Conceptions of Women's Empowerment

Nazilde from Brazil

Photo/Andrea Cornwall

How is women’s empowerment conceived by those engaged in seeking to bring it about - and by women themselves? How do conceptions of empowerment vary cross-culturally? How do development narratives on empowerment translate into diverse local contexts and languages? What is needed to build a ‘new narrative’ on women’s empowerment that takes context, culture and history into account?

Work under this theme will explore:

changing narratives on women’s empowerment in each of our regional contexts - how different actors (government, international agencies, feminist movements and women’s organizations) understand it and how these understandings translate into policy and practice
ways of building theory from ‘below’, rooted in regional contexts, languages and debates rather than transposed onto diverse realities by supranational actors and ahistorical, acontextual development policies
tracing the trajectories of development discourses on empowerment (where they come from, where they map onto local/national policies and practices) and unpacking their presuppositions about power and change in our different settings
ways of engaging with popular media, story-telling, photography and film to open spaces for dialogue on empowerment and generate a contextualised understanding of the relationships between empowerment, justice, wellbeing and social change in favour of greater social justice