development at CIRED, the Center for International Research Education and Development
Sofi I think you need to move the slide forward there you go thank you so some of that I'm going
to say but anyway welcome to our second virtual Women and Gender in Development discussion series.
Before introducing our speaker I'd like to read the following land acknowledgement statement.
We acknowledge the Tutelo Monacan people who are the traditional custodians of the land
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we can show the chat. The full calendar and the updates for this year's discussion series can be
seen on our website and if we shut the powerpoint we will be able to put some things in chat so some
housekeeping this event will last approximately an hour or the presentation will be about 25 minutes
and then we'll have about 25 minutes for Q&A and discussion. We really are an experimenting
stage here with this virtual event so we've got all dial-in and all participants are
muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption until the final discussion and
you're welcome to use the chat to post questions anytime during the presentation we'll be keeping
track of those and we'll get to them at the end of the presentation and um we also are going to
address several questions that came in uh when people registered so before the events started
so in order for this discussion to be as rich as it can be we need everyone to be respectful
and treat all participants with kindness and consideration without discriminatory behavior
i think it goes without saying but always worth stressing we are recording this webinar and you
will have access to it later at VTechWorks. We'll also send you a link at the end of the event uh to
a survey that we really ask you to take just just a couple minutes probably taking two minutes to do
and then those are you that use twitter please tweet using the hashtag #IntoTheField and tagging
us at @WGD_VT that'll be in the chat as well so let me introduce our speaker we're very excited
that despite Covid making things really difficult for us Dr. Carly Nichols has agreed to join us.
Dr. Nichols is an assistant professor at the department of geographical and sustainability
sciences global health studies program, University of Iowa. She's a broadly trained
human environment geographer with specializations in feminist health and agrofood geographies.
Dr. Nichols has over 10 years of research experience across northern eastern and central
India investigating agriculture health gender and food and nutrition security her research examines
the complex interplay among processes of women of i'm sorry human health and well-being ecological
change and everyday social relations particularly in relation to food and agriculture. She has a
particular interest in using qualitative ethnographic and feminist methods to
understand how health and social inequities are produced reproduced and experienced by different
stakeholders. So please welcome Dr. Carly Nichols and thank you, thank you all for joining us.
Oh here we go hi there we go it's so good to be here thank you Maria Elisa for inviting me
and I really appreciate all of you showing up today so let's get
started. Today I'm presenting a draft of a paper that I'm calling towards the politics of
mobility and women's empowerment and as you may be able to tell from the subtitle the data for this
presentation comes from ethnographic research I did in 2016 and 2018 and these two states of India
highlighted in the map here, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. I was working with women's self-help
groups or SHGs. Now these are typically small groups of women, eight or ten who meet for
weekly meetings to do small savings and lending activities now often a central justification for
self-help groups is that they give women who were often relegated to the homestead or agricultural
fields newfound opportunities for empowerment through expanding their mobility to attend
village meetings and beyond and also giving them access to capital through group savings
uh more recently shg's which are widespread across south asia have increasingly been seen as
promising platforms for development so this means other developmental programs such as those focused
on sanitation or health or nutrition are layered on top of the shg's core saving and lending work
the programs train shg women on key sets of knowledge such as health or nutrition and then
motivate them to freely share this knowledge with others in their village this is seen as a
win-win solution and that it directly empowers selected women through intensely training them
and encouraging them to be community leaders and it's also cost effective since these women only
share knowledge in their immediate vicinity they are volunteers or have small honorariums
the idea is that they'll continue to share this information even beyond the life of the project
so i was in madhya pradesh and working with uh ngo that i'm calling ajivaca in 2016 and 18 looking at
the broader political implications of addressing nutrition through these self-help groups
however as a feminist geographer and an ethnographer i became
extremely interested in the way that these women were engaged in new mobility practices
uh that's in this paper i'm answering the research question how did women feel about these
new opportunities for mobility they had through shg involvement and what did it mean for their
empowerment so i'm just going to give you a little cut to the chase teaser of what this paper argues
