Conceptions of Women's Empowerment
Photo/Andrea Cornwall
How is women’s empowerment conceived by those engaged in seeking to bring it about - and by women themselves? How do conceptions of empowerment vary cross-culturally? How do development narratives on empowerment translate into diverse local contexts and languages? What is needed to build a ‘new narrative’ on women’s empowerment that takes context, culture and history into account?
Work under this theme will explore:
- changing narratives on women’s empowerment in each of our regional contexts - how different actors (government, international agencies, feminist movements and women’s organizations) understand it and how these understandings translate into policy and practice
- ways of building theory from ‘below’, rooted in regional contexts, languages and debates rather than transposed onto diverse realities by supranational actors and ahistorical, acontextual development policies
- tracing the trajectories of development discourses on empowerment (where they come from, where they map onto local/national policies and practices) and unpacking their presuppositions about power and change in our different settings
- ways of engaging with popular media, story-telling, photography and film to open spaces for dialogue on empowerment and generate a contextualised understanding of the relationships between empowerment, justice, wellbeing and social change in favour of greater social justice
Latest
Empowering Women through Fairytales and Folk Stories
The Women and Memory Forum - a partner within the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC - are looking at how Arabic folk stories present stereotypical images of women and exploring how these tales can be rewritten to empower women with more positive role models. A performance by Women and Memory of the stories took place in Cairo on 15 June 2008 - see the report by Tessa Lewin on the IDS website and you can download extracts from the performance at Open Democracy.
Partners: