Empowering women or institutionalizing women's agency: an ethnography of the Mahila Samakhaya education program for women in India
Year: 2005
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The central argument of this dissertation is that programs of empowerment or \nthose that seek to foster women’s agency infact pose problems for it in and through their \ninstitutionalization. It selects a government sponsored education program for women in \nIndia (Mahila Samakhaya) to produce a critical ethnography of its institutionalization and \nof its effects on women’s agency in Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. Institutionalization \nof a program here refers to institutionalization of education in the rural context of Banda. \nThe process involves two stages: recruiting local women as functionaries/ agents and \ncreating frameworks/ institutions for education through the assistance of such \nfunctionaries. Experiences and articulations around empowerment are therefore relative \nto the levels of responsibilities vis-à-vis the program’s institutionalization at the \ngrassroots. Infact institutionalization complicated women’s experience of empowerment. \nEven as the process fostered women’s individual agency in similar/ different ways, the \nrules of structuring/ structured interventions subverted the formation of a women’s \ncollective. This weakened women’s bargaining power in matters regarding their agency. \nDissent and self-reflection were penalized elsewhere in districts where the program \ncontinued to function after 2001. This ethnography then raises concerns around feminist \ntheory and praxis. If institutionalization is inevitable under conditions of globalization, \nthen it is imperative to rethink and reconstruct feminist spaces for critical reflection \nregarding governance, development, and women’s agency in the same context. The \nsurvival of the “ultra-poor” is contingent upon the responsiveness of policy to their \nchanging lived realities/ needs within its actualized framework, than upon its theoretical \nsensibilities.
Author: Shubhra Sharma
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1945368265