Toward Wellness
A Theoretical and Practical Rationale for Alternatives to the Twelve-Step/Disease Model
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session William Marek
This qualitative research explores the major and minor features and attributes of the Twelve-Step / disease model, followed by comments and disputes of each of those attributes. The paper concludes with alternatives to the model. An argument is made that the model is the primary reason for addicts who remain addicted.
Civil Society Engagement for Ecology, Health and Farmers' Livelihoods: Two Case Studies from Organic Food Movements in Bangkok, Thailand and Chennai, India
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Judith Bopp
Organic food movements are globally gaining momentum. In Thailand and India, the industrialisation of agriculture and climate change-related unpredictability has degraded many rural areas. Urban sprawl reduces agricultural resources in peri-urban areas, and many farmers shift towards non-farming occupation. Organic farming methods have consequently re-emerged as means to health and livelihood improvement while the claim for nutritional, healthy foods rises in the urban centres. In the organic food movements in Bangkok and Chennai, a variety of civil society stakeholders engages to challenge the public food system in a bottom-up manner. Many rural farmers have joined the movement, for most know from their own experience that the handling of agro-chemicals affects health, soils and overall farm ecology. This paper presents empirical findings from field research conducted in Bangkok, Thailand (2013-2016), and Chennai, India (2017). It elaborates how the civil stakeholder challenges the public food system through bottom-up participation, and how local movements may actually model for global sustainability transformations. It borrows from New Social Movement theories (e.g. Scott, 1990) and social ecological approaches. The research draws on expert interviews, informal discussions and long-term observations, as well as an annual transdisciplinary Indo-German workshop. Corresponding to the heterogeneity of ‘New Globalisation’ processes, this paper discerns the diverse practices of local communities by the example of the organic food movements in Bangkok and Chennai. These receive impulse largely from within their own societies, drawing on local knowledge. Beyond, stakeholders embrace local spiritual-cultural traits, which distinguish the movement from those of other global regions.
Tackling Sanitation in Urban Informal Housing in the Age of the Clean India Mission
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarita Panchang
India has some of the largest gaps in access to safe sanitation in the world, and open defecation (OD) remains a practice that is as common as it is politicized. With the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals now in place, India has recently embarked on a campaign to promote sanitation and eliminate OD nationwide by October 2019. This World Bank-funded campaign is called Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBM) and has had controversial impacts thus far. While more sanitation provisions are needed, insights from political ecology and critical medical anthropology have made clear that merely building more infrastructure or implementing community-based projects are not neutral, clear-cut solutions. People’s demands for sanitation must be interrogated alongside the stigmatization of health behaviors such as OD, to ask whose needs are served by particular discourses. Though a great deal has been written on class politics and urban sanitation in India, less studied are the dynamics of sanitation within heterogeneous slum communities. I draw on fieldwork from two urban slum communities in the state of Maharashtra to highlight how residents of informal housing manage the challenges of toilet provisioning in relation to larger questions of infrastructure access, housing insecurity, and urban development more broadly. I bring these findings into conversation on the ability of SBM to respond more effectively to sanitation challenges on the ground in cities.
