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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. …

By exploring the link between the denial of women’s reproductive rights and the denial of women’s sexual agency under patriarchy, the researchers sought to elucidate the conditions under which feminist demands around abortion have been successful by drawing together experiences from across Latin America. …

This project researched the reforms that have been taking place in Egyptian personal status laws since 2000. The aim was to examine the unfolding reform story and what it entailed in terms of successes and challenges for women's rights activists in their pursuit of justice and equality in marriage and divorce rights, and for Egyptian women at large who seek legal redress in family courts. The focus of the study was on two aspects of the reform story: 1) the process of mobilising for the new laws, building alliances, choosing strategies, and making concessions, and 2) the implementation of the legal reforms in the new family courts that were introduced in 2004. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances. …

This collection of eleven short stories by both young and established writers drew on the research of the Pathways programme for inspiration in creating a fictional narrative. The idea to transform some of the stories which the researchers uncovered during the research process into fiction grew out of a desire to reach a wider audience in demonstrating the change and conflict women encounter within their lives. The stories were developed through creative writing workshops in which different aspects of writing were debated, life stories from the research shared, and draft fictional stories were presented and discussed. The hope is that by producing this volume, these stories of ordinary women and their daily struggles, which often languish as research documents, will reach a much more diverse public. …

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.  …

This project links talented young documentary filmmakers with academics from the Pathways consortium to collaborate on a series of shorts broadly exploring concepts around women’s empowerment. …

This special issue of 'Development' originates from a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2008. It seeks to explore the linkages between sexuality and the development industry and to uncover the impacts of development on sexuality and how to move towards a more constructive engagement. …

This bulletin addresses a theme that mainstream development has persisently neglected: sexuality. Drawing on a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2005, it seeks to show why sexuality matters. It features papers from the workshop which provide diverse accounts of sexual rights conceptions, mobilisation, and new approaches to implementation. …

This project explored how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings, choices and subjectivities they derive from it. Researchers examined changing representations of women and female sexuality and explored how women in different sites and classes engage with television and attach meaning to the images that are represented on screen. They enquired whether and where there are possibilities of empowerment that open up through women's engagement, pleasure, and learning from the media. …

This research looked at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities in Bangladesh. The aim was to see whether the new forms of Islam in fact open up new spaces thereby ‘permitting’ women greater sexual rights than has been popularly perceived, and what might be learnt by the secular women’s movement from women’s organising in these new spaces. …

This research considered whether and how the work done by Women Health Workers leads to changes at the individual, family and societal levels. Researchers explored how Women Health Workers are introducing new role models for women, challenging purdah, encouraging mobility, and creating pathways of empowerment. The study compared public (government) women health workers with non-government women health workers. …

The Social Research Center at the American University Cairo recently ran and were involved with hosting two back to back workshops on Family Law. The first one on ‘Reforming Family Laws in the Middle East’ aimed to disseminate the findings of the research that the SRC team has been conducting on the reforms in Egyptian family laws. The second, which ran from 9-11 January 2009, was hosted by The Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief on ‘Guidelines for Islamic Family Law: Women’s Equality, Male Guardianship, and Legal Objectives’. …

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. …