This book presents a rigorous empirical study of various aspects of poverty alleviation in rural Bangladesh. The themes include the trend and structure of rural poverty and the role of microfinance in alleviating rural poverty through participation of the rural poor in NGOs and microfinance institutions (MFIs). It also includes different challenges of participation of rural poor women in NGO-MFIs. In probing those issues, this book employs a different approach of investigation. In comparison with other poverty studies, this book can claim a number of distinct features. First, this book probes the participation behavior of rural poor women who face different socioeconomic, cultural and psycho-attitudinal challenges to participate in NGO-MFIs which ultimately prevented the attainment of the prime objective of poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. In analyzing those issues, this book uses a social psychological theory named the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical model upon which the research framework was grounded upon. Second, unlike other studies which are based on relatively small and unrepresentative samples, this book is based on a nationally representative large-scale survey. Third, even though it employs a cross-sectional survey, the study explored in this book attempts to infuse an element of dynamics by employing information on both current and initial condition of resources of households being defined as the resource-base a household had inherited at the time it was formed. This type of data-set helped analyze the dynamics of resource adequacy of the participants in NGO-MFIs which yielded key insights into the challenges of poverty alleviation. Fourth, a concern with the possible influence of microfinance in the economy runs as an intrinsic theme throughout the book. In addition to devoting a long chapter of emergence of NGO-MFIs in Bangladesh, the author analyzes the role of microfinance in its specific contexts in each subsequent chapter, for example, in shaping the trends in poverty, inequality, resource accumulation and in influencing participation of the rural poor in NGO-MFIs and in affecting the ability of the rural poor to be free from poverty and to cope with environmental shocks. Some remarks on possible prospects or recommendations are provided at the end of the book.

India's growth story is set to take a significant turn with the Government of India announcing its mission of 'Doubling of Farmers' Income by 2022'. The Indian government expects significant increases in the income of farmers through enhancement in agricultural production and productivity, reduction in cost of cultivation, crop diversification, promotion of allied and off-farm activities, efficient value chain management, and marketing of produce through electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM). Issues facing India's rural economy are thus going to come under sharp focus. NABARD's Rural India Perspective 2017 provides a comprehensive view of these issues, and prescribes policy interventions to address them. The volume is a compilation of insightful essays written by eminent researchers, practitioners, and experts in the field of Indian agriculture and rural development. It recommends carrying out innovations all along the agricultural value chains in order to make agriculture more profitable, productive, and sustainable. This, however, would entail massive investments in various fields such as irrigation, high-value agriculture, dairy, poultry, and rural infrastructure.

"This work is a profound and fundamental contribution to the issues addressed."-Sociology "Vital to an understanding of peasant politics."-Library Journal James C. Scott places the critical problem of the peasant household-subsistence-at the center of this study. The fear of food shortages, he argues persuasively, explains many otherwise puzzling technical, social, and moral arrangements in peasant society, such as resistance to innovation, the desire to own land even at some cost in terms of income, relationships with other people, and relationships with institutions, including the state. Once the centrality of the subsistence problem is recognized, its effects on notions of economic and political justice can also be seen. Scott draws from the history of agrarian society in lower Burma and Vietnam to show how the transformations of the colonial era systematically violated the peasants' "moral economy" and created a situation of potential rebellion and revolution. Demonstrating keen insights into the behavior of people in other cultures and a rare ability to generalize soundly from case studies, Scott offers a different perspective on peasant behavior that will be of interest particularly to political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and Southeast Asianists.

For nearly four decades, China's manufacturing boom has been powered by the labor of 287 million rural migrant workers, who travel seasonally between villages where they farm for subsistence and cities where they work. Yet recently local governments have moved away from manufacturing and toward urban expansion and construction as a development strategy. As a result, at least 88 million rural people to date have lost rights to village land. In Beneath the China Boom, Julia Chuang follows the trajectories of rural workers, who were once supported by a village welfare state and are now landless. This book provides a view of the undertow of China's economic success, and the periodic crises-a rural fiscal crisis, a runaway urbanization-that it first created and now must resolve.