i advance an argument that critiques a taken for granted assumption that traverses much
of the development literature and thinking that increased mobility is evidence of empowerment or
is inevitably a pathway to greater empowerment through my ethnographic research i find that
while nobility is initially experienced positively for many women it remains far from free and they
oftentimes remained embedded in power relations and continue to engage in unfavorable terms
of course there was contestation within that and i am excited to explain more to you over the next 20
minutes so i'm gonna proceed by way of a short exemplary vignette a little more background my
methods and then some highlights from the empirics of this paper so i want you to meet ranjala
she is a woman in her mid-20s that lives in the northern district of jericho
she recently began working as a nutrition trainer for her self-help group she invited
me one day to come with her to go to a dietary diversity training she was about to give about
two kilometers from her home now this was in her village but in a further away hamlet from
where she lived she grabbed my hand and directed me towards a grove of trees off the beaten path
she flashed a smile and told me this was her chota rasta or hindi for shortcut i was impressed and
asked her how she learned this route she explained it was only the last couple months since she
started doing work for the shg's and delivering these trainings she seemed excited and proud to
be expertly traversing the landscape so i asked her how she felt about this new fountain from
newfound mobility she said it was nice that people recognized her now that didn't recognize
her before and that she enjoyed teaching women about things they didn't know and really engaged
enjoyed this interaction she paused and lowered her voice and she said the only problem was
that the pay was very low i was struck by this since the strategy of this intervention was not
to give her a job but to cultivate her as a community leader the ngo supervisors that
enrolled her in this position made clear this was not a job but this was just a community service
and the real benefit came from her own development and knowledge and the upliftment of her community
they felt that by not incentivizing her with money that the likelihood
of her continuing to share this information beyond the life of the project would increase
so of course with all of this knowledge in mind i asked ranjalo what she would do when these
honorariums that she received eventually ceased would she still wander between hamlets and talk
with women about nutrition and health or would she go back to remaining in her own hamlet in her
house like she did before without missing a beat ranjala looks at me and tells me that without the
honorarium wandering between villages is merely quote time waste so this vignette exemplifies
how spatial mobility in the context of women's empowerment and self-help groups in particular
is quite complex neither kabir defines empowerment as a process where relatively disempowered
groups or individuals change the relations of power so they can live their lives in the way
they wish for kabir this involves an expansion of resources including material resources like
land income or productive assets as well as what she calls discursive resources which
amount to a critical consciousness of analyzing the social norms within which one is embedded
so these expanded resources coupled with an expanded opportunity to exert agency or make
decisions about one's life leads to what kabir calls achievements or empowered new ways of living
now scholars routinely emphasize like underlying routinely emphasize that empowerment is complex
in a context specific process nonetheless women's mobility continues to regularly be used as an
indicator of empowerment and is evidence of women exercising their agency so from
early efforts to try and measure women's empowerment in the beginning of the 2000s
and the late 90s to more recent efforts such as the women empowerment and agriculture index
there's frequently the use of survey questions such as this one displayed on the screen
that ask women whether they have traveled to certain predefined locations in the past month
and often times whether they had to ask permission to do so so these questions are
important and they're born out of long-standing social norms across south asia and elsewhere
that restrict women's mobility to the home unless they are accompanied by a male relative
uh moreover women's reclaiming of traditionally coded masculine spaces has long been a tactic of
feminist organizing across the world in the case of india mobility is seen not just as evidence of
agency or socially empowered women who is able to move about space in new ways but also essential
to economic and political empowerment because if women are not able to freely travel to banks
markets etc then there is inherent limits on their economic or political potential
so i agree that these survey questions and this assessment of mobility is really important
and critical however as we can see from this vignette about ranjala uh there needs to be
a little bit more in analytically unpacking whether mobility is in fact increasing women's
opportunities for empowerment so i find that geographers work here is particularly helpful
creswell and utang in 2008 wrote a book about gendered mobilities and in it they say that
the simple raw physical movement whether or not someone moves from point a to point b is
