation: How digital and biometric technologies are transforming social protection in Tamil Nadu, India
What are the effects of biometric and digital technologies on social protection for the poor in India? Drawing on ethnographic research from rural Tamil Nadu, this paper presents evidence of how new technologies are experienced by beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System (PDS), and analyses the impacts of technology innovations on transparency, exclusion and mediation. The authors focus on the implementation of ‘smartcards,’ new digitised …
Good debts, bad debts: Microcredit and managing debt in rural south India
This paper engages with debates around microcredit, once a development success story, but now much critiqued. Arguing that microcredit can only be understood within the wider context of debt, we draw on ethnographic material from two villages in Tamil Nadu, to examine how microcredit through self‐help groups sits within a broader context of indebtedness among the rural labouring classes. We describe patterns and sources of borrowing among the poo…
Paperwork, patronage, and citizenship: The materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu, India
This article explores the material practices through which lower-caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork - such as ration cards and community certificates - as a 'lens' through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of lite…
Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India
This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An…
Struggles over work take place at home: Women’s decisions, choices and constraints in the Tiruppur textile industry, India
Litigation against Political Organization? The Politics of Dalit Mobilization in Tamil Nadu, India
This article examines contemporary Dalit assertion in India through an ethnographic case study of a legal tool being mobilized by Tamil Nadu's lowest-ranking Arunthathiyars in their struggle against caste-based offences. The Arunthathiyars of western Tamil Nadu are increasingly taking recourse to the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA Act) in an attempt to bring members of higher castes to justice. The article explores how Arunthathiyars are …
Why Indians Vote: Reflections on Rights, Citizenship, and Democracy from a Tamil Nadu Village
This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as…
T-shirts and tumblers: Caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India
This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly di…
MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu: A Story of Success and Transformation
Social protection has emerged as a key driver of development policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is widely considered a 'good thing' that has the potential not only to alleviate poverty and vulnerability, but also to generate more transformative outcomes in terms of empowerment and social justice. Based on an ethnographic study of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India…
From field to factory: Tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu
Taking a historical perspective this paper explores the phasing out of ‘bonded’ labour in agriculture and its reappearance in the village-based powerloom industry in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India. \nFocussing on a village outside Tiruppur, we trace the gradual transformation, and ultimate disappearance of forms of labour bondage in agriculture. In this region bondedness in agriculture changed in a number of significant ways, before giv…
Dalits and local labour markets in rural India: Experiences from the Tiruppur textile region in Tamil Nadu
This article asks how labour markets are changing in the context of wider transformations in the rural economy. Drawing on evidence from two villages in southern India, which are both close to, and deeply affected by, a major textile industry cluster, the article examines local labour markets, arguing that labour market segmentation is not simply caste‐based. While some Dalits from one village have gained access to jobs in export markets, the sam…
Labouring for global markets: Conceptualising labour agency in global production networks
NREGA and the Return of Identity Politics in Western Tamil Nadu, India
Journal article on NREGA and its impacts on changing rural and urban social relations and politics in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India
Multiple historical geographies: Responses and resistance to colonial conservation schemes in East Africa
Continuities in Environmental Narratives: The Case of Kabale, Uganda, 1930-2000
This article looks at continuities and change around the issue of agricultural sustainability in colonial and post-colonial Kabale. It argues that a series of environmental narratives developed during the colonial period, which have been largely unquestioned since then. It shows how the perception of the district being threatened with environmental degradation has continued from the earliest colonial period up to the present day. Many of the assu…
Food Crops as Cash Crops: The Case of Colonial Kigezi, Uganda
This article examines the case of Kigezi, where colonial efforts to introduce cash crops such as coffee and tobacco consistently failed. It argues that Kigezi farmers already had cash-earning crops, which were food crops. These were widely produced and traded in the pre-colonial and colonial periods, and the strength and vibrancy of this trade helps to explain the problems the colonial state encountered when it tried to introduce cash crops. Mark…
Farmers and fallowing: Agricultural change in Kigezi District, Uganda
Focusing on the area of Kigezi, in south-western Uganda, this article examines land use change over a 50-year period. It shows that Kigezi, an area long considered to be suffering the effects of overpopulation, has never suffered the environmental catastrophes that have long been predicted. Instead, research suggests that farmers have successfully managed their land and maintained productivity
History of land use change in Kigezi, SW Uganda
Histoire des changements d'utilisation du sol a Kigezi, en Ouganda du Sud-Ouest est analysee dans cet article, notamment en ce qui concerne le peuplement, les migrations, les changements des activites professionnelles et des sources des revenus, la differentiation sociale
Labouring for global markets: Conceptualising labour agency in global production networks
Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India
This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An…
T-shirts and tumblers: Caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India
This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly di…
