Social Trends, Vol. 04

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/3584

EDITORIAL NOTE

It is indeed gratifying that the fourth volume of Social Trends is being published on time. This year, an important landmark has been reached and that is the journal has been approved by the UGC. This recognition has already motivated the young scholars to write for the otherwise young journal.

The developments guide me to approach my task with greater vigour. I can see the young minds inching towards maturity, ready to take on new challenges. I thoroughly enjoy passing on the editorial tips out of my experience to the scholars who are not my direct students. In a way, thus, I get an opportunity to dialogue with a larger body of inquisitive minds. I enjoy doing this meager service to the growth of the discipline.

The journal offers an opportunity for the young and established scholars to write experimental papers. One can see that the papers by Pinaki Roy, Jhuma Chakraborty and Sritama Basu, and Sanjay K. Roy in this volume have been written applying auto ethnography, in line with the tradition set by scholars like S. C. Dube, M. N. Srinivas, C. Wright Mills, to mention only a few. The idea is to explore the rich reserve of our personal experiences, reflect on them dialogically, objectify them and draw discourses, which would give us some idea about how people in general organize their everyday life, coordinating consciousness and actions.

Since we published the last volume of Social Trends, we have lost our beloved Prof. Sharit Kr. Bhowmik, a member of the Advisory Committee of the journal, a former faculty of the Department of Sociology, NBU, and a leading sociologist in the country. We have included an obituary on Prof. Bhowmik, in this volume.

Prof. Rajatsubhra Mukhopadhyay, a faculty of the Department of Sociology and a member of the editorial team of the journal, has retired on 9 November 2016 after serving the Department for 31 years. We have included in this volume a note of appreciation, which was accepted in his farewell meeting, held on 16 December 2016 in the Department of Sociology.

I would thank the members of the Advisory Committee, my colleagues on the Editorial Board, the contributors and the reviewers for their kind help and suggestions in bringing out the fourth volume of the journal.

Sanjay K. Roy
31 March 2017
North Bengal University




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    Culture shock at universities : suburban students and their experience of marginality
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2017) Bhowmick, Arunima
    Marginality is a condition of disadvantaged individuals and communities that arises due to unfavourable environmental, cultural, social, political and economic factors. The vulnerable situation that they confront can be either societal or spatial, very often, both. This paper seeks to understand predicaments and vulnerabilities of students coming to universities in metropolitan Kolkata from the margins of the city, more often referred to as the “suburbs”. The study is an attempt to relook marginality in the face of globalisation and dissect the context of regionalism in this light. The study has gathered strength from case studies of students coming to universities from these regions and an account of their conditions and sense of discrimination has been recorded. Their sense of marginality finds manifestation in difference of language, more precisely their speech and diction, fashion and most importantly lifestyle. Tracing the origin of the concept of marginality back to the one who coined it, Robert Ezra Park (1928), young students were found placed between multiple cultures and their negotiations give rise to a “hybrid” personality or the marginal man. Students from suburbs might not necessarily have pronounced class differences with the local residential students, but their possession of “cultural capital” and further access to it in the universities often become a ripe condition for furthering marginalization. Finally, the paper engages in addressing the vital question — whether to uphold “affirmative action” and support the marginal status, or create a collective of poorly privileged?