important but only a partial picture of mobility which is indeed a power laden spatial practice
they say that equally necessary it's important to look at the way mobility is represented
the meanings and social values that are uh embedded within it they emphasize that these
meanings and values around mobility are not static or singular and that they change
over time both maybe from day to day and also over a longer duration similarly they argue
that mobility is ultimately an embodied experience right it's something that we do and so it this is
crucial to recognize and understanding things such as how people are moving the velocity by
which they're moving the routes by which they're taking is really important to understanding more
fully what mobility means in people's lives now relevant here is a concept called motive force
uh and this inquires why bodies do or do not go into motion so according to cresswell and
you tang this is slightly different than agency right because agency is seen to emanate from this
singular fixed subject whereas motive forces are a dynamic sort of complex of maybe intrinsic
desires and external compulsions that help to explain why certain bodies do or do not go into
particular uh mobile practices so unpacking sort of the arrangement of these motive forces
and how they enable or disenable women to move is central to understanding its role in empowerment
so i'm going to take this conceptual framework and use it to analyze my data but first
i want to talk really briefly about my study sites and my methods
so i worked with a large non-governmental organization based in india that i'm calling
ajivika which is a pseudonym and all of the names in this presentation are pseudonyms
uh the methods were broadly ethnographic so i worked with ajivika who's long been
mobilizing women's self-help groups across these swaths of northern and central india
and over the last five years has really expanded their mission to address a broader set of issues
using community trained people like ranjala so i spent a cumulative 12 months collecting data in
two ajivaca block sites one was in dhunka district in jardikand and another was in dendori district
in madhya pradesh these are both hilly remote sites that are primarily populated by adavasi
or indigenous people and so this is the san tal community is predominant in dhunka and the
gomden vega community is predominant in january although all of my research was in gold villages
these study sites are both on the government's high burden site
for poverty and they are characterized by chronic government disinvestment uh
now it's important that these are adivasi areas because much work has shown that
adavasi social relations are markedly different from past-based hindus or muslim communities
so gender relations are seen as more egalitarian among many adivasi communities than in other types
of communities in india they're more women are more involved in household economic activities
however these do remain patriarchal societies and there are still restrictions on women's mobility
moreover over the last 50 years there's been a process of what we call hinduisation or adoption
of hindu social norms and so many of these households that used to have more mobile women
are now practicing more social female seclusion uh so i can talk more about that in the q and a but
uh it's an important asset so over the course of the main 10 month field work period in 2017
i was embedded within these two teams and i utilized a suite of qualitative methods that
included interviews with different stakeholders and participant observation i conducted him
interviews in hindi the local language in english both independently and with local field assistants
with different sets of actors uh and recorded and transcribed them but i also relied heavily
on participant observation so not only did i stay in the village with women like ranjava
and spend time with ajibica professionals who are college educated people
but i also did many field visits with people in shadowed field work i spent lots of time walking
with women in auto rickshaws in public transit and triple loading on motorcycles which all presented
good opportunities to understand these people's lives vis-a-vis involvement in shg's i also
spent a lot of time at three-day residential trainings which were the critical means by
which they trained women about these key sets of knowledge around health nutrition or sanitation
and encouraged them and motivated them to share this knowledge among their community
so all of these experiences were really critical and getting a fuller understanding of the way
that mobility uh factored into these women's lives and their experiences now the findings
that i'm going to present right now are structured chronologically along the expansion of involvement
in shg's and empowerment projects so i argue that these changing meanings and experiences ultimately
impact whether women move from point a to point b they impact this sort of physical raw movement
um and it also includes these uncomfortable realizations that even as women's mobility
expands it still becomes surveilled and circumscribed and that when it is unhinged from
the household it never really is truly free and it's still bound up in these relations of power
so in the beginning however mobility was for many women exhilarating and new women frequently
expressed to me how participation in shg's opened up these first-time opportunities for mobility a
particular narrative emerged where women discuss their transformation from meek or homebound women
to newly mobile shg members who are now able to speak well and access capital these narratives
exemplified how before joining fhgs there was no motive force necessitating women's movement
beyond familiar routes to the wells to collect water to the forest to collect fuel fuel wood
moreover many women relate it would have been previously unimaginable for women to move outside
of the house on their own to see the world they needed adequate justification to convince their
husbands and in-laws this was a worthwhile use of their time thus while shg participation increased
women's confidence to move independently across space and time it also gave them sufficient reason
to justify this movement now these were often hard fought battles so a lot of times ajivaca
professionals of these college-educated urban individuals would come to the village and advocate
on behalf of the women uh to convince husbands that shd activities were worthwhile and useful and
that they would ultimately benefit the household in the village by letting women to participate
so women reported these incidents to me with much enthusiasm and this sort of solidarity
they shared with the jeevika workers was clearly a positive aspect of shg involvement
however while there was this collaborative fight to advocate for women and get them to have the
freedom to participate in fhg activities there was little work that was done to help renegotiate
gendered household labor responsibilities thus women frequently complained that to attend
day-long meetings or residential trainings they had to wake up early and do a lot of housework
to get everything in order to prepare for their absence they tried to hedge against in disarray by
delegating systems of responsibility and they tried to negotiate to see if they could go back to
the village at night time from these residential trainings so they could check up on everything
and make sure everything was okay so agita professionals were sympathetic to women's high
work burdens but they ultimately discouraged women coming and going from these residential trainings
they said women would not be able to fully immerse themselves if they came and went and that they
might arrive late in the morning having to rely on foot transit or unreliable public transit
thus uh delaying the the training but it became evident that while women were have this
had this newfound mobility they were still tied up in these relations of power whether it be
the household trying to control uh when and where they went or the ngo
so while these experiences were initially very positive and women were excited
as they turned from opportunities to obligations women started to shy away from participation
and as unknown places and unknown experiences became known once women were more judicious and
allocating their time to shg based mobilities so this had two effects
uh one was that there was a group of women who used these strategies to
avoid less appealing forms of mobility or to diminish their involvement in shg activities
and there was a second group of women who continued to deepen their engagement and fhd
activities but attempted to negotiate these in power relations that were more favorable to them
so just a quick example from this first group of people who really shied away from increased
shg involvement beyond this initial period so uh frequently when there was these three-day
residential trainings ajivaca would send a bolero which is pictured here on a route through the
villages to kind of fetch up all of the women who were scheduled to come for the training
so i occasionally wrote in the back seat with some of the shg trainers to go pick up these women so
one day i was with this young woman named sharmila we were going to pick up women for an agricultural
training so we entered one village and sharmila directed the bolero driver to the house that we
were supposed to go to and we catch the woman while she's coming outside with her child on hip
um sharmila says get your bags in the car we're going to the three-day training and
the woman laughs and seeds and she says no no no i can't go i have too much to do plus i'm not
educated so there's no use for me to come to this sharmilla was prepared and she quickly retorted
that education is not necessary because this is a church a wallet or a discussion based training not
a leak nowalla or writing one the woman was sort of cornered but she still persisted and said that
there was a wedding in the neighboring village there was no way she could make it sharmila was
unable to argue with this and so she asked for someone to come in her place and she gave us a
name and we began these negotiations afresh now women such as this one who are trying to avoid
having to leave the village and come to this frequently were initially interested in these
new experiences but once the novelty wore off it they simply dropped off it was too much of an
additional labor burden this was also because when women were sort of whipped out of the village and
taken to these trainings they were often relegated to the training hall and had little opportunity
to go beyond the confines of these rooms and sort of see or experience how other people were
living their lives which is a critical element of this development of critical consciousness so
they these these led to a sizable segment of women who who would drop out however there was another
small group of people and sharmila would be one of them who continued to deepen their engagement
interestingly sharmila who continued to be a very uh what they would call reliable woman and
good community leader spoke about her newfound mobility in terms of hardship
so she said she had little ability to forego these opportunities for minimally paid employment
uh she was she explained that she was a poor woman and because she was paid per
training her family's cash needs dictated the amount of training that she strived to give
for sharmila her mobility was a this visceral reminder of her poverty in the few choices she
had to earn cash especially she had to travel to different villages under this hot sun in the
summer my conversations with other women bore resemblance to sharmila's account and women
generally saw this shg based mobility as pathways to maybe future employment or to scaling up uh
for either jobs with agita or government agencies so bringing knowledge and development to others
in the village was seen as desirable and they felt proud about it but the primary motive was
economic security however there were some women who did advance to these more sort of prestigious
salary positions and so there was always this idea that maybe it could happen that sort of
kept women like sharmila engaged so the the i'm gonna wrap up by saying that um in madhu
pradesh there were several of these women who took salaried positions one of them was niko
she also spoke about her early experiences of mobility and going to the field as in terms
of hardship in terms of taking public transit and walking interior villages
however after about 12 months of employment she saved enough money to buy a scooty
and she talks about the first time she drove this booty across which is a scooter across india um
the countryside she felt pura bindas or completely free it was very interesting because many ajitaka
people spoke about this feeling as well and this represents this idea of the gumna in india which
is this idea of carefree wandering or leisurely travel this was something that many young men did
as a rite of passage but was highly gendered and restricted to women and seen as suspect
um moreover among women who worked in the shd there was little opportunity to gumna and
one of the sort of main tensions within it was that they did field work efficiently and that they
were not wasting time or frivolously moving about um however although it was largely off limits
there were some exceptions and in particular there were a couple ajiva professionals who really
really advocated this idea of creating spaces for women to play saying that women should go on trips
together to go on picnics or to go play football matches and while this was embraced within this
really specific location and really spearheaded by one individual it showed the potential of
reworking gender norms for more empowering types of mobility rather than just this productive labor
um so where is that jeevika had broken suspicions about women's participation in
fhgs uh carefree wandering was still viewed as suspect or wrong however this could clearly be
addressed with sustained commitment so just in quick conclusion empowerment has long included
a focus on expanding women's mobility and this is often seen as a taking for granted positive thing
uh survey questions are important in assessing women's freedom of movement
however they rarely interrogate why women are engaging in new mobile practices how they are
performing such mobility and if they actually want to be doing so or if they feel compelled to
um my data suggests that these mobile practices are indeed initially very empowering for women
but they can shift towards exploitative as women sort of become familiar with
these new routes and mobilities that they're traveling on there have become sort of this
slippage with immediate development programs between viewing new mobilities as an option or
a choice to becoming more of an obligation or a new demand on women's labor and time
um so i argue that by focusing on this idea of play and gumna and sort of leisurely
travel perhaps there could be more sort of radical possibilities for women's empowerment within these
areas moreover because these evaluation frameworks frequently dictate how programs are are focused on
i think survey questions could move away from focusing on productive mobility or reproductive
mobility and focus more on whether women can go wherever they want when they want and how they
wish so that is all i have for you i want to thank um i have quite a few funders for this uh mostly
i want to thank everyone in jindori and doomkey and delhi i have wonderful research assistants and
mostly to the women like bernangella and sharmila who shared their stories and their lives with me
so thank you for all of your attention and i think we can open up to questions
okay thank you so much dr nichols for that excellent presentation
we have um before we get to one that came in early i'd like to ask suchita samantha is a
faculty with women and gender studies and she had several questions but i'm going to just
ask her demographic questions so what level of education had most of the women obtained
and then general demographic makeup such as their average age number of children
okay so most women were uh that worked like in these positions of community trainers
like rhondella or shamila had basic literacy and so they were some of the more educated
women in their village and these areas are particularly difficult to work in because uh of
the linguistic barriers so and they speak santal in bunka and they speak gondi in madhya pradesh
and many of the ajitaka people did not speak those languages so these women who
spoke excellent hindi served a really important role in translating for the development people
but they probably had a some of them had eight plus two so secondary education really
nothing beyond that um they generally like i said there were sort of these two demographics these
older women who had been some of the earliest members of shg's and they were kind of fiercely
loyal to the shg because these ajibica people had really advocated for them on their behalf
and then there was this kind of newer younger group of women who participated
and they were less loyal and they were more like they had skills and they wanted some
place to use them um and so they were like more looking in advancement of their skills
but almost everybody had children and generally women who were a little bit
older maybe a mother-in-law had more autonomy to participate in a deeper way than younger women
great thank you um hopefully we'll have time to come back to another one of your questions later
but let me get to um a few others so miranda gardner submitted this question before the
start of the meeting and uh that is how are women's self-help groups helping the
global pandemic i've read news articles about it and find it really inspiring
yeah so there has been a lot of reports i haven't been doing active research in madhya pradesh and
shardkins during since the pandemic started um my communication with the jeevika people
have been that they've been really active and doing mobile kitchens and especially helping
with the returning migrant workers who had to return from delhi and mumbai in the big cities
after this very sudden and immediate lockdown i have had a small project in himachal pradesh
and uttarakhand that has been this remote data collection and their self-help groups have been
active in making masks and doing things of this sort so it has been interesting
although i'm not super qualified to speak on it this is mostly um remotely collected data
okay thank you uh we have one from peter schmittner and i'm sorry if i did not
pronounce your name correctly um so peter asks can you speak more to the hinduisation of these
alibausi areas is this being prompted by hindu nationalists or other forces uh he adds if i'm not
mistaken there are large populations of alibaba christians especially in jack and it appears
that this process of hinduism is negatively impact women impacting women i'd like to hear
your thoughts that's really a great question so the two sites are actually quite different so
in doumka district where it's primarily a centaur community it is indeed correct it's
mostly christian missionaries who are in that area so almost all of the santa people that i worked
with were chris were practicing christians uh they've also done a better job at i would say like
cultural preservation and that they've been less uh i guess exposed to this process of hinduism
that has happened however um they're still like within the traditional sort of centaur culture
women have a lot more rights than in hindu culture but they're it's still patriarchal
there's still uh definitely a male dominance and so while it's different and more egalitarian
it's still far from from free um in madhya pradesh there's much more of a forces of hinduisation at
work and so i spent much time with people who had become hindus who were previously practicing their
tribal religion and who had adopted practices like not eating meat or going to temples on tuesday and
so this process of hinduisation within madhya pradesh was much more intense than in jargon
and i think that you know it's it's like these sort of like broader social forces it's hard
to comment on like goodness or badness they're happening and um i guess you know time will tell
there's also you know some revitalization of like cultural revivalism going on and trying to
articulate that adivasi or indigenous roots within both sites and to try and push back on these like
broader sort of cultural homogenizing forces so it's a good question i hope i hope i answered it
great thank you uh we have a question from north sadiq
nora is the chief of party for virginia tech's catalyzing afghan agriculture innovation where
we work with gender and of course mobility is another issue in um afghanistan for women so his
question is are men resisting women to be educated in agriculture or home economics related learning
my experience is that women contribute or lead all aspects of family lives but
informally but when it comes to formal education and recognition there's resistance from men
what are your findings yes i mean i would say that within these uh programs there is again and it's
very much in line with the broader development literature and that when that there is income
earning potential involved men tend to co-opt it a bit more whereas when it's like reproductive or
subsistence agriculture it's more left to the domain of women in these areas i would say that
most of the people are it's quite remote and people are quite poor most of the agriculture is
still largely subsistence uh and so there isn't maybe so much co-option by men as there would
be in other areas where there's more market potential for the agriculture uh i guess my
findings with the relationship between men and women is that um there's been this focus on really
empowering women in agriculture and teaching them and that it hasn't been that resisted by men and
men have actually been pretty okay with women taking the lead in that i would say that there's
been some distress or stress among women who feel overburdened uh in having to focus on reproductive
activities and also agricultural and productive activities so i think there there might be a
desire for men to to take a more active role or be more of active partners in household reproduction
okay great um we have another question but i just want to point out so peter wrote he's a specialist
in modern indian history in the department of religion and culture with a joint appointment in
history so thank you for taking his question prior to norris uh we have a question from
tom crawford he's the chair of our department of geography here at virginia tech and his question
is about bicycles do any women use bicycles and are bicycles a common means of transportation
in general great question yes very common and in fact there was a government program
that gave all indigenous groups free bicycles um these bicycles were bad quality and free were
almost dangerous to some degree because they would break down on the road but
in uh especially junk and bicycles were very common uh means of transport
uh in madhya pradesh to a lesser degree but among young people adolescent girls definitely
great uh we have a question from daniel sumner as you know he's the assistant director for women and
gender development at seared working with our team that put this event on he asks um carly
he says you mentioned that the ngo you did your research with had some initial engagement with men
to build support for women's participation in shg's do you think that there's an opportunity
for ngos like the one you were engaged with to implement more gender transformative approaches
that try to spark conversations about workload and care responsibilities yeah i would say that
sort of so the ngo that i worked with ajivaca is interesting because they're very like horizontal
organization and teams the black teams have lots of autonomy to pursue programs in ways that like
resonate with them and they feel passionate about so not a lot of central i would say oversight so
in certain teams there was more of this focus on engaging men however this was largely on a
personal basis right there was not really a coordinated strategy it was more that these
professionals would develop relationships with women and advocate on their behalf
there was a lot there has been a lot of talk i mean the years i was doing
my research with them and since then on um and push on the need to engage men and
that just focusing only on women was perhaps not as productive as it could be there's a lot of
interesting sort of logistical issues and that they've spent years mobilizing these networks
of women and what does it mean to start working with men so um there were discussions around this
and there was a lot of interest among young people in the organization and field workers
but there was as of 2019 no real coordinated strategy to begin this work but lots of discussion
so uh social put in another interesting question um how do you measure motivation that's
interesting i mean i think there's like a lot of different ways that are potentially used to
measure motivation um you know so i mean i think measure is also a strong word i think
that you could try and measure it through the use of standardized survey questions in terms
of getting uh responses to why people do what they do i mean i think that it's more complicated than
that and that's i think why i was drawn to this work by cresswell and about motive forces because
it really my ethnographic research with women found out it was very complicated right in in
terms of that they felt they should do something and this feeling of should is like kind of a
complicated feeling and that um maybe they sort of wanted to they saw some benefit in it but they
also didn't want to and they felt a sort of social responsibility to engage in that type of labor so
i think it's complicated i mean i as a qualitative ethnographer i like very much believe that it's
important to spend time with people and kind of understand the structural like domains of their
life to understand how this motivation happens but i would say that certainly there's a lot of people
who think you can measure it with survey questions and i think that that's one way of getting at it
but i do believe it's incomplete without more sort of fine-tuned uh methods good question
so i don't see any more questions coming in on the chat so i think um unless somebody wants to
put one in now i i we can open it to discussion so we can just pretend we're in where we normally
would be would be in the multi-purpose room at newman library and we'd have coffee and tea
in the back of the room with some pastries um um let's see am i getting a question in
daniel did you just put this is this question from angela okay
angela leland who worked at virginia tech for many many years and it's so
nice to see you on here you've been gone so let me go ahead and read her question in the
1970s vt's outreach to rural appalachian women involved home demonstration clubs
we discovered that the husbands use this opportunity to control the women's behavior
in other words if she behaves i will allow her to go or take her in the car to the monthly meeting
if she does not behave meaning do what i want her to do then she cannot attend did you find
that women tried or did control women's movement once it was seen as a new freedom for the women
so that's an interesting question i would say that women's i mean so the
the the household resistance or men's resistance to women leaving and doing these activities was