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Popular music plays a significant part in the everyday lives of people across age, class, religion, ethnicity and social occasion. In Africa, musicians are frequently powerful public figures capable of conveying ideologies through their lyrical and verbal pronouncements. Many popular songs portray women as sex objects and convey misogynistic constructions of women. At the same time, however, other songs hail women as perfect lovers and sacrificial mothers. …

This article maps the multiple methods used to bring scholar-activists, music producers and music consumers together in a conversation that culminated in the creation of three winning ‘empowering songs’ from the ‘Changing representations of women in popular music’ project. This project explores the gendered stereotypes of women in popular music, and seeks to contribute to reflection on, and creation of, alternative (empowering) narratives about women through song. The article discusses this marriage of research and advocacy and reflects on some of the outcomes from ‘corporate’ reflections – all of which generated a lot of passion about the tensions and possibilities around women’s representations and roles. The authors conclude that for research findings to have practical and policy value and legitimacy, what, how, when and where we communicate our messages is extremely important. …

This presentation made to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011, reflected on the Digital Story-Telling Workshops organized by the Pathways Programme. Digital Stories are 2-4 minute “films” that individuals create by combing their own narration with personal photographs, scanned artefacts and music to share a story about their own life. These workshops, which focused on stories of empowerment, were held in order to counter mainstream narratives of women’s lives and create an opportunity to document stories that may not be heard otherwise. Empowerment means different things to different people and the participants brought their own experiences and understandings of it to the workshop, some of which the organisers attempted to challenge and others which challenged us. …

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. …

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. …

The downfall of Suharto's regime in 1998 has been marked by the increasing visibility of Islamic piety in a form of popular culture. Tracing the emergent new genre of sinetron religi (religious TV series/serials), this paper analyses the discourses of Islamic piety in several different series/serials, the construction of the public and the wider implication of these discourses for the position of Islam culturally and politically in Indonesia. This article argues that religious melodrama series/serials are a site of contestation of incoherent concepts of piety. As cultural texts, they interpellate their public and allow us to see how the visibility of religious discourses in public becomes a subject of negotiations and confrontations, while at the same time they trigger the politicisation of piety as national identity. …

Ama Ata Aidoo is an iconic African writer who has inspired generations of black and other women writers. This latest collection of short stories brings together diverse themes that speak of the relationship between Africa and its diaspora in terms of home, exile and sense of belonging and alienation. It reveals the complexities involved in the African diaspora connections, engaging with a sense of anomie and fragmentation, revealing her interest in presenting common human frailties. Steeped in Ghanaian and African history, her craftmanship also embraces pertinent new levels. …

This project sought to explore and understand the ways in which women are represented in different music genres, and by different artistes over the period 1970 to date. The researchers examined the main themes about women in the song lyrics, both explicit and implicit, focusing on narratives of women's bodies and their roles as workers, providers and caregivers. …

The special journal issue sprung out of a special panel at the IACS 2009 Tokyo Conference. The panel, entitled ‘Women Negotiating Islam’ had looked at how women in different locations cope with the ways that religion, either as politics or as culture, enters their lives. …

The project explored the identity formation of Bengali Muslim women by investigating the cultural and political history of Bangladesh spanning the 20th Century. Researchers investigated how women placed themselves in the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the early twentieth century; the import of language, culture and national identity for Bengali Muslims during the middle decades; and the contestations between nation, culture, progress, modernity and women's sexuality in a globalised world towards the end of the millennium. …

Pathways South Asia used digital storytelling to document the experiences of growth and transformation in women's lives from their own perspectives, in their own words and voices. The workshops the team held in Dhaka and Chittagong enabled participants to make a 3-4 minute multimedia presentation by themselves, providing moving testimonies of individual lives and the contexts in which empowerment/disempowerment is experienced. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …

The Ghana Team had a unique experience on the weekend of 25-27 April 2008, learning photography and video techniques, under the tutelage of Tessa Lewin, the RPC Communications and Learning Officer and Anna Kari and Guilhem Alandry of Documentography. Participants were from the Foundation for Female Photojournalists (FFP), Memento Films, and one each from the Institute of African Studies and RPC Ghana and the training took place at the University of Ghana, Legon campus. …

Popular music is a powerful medium for reinforcing and dictating what is in vogue or considered the norm for society. The songs are played on radio, television and the internet, and in the two latter cases are typically accompanied by musical videos which often depict women’s bodies through dance (often quite provocative). Music is heard daily booming from shops, restaurants, taxis, buses, lorries, and other social spaces. Social gatherings such as marriage and naming ceremonies, funerals, commissioning of projects are deemed dull without music. …