Bang Chan traces the changing cultural characteristics of a small Siamese village during the century and a quarter from its founding as a wilderness settlement outside Bangkok to its absorption into the urban spread of the Thai capital. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book sums up the major findings of a pioneering interdisciplinary research project that began in 1948. Changes in Bang Chan's social organization, technology, economy, governance, education, and religion are portrayed in the context of local and national developments.

The lived experiences of students’ educational practices are analysed and explained in terms of the book’s plea for the recognition of the ‘multi-dimentionality’ of students as educational beings with unexplored cultural wealth and hidden capitals. The book presents an argument that student lives are entangled in complex social-spatial relations and processes that extend across family, neighbourhood and peer associations, which are largely misrecognised in educational policy and practice. The book is relevant to understanding the role of policy, curriculum and pedagogy in addressing the educational performance of working-class youth.

Following on from the preceding volume in this series that focused on innovation and implementation in the context of school-university-community collaborations in rural places, this volume explores the positive impact of such collaborations in rural places, focusing specifically on the change agency of such collaborations. The relentless demand of urban places in general for the food and resources (e.g., mineral and energy resources) originating in rural places tends to overshadow the impact of the inevitable changes wrought by increasing efficiency in the supply chain. Youth brought-up in rural places tend to gravitate to urban places for higher education and employment, social interaction and cultural affordances, and only some of them return to enrich their places of origin. On one hand, the outcome of the arguable predominance of more populated areas in the national consciousness has been described as "urbanormativity"-a sense that what happens in urban areas is the norm. By implication, rural areas strive to approach the norm. On the other hand, a mythology of rural places as repositories of traditional values, while flattering, fails to take into account the inherent complexities of the rural context. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four parts-the first three of which explore, in turn, collaborations that target instructional leadership, increase opportunities for underserved people, and target wicked problems. The fourth part consists of four chapters that showcase international perspectives on school-university-community collaborations between countries (Australia and the United States), within China, within Africa, and within Australia. The overwhelming sense of the chapters in this volume is that the most compelling evidence of impact of school-university community collaborations in rural places emanates from collaborations brokered by schools-communities to which universities bring pertinent resources.

This volume is based on papers from the second in a series of three conferences that deal with the multi-scalar processes of heritage-making, ranging from the local to the national and international levels, involving different players with different degrees of agency and interests. These players include citizens and civil society, the state, and international organizations and actors. The current volume focuses on the role of citizens and civil society in the politics of heritage-making, looking at how these players at the grass-roots level make sense of the past in the present. Who are these local players that seek to define the meaning of heritage in their everyday lives? How do they negotiate with the state, or contest the influence of the state, in determining what their heritage is? These and other questions will be taken up in various Asian contexts in this volume to foreground the local dynamics of heritage politics.

In Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing. America's trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated 12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about the importance of housing, community, and location in the families' dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the "mobile home industrial complex" may become caught in an expensive trap starting with their purchase of a mobile home. A family that must site its trailer in a land-lease trailer park struggles to realize any of the anticipated benefits of homeownership. Seeking to break down stereotypes, Salamon and MacTavish reveal the important place that trailer parks hold within the United States national experience. In so doing, they attempt to integrate and normalize a way of life that many see as outside the mainstream, suggesting that families who live in trailer parks, rather than being "trailer trash," culturally resemble the parks' neighbors who live in conventional homes.

In Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing. America's trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated 12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about the importance of housing, community, and location in the families' dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the "mobile home industrial complex" may become caught in an expensive trap starting with their purchase of a mobile home. A family that must site its trailer in a land-lease trailer park struggles to realize any of the anticipated benefits of homeownership. Seeking to break down stereotypes, Salamon and MacTavish reveal the important place that trailer parks hold within the United States national experience. In so doing, they attempt to integrate and normalize a way of life that many see as outside the mainstream, suggesting that families who live in trailer parks, rather than being "trailer trash," culturally resemble the parks' neighbors who live in conventional homes.