From field to factory: Tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu
Taking a historical perspective this paper explores the phasing out of ‘bonded’ labour in agriculture and its reappearance in the village-based powerloom industry in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India. \nFocussing on a village outside Tiruppur, we trace the gradual transformation, and ultimate disappearance of forms of labour bondage in agriculture. In this region bondedness in agriculture changed in a number of significant ways, before giv…
Paperwork, patronage, and citizenship: The materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu, India
This article explores the material practices through which lower-caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork - such as ration cards and community certificates - as a 'lens' through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of lite…
Struggles over work take place at home: Women’s decisions, choices and constraints in the Tiruppur textile industry, India
Dalits and local labour markets in rural India: Experiences from the Tiruppur textile region in Tamil Nadu
This article asks how labour markets are changing in the context of wider transformations in the rural economy. Drawing on evidence from two villages in southern India, which are both close to, and deeply affected by, a major textile industry cluster, the article examines local labour markets, arguing that labour market segmentation is not simply caste‐based. While some Dalits from one village have gained access to jobs in export markets, the sam…
MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu: A Story of Success and Transformation
Social protection has emerged as a key driver of development policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is widely considered a 'good thing' that has the potential not only to alleviate poverty and vulnerability, but also to generate more transformative outcomes in terms of empowerment and social justice. Based on an ethnographic study of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India…
Farmers and fallowing: Agricultural change in Kigezi District, Uganda
Focusing on the area of Kigezi, in south-western Uganda, this article examines land use change over a 50-year period. It shows that Kigezi, an area long considered to be suffering the effects of overpopulation, has never suffered the environmental catastrophes that have long been predicted. Instead, research suggests that farmers have successfully managed their land and maintained productivity
Food Crops as Cash Crops: The Case of Colonial Kigezi, Uganda
This article examines the case of Kigezi, where colonial efforts to introduce cash crops such as coffee and tobacco consistently failed. It argues that Kigezi farmers already had cash-earning crops, which were food crops. These were widely produced and traded in the pre-colonial and colonial periods, and the strength and vibrancy of this trade helps to explain the problems the colonial state encountered when it tried to introduce cash crops. Mark…
Continuities in Environmental Narratives: The Case of Kabale, Uganda, 1930-2000
This article looks at continuities and change around the issue of agricultural sustainability in colonial and post-colonial Kabale. It argues that a series of environmental narratives developed during the colonial period, which have been largely unquestioned since then. It shows how the perception of the district being threatened with environmental degradation has continued from the earliest colonial period up to the present day. Many of the assu…
Litigation against Political Organization? The Politics of Dalit Mobilization in Tamil Nadu, India
This article examines contemporary Dalit assertion in India through an ethnographic case study of a legal tool being mobilized by Tamil Nadu's lowest-ranking Arunthathiyars in their struggle against caste-based offences. The Arunthathiyars of western Tamil Nadu are increasingly taking recourse to the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA Act) in an attempt to bring members of higher castes to justice. The article explores how Arunthathiyars are …
Why Indians Vote: Reflections on Rights, Citizenship, and Democracy from a Tamil Nadu Village
This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as…
NREGA and the Return of Identity Politics in Western Tamil Nadu, India
Journal article on NREGA and its impacts on changing rural and urban social relations and politics in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India
Multiple historical geographies: Responses and resistance to colonial conservation schemes in East Africa
Training for employment or skilling up from employment? Jobs and skills acquisition in the Tiruppur textile region, India
This paper explores how skills for garment work are acquired in the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, one of India’s largest garment manufacturing clusters. Drawing on a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with garment workers in Tiruppur’s hinterland, we document the informal pathways of skill acquisition for garment work and advocate a demand-driven approach to vocational training. Such an approach, first, unsettles linear policy assumpt…
Informal, individual and cumulative labour agency: Reconceptualising capital's socio-spatial fix in the south Indian garment industry
This paper reconceptualises labour agency by examining the cumulative impact of informal and individual worker agency on capital’s search for a social-spatial fix in the Tiruppur garment industry in Tamil Nadu, India. The study foregrounds everyday micro-acts—such as choosing, refusing, and exiting work—as significant forms of agency, especially when viewed in aggregate. Based on ethnographic research, we explore how these acts influence the soci…
History of land use change in Kigezi, SW Uganda
Histoire des changements d'utilisation du sol a Kigezi, en Ouganda du Sud-Ouest est analysee dans cet article, notamment en ce qui concerne le peuplement, les migrations, les changements des activites professionnelles et des sources des revenus, la differentiation sociale
Farmers and fallowing: Agricultural change in Kigezi District, Uganda
Focusing on the area of Kigezi, in south-western Uganda, this article examines land use change over a 50-year period. It shows that Kigezi, an area long considered to be suffering the effects of overpopulation, has never suffered the environmental catastrophes that have long been predicted. Instead, research suggests that farmers have successfully managed their land and maintained productivity
Continuities in Environmental Narratives: The Case of Kabale, Uganda, 1930-2000
This article looks at continuities and change around the issue of agricultural sustainability in colonial and post-colonial Kabale. It argues that a series of environmental narratives developed during the colonial period, which have been largely unquestioned since then. It shows how the perception of the district being threatened with environmental degradation has continued from the earliest colonial period up to the present day. Many of the assu…
Food Crops as Cash Crops: The Case of Colonial Kigezi, Uganda
This article examines the case of Kigezi, where colonial efforts to introduce cash crops such as coffee and tobacco consistently failed. It argues that Kigezi farmers already had cash-earning crops, which were food crops. These were widely produced and traded in the pre-colonial and colonial periods, and the strength and vibrancy of this trade helps to explain the problems the colonial state encountered when it tried to introduce cash crops. Mark…
Multiple historical geographies: Responses and resistance to colonial conservation schemes in East Africa
NREGA and the Return of Identity Politics in Western Tamil Nadu, India
Journal article on NREGA and its impacts on changing rural and urban social relations and politics in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India
Dalits and local labour markets in rural India: Experiences from the Tiruppur textile region in Tamil Nadu
This article asks how labour markets are changing in the context of wider transformations in the rural economy. Drawing on evidence from two villages in southern India, which are both close to, and deeply affected by, a major textile industry cluster, the article examines local labour markets, arguing that labour market segmentation is not simply caste‐based. While some Dalits from one village have gained access to jobs in export markets, the sam…
Labouring for global markets: Conceptualising labour agency in global production networks
From field to factory: Tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu
Taking a historical perspective this paper explores the phasing out of ‘bonded’ labour in agriculture and its reappearance in the village-based powerloom industry in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India. \nFocussing on a village outside Tiruppur, we trace the gradual transformation, and ultimate disappearance of forms of labour bondage in agriculture. In this region bondedness in agriculture changed in a number of significant ways, before giv…
Why Indians Vote: Reflections on Rights, Citizenship, and Democracy from a Tamil Nadu Village
This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as…
T-shirts and tumblers: Caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India
This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly di…
MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu: A Story of Success and Transformation
Social protection has emerged as a key driver of development policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is widely considered a 'good thing' that has the potential not only to alleviate poverty and vulnerability, but also to generate more transformative outcomes in terms of empowerment and social justice. Based on an ethnographic study of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India…
Litigation against Political Organization? The Politics of Dalit Mobilization in Tamil Nadu, India
This article examines contemporary Dalit assertion in India through an ethnographic case study of a legal tool being mobilized by Tamil Nadu's lowest-ranking Arunthathiyars in their struggle against caste-based offences. The Arunthathiyars of western Tamil Nadu are increasingly taking recourse to the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA Act) in an attempt to bring members of higher castes to justice. The article explores how Arunthathiyars are …
Struggles over work take place at home: Women’s decisions, choices and constraints in the Tiruppur textile industry, India
Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India
This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An…
Paperwork, patronage, and citizenship: The materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu, India
This article explores the material practices through which lower-caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork - such as ration cards and community certificates - as a 'lens' through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of lite…
Good debts, bad debts: Microcredit and managing debt in rural south India
This paper engages with debates around microcredit, once a development success story, but now much critiqued. Arguing that microcredit can only be understood within the wider context of debt, we draw on ethnographic material from two villages in Tamil Nadu, to examine how microcredit through self‐help groups sits within a broader context of indebtedness among the rural labouring classes. We describe patterns and sources of borrowing among the poo…
Transparency, exclusion and mediation: How digital and biometric technologies are transforming social protection in Tamil Nadu, India
What are the effects of biometric and digital technologies on social protection for the poor in India? Drawing on ethnographic research from rural Tamil Nadu, this paper presents evidence of how new technologies are experienced by beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System (PDS), and analyses the impacts of technology innovations on transparency, exclusion and mediation. The authors focus on the implementation of ‘smartcards,’ new digitised …
Training for employment or skilling up from employment? Jobs and skills acquisition in the Tiruppur textile region, India
This paper explores how skills for garment work are acquired in the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, one of India’s largest garment manufacturing clusters. Drawing on a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with garment workers in Tiruppur’s hinterland, we document the informal pathways of skill acquisition for garment work and advocate a demand-driven approach to vocational training. Such an approach, first, unsettles linear policy assumpt…
Informal, individual and cumulative labour agency: Reconceptualising capital's socio-spatial fix in the south Indian garment industry
This paper reconceptualises labour agency by examining the cumulative impact of informal and individual worker agency on capital’s search for a social-spatial fix in the Tiruppur garment industry in Tamil Nadu, India. The study foregrounds everyday micro-acts—such as choosing, refusing, and exiting work—as significant forms of agency, especially when viewed in aggregate. Based on ethnographic research, we explore how these acts influence the soci…
Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Tamil (11 works) · Caste (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Economic growth (8 works) · Politics (7 works)