Empowering women or institutionalizing women's agency: an ethnography of the Mahila Samakhaya education program for women in India

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dc.contributor.advisorVisweswaran, Kamalaen
dc.creatorSharma, Shubhraen
dc.date.accessioned2008-08-28T22:42:26Zen
dc.date.accessioned2017-05-11T22:17:07Z
dc.date.available2008-08-28T22:42:26Zen
dc.date.available2017-05-11T22:17:07Z
dc.date.issued2005en
dc.descriptiontexten
dc.description.abstractThe central argument of this dissertation is that programs of empowerment or those that seek to foster women’s agency infact pose problems for it in and through their institutionalization. It selects a government sponsored education program for women in India (Mahila Samakhaya) to produce a critical ethnography of its institutionalization and of its effects on women’s agency in Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. Institutionalization of a program here refers to institutionalization of education in the rural context of Banda. The process involves two stages: recruiting local women as functionaries/ agents and creating frameworks/ institutions for education through the assistance of such functionaries. Experiences and articulations around empowerment are therefore relative to the levels of responsibilities vis-à-vis the program’s institutionalization at the grassroots. Infact institutionalization complicated women’s experience of empowerment. Even as the process fostered women’s individual agency in similar/ different ways, the rules of structuring/ structured interventions subverted the formation of a women’s collective. This weakened women’s bargaining power in matters regarding their agency. Dissent and self-reflection were penalized elsewhere in districts where the program continued to function after 2001. This ethnography then raises concerns around feminist theory and praxis. If institutionalization is inevitable under conditions of globalization, then it is imperative to rethink and reconstruct feminist spaces for critical reflection regarding governance, development, and women’s agency in the same context. The survival of the “ultra-poor” is contingent upon the responsiveness of policy to their changing lived realities/ needs within its actualized framework, than upon its theoretical sensibilities.
dc.description.departmentAnthropologyen
dc.format.mediumelectronicen
dc.identifierb61126147en
dc.identifier.oclc71004522en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2152/2308en
dc.language.isoengen
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works.en
dc.subject.lcshMahilā Samākhyā (Project : Uttar Pradesh, India)en
dc.subject.lcshWomen--Education--Indiaen
dc.subject.lcshSex discrimination in education--Indiaen
dc.subject.lcshEducation and state--Indiaen
dc.subject.lcshSex discrimination against women--Indiaen
dc.titleEmpowering women or institutionalizing women's agency: an ethnography of the Mahila Samakhaya education program for women in Indiaen
dc.type.genreThesisen

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