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Housing discrimination in India from a socio-legal perspective

When: Friday, 25 October 2024 - Friday, 25 October 2024
Where: Hybrid Event
Parktown Management Campus
Start time:9:00
Enquiries:

athenkosi.pono@wits.ac.za

kitso.kgaboesele@wits.ac.za

 

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SCIS invites you to a hybrid seminar titled Housing discrimination in India from a socio-legal perspective on 25 October 2024.

The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) invites you to a hybrid seminar titled Housing discrimination in India from a socio-legal perspective on 25 October 2024. Rowena Robinson, who is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, will present this seminar.

Abstract: 
Housing discrimination may well be regarded as one of the great unmentioned crises that looms large over urban India. In contrast to those postcolonial countries where racial or ethnic discrimination is generally recognized in academic writing, here in the first decades after Independence there was little scholarly acknowledgment of socio-economic disadvantage across ethnic and religious communities, or interest in mapping it. This paper focuses on housing discrimination against Muslims in urban areas against the background of marginalization, conflict, and violence. Apart from manifest inequality, it has implications for the idea of fraternity, the crucial third in modern democracy’s triptych. How does the Indian legal system, and particularly, its constitutional structure frame this issue? It is placed here within the context of a sociological understanding of the cumulative disadvantageous effects of what are legally considered ‘private acts’ and, thus, brings a distinct perspective to the examination of vertical versus horizontal rights. While South Africa for instance seems to apply constitutional law directly to such domains, in other countries public policy in the form of equal opportunities legislation has been the chosen instrument for tackling similar forms of discrimination. The paper argues that public activism could be significant in embedding values socially and making durable the legislation arising therefrom. At the same time, it calls on the notion of ‘demosprudence’ to contend that in the context of deep-rooted structured inequalities a primary judicial step triggered by the mechanism of social action litigation may be necessary.

About the speaker:
Rowena Robinson is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay and has taught earlier at Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities. Her current areas of research include minority studies, structural inequality and ethnic conflict, constitutional law, civil society and public policy. Among other publications, she is author of Boundaries of Religion (OUP, 2013) and Tremors of violence (Sage, 2005) and editor of Minority Studies (OUP, 2012). She is co-editor of Margins of Faith: Dalit and tribal Christianity in India (Sage, 2010) and of Religious conversion in India: modes, motivations and meanings (OUP, 2003) and has also published widely on the above research themes in academic journals.

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