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Final synthesis report of the South Asia Hub of the Pathways RPC covering the period 2006-2011. This 40 page report details the context and background for the research areas, overviews of the research projects, specific analysis of some research projects, hub highlights and short biographies of the researchers. …

This chapter argues that the Sudan experience puts into question the quota as a pathway for political power. It also argues that an explicit concern with numbers, and by extension quotas, can lead to unexpected pitfalls, since centralised and authoritarian regimes (and parties) can readily impose quotas from the top down. Quotas do not by default widen or transform political opportunities for women who come from diverse backgrounds and who carry with them complex identities, and in fact, quotas can serve to consolidate the status quo ‑ both at the level of party politics as well as in regards to patriarchal conceptions of women’s place. …

Final synthesis report from the West Africa Hub of Pathways of Women’s Empowerment (Pathways) - an international research and communications programme that has focused for the five years from 2006-2011 on understanding and influencing efforts to bring about positive change in women’s lives. After an introduction to the West Africa research projects within the four research themes, the report analyses selected research. Highlights from the WA Hub are given along with a detailed list of research outputs. …

This presentation to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011 outlines Pathways South Asia research which explores Bengali women's ability to become cultural markers and their place in shaping an emerging nationalist discourse. By using a focus on music, the research looks at the binary between the secular and the religious and questions how the Bangladeshi nation can be understood through this through history. …

The rise in an intense, textually‐based piety, which has become increasingly prevalent in many circles in Bangladesh in the past decade, sees music as taking away from an ideal pious disposition, and therefore considers its removal from everyday life as a requisite to becoming a good Muslim. The removal of music is critically looked upon by secular Bengali Muslims, where singing, especially songs of the Nobel Laureate Tagore, is equated with cultural pride and Bangladeshi nationalism in the secular‐liberal, especially the intellectual imaginary. The shunning of such music is thus tantamount to shunning ‘Bengaliness’ and a source of anxiety for the nationalist. In this article, through a deeper exploration of women's struggles of and sense of achievement in giving up music, I argue that for the women in pursuit of piety, what the act of giving up music speaks to is inner changes that enable them to critically reflect upon roles and relationships that have long been the defining features of a particular kind of middle class, Bengali, feminine self. …

This pilot study was conducted over a two-month period in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Seventeen women from different socio-economic, educational, religious, and ethnic backgrounds were interviewed and they were encouraged to talk about the following: family life while growing up, marriage, work and education, the war, religion, excision, politics, their take on empowerment and general concerns about Salone society. The report includes transcripts from some of the interviews. …

Susie Jolly asks if we can reclaim sexual pleasure from the grip of the market and influence the terms on which the market engages with pleasure. She proposes a political perspective on sexuality which challenges the structures and ideologies that generate guilt and shame and make pleasure more accessible to some groups than others. …

The women of Indonesia with unwanted pregnancies face stark choices: giving birth and facing social ostracism, loss of family support network, and even harsh criminal punishment; or an abortion from a clandestine provider, risking serious injury or death. The complexity of Indonesian life is multifaceted. Ruled by multiple formal and traditional legal systems, it remains embroiled in an on-going struggle to establish its identity during the process of democratization and a strengthening of Islamic values in a time when the vast majority of its population, as Muslims, feel under attack by the West’s ‘war on terror’. The campaign to bring in a new health bill including the decriminalization of abortion has been challenged, facing lack of consensus that high maternal mortality rates are primarily caused by clandestine abortions, varying reasons behind reforms to the health law, and lack of political will to see through the change because of difference of opinion. …

A diverse mix of people came together in Dakar, Senegal from 13-19 October 2007, to debate issues of men, gender and power: unconventional practical academics, open-minded policymakers, reflective practitioners and activists. It was a unique gathering and offered a unique opportunity – to inform and inspire a greater engagement by men in the struggle for gender justice and broader social change. The symposium was borne out of a realization that much of the most innovative work on men and masculinities has worked at the level of the personal, such as seeking to transform men’s sexual behaviour, violence against women and relations of fatherhood. The HIV epidemic has forced an open space for greater acknowledgement of the fluidity and diversity of men’s sexual and social identities. …

In 2006, women constituted only 5 per cent of elected members and about 35 per cent of appointed members in 97 out of 110 district assemblies.  In this chapter, which is based on life history interviews with 32 elected and appointed District Assembly Women held by the Ghana Hub in 2007, Professor Manuh explores the personal biographies and factors that have enhanced opportunities for them to gain access to political power, including their backers and mentors at local level, and how this influences their agendas as assembly women as well as their experience of politics, how they perceive their roles and the kind of power they claim, and what they can do with it once they are in office. …

This research examined the complexity of gendered subjectivity in Gaza Strip and how it is reshaped in a contradictory manner in the context of livelihood crisis and insecurity caused by the full siege imposed on Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation and the international community. The research is unique because it attempted to deal with the reality of women’s everyday life and avoided any standardized framework of gender analysis. It focused on the contextualization of the concept of women’s agency based on the narration of women’s stories and life experiences. The documentation of poor women’s interpretation of their daily life is the basis for creating new knowledge and new theories. …

Representations of women in popular music can reinforce or challenge stereotypes. Pathways researchers, Akosua Adomako and Awo Asiedu, researched the changing representations of women in Ghanaian popular culture. They analysed the gender content of the lyrics of 250 Ghanaian popular songs from the 1950s to the present. Their textual analysis showed that the messages contained in these songs were often negative, portraying women as sex objects, or as fickle and jealous. …

Walking down the streets of Dhaka – or anywhere in Bangladesh for that matter – popular expressions of matters of faith, specifically Islam, strike the eye. Painted on public transport vehicles such as trucks, three-wheeled auto taxis or bicycle rickshaws, painted on walls and minarets of mosques, paintings and calligraphy dot the landscape. While Islamic expressions are normally associated with high art forms that reflect deep spirituality and faith, or more recently with the growing politicization which is often seen as extremism or fanaticism, these popular images reflect an every day and comfortable co-existence with the faith. Eschewing the high art forms of the Mughal and Sultanate traditions of the 15th to the 18th centuries, these images reflect a more folk tradition, and an easy accommodation with religion and culture. …

This article is based on the experiences and reflections of a group of researchers in Bangladesh (of which we were members) studying women's empowerment. We investigate the kinds of epistemological and ethical dilemmas that arose from how they selectively presented their identities to gain access and tried to create ‘positional spaces’ in conducting fieldwork. We also explore how these researchers engaged in co-production of knowledge with research participants and tried to balance our multiple accountabilities in this process. By exploring these issues, we analyse assumptions about ‘feminist’ research practices and our struggles to live up to these. …

In several respects, waste pickers pose challenges to organizing: they are physically dispersed, have no employer, many work long hours, and they are socially shunned. Yet Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP), a waste pickers’ trade union has for nearly twenty years sustained a vibrant organization which has made tangible material and social gains on behalf of its membership. Its offspring, SWaCH (Solid Waste Collection and Handling), is growing in strength as a model for the new face of solid waste management in India; one which has put the interests of a very marginalized constituency of waste pickers in retaining access to waste as its top priority. This chapter highlights some aspects of its approach and strategies which have contributed to this progress. …