Introduction

The South Asia Hub of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research consortium held an inception workshop based on scoping papers on the themes of ‘voice’, ‘work’, and ‘body’. The purpose of the research is to seek to identify discourses and interventions that have led to the greater empowerment of women, based on these three themes. The papers in this book are culled from that inception workshop and give an idea of the mosaic that forms the lives of women in the heartland of South Asia. Three main arenas of activism and interventions emerge from the papers. One very important arena of intervention has been national or local civil society movements and organisations. Apart from civil society movements, governments or state machineries affect processes of women’s empowerment as they respond to the needs of their citizens. The final area of intervention is the international sphere. The papers in this volume not only review the history and thinking around each of the three themes of body, work and voice, but also show new directions and pathways that are opening up for women to traverse.