Prinicipal Investigator: Cecile Jackson. Lead Organisation: University of East Anglia
Development policy, economists' models, and gendered anthropological research are concerned with understanding the space for empowerment of those who suffer illbeing through their gender identity. This involves grappling with the exercise of agency within marriage, and the ways in which power is expressed, controlled, effective and thwarted in the everyday conduct of conjugality, and the trajectories of marriage, divorce, remarriage and non-marriage over the life course. The research is based on a study of a rural area of eastern Uganda, dominated by the Bagisu, and on multiple methods, including survey data, ethnography and the methods of experimental economics with married couples.
Research questions:
- What gender gaps are there in achieved wellbeing of spouses and how they are perceived?
- What are the contributions, perceived and actual, of spouses to joint livelihoods?
- How does household poverty relate to the individual power of women, and gender relations?
- What patterns the bargaining power of spouses?
- What do experimental games tell us about intrahousehold relations?
- How far does the cooperative conflict model explain differential wellbeing outcomes and gender inequality in a rural African context?
- What methods are most effective for studying gender relations within domestic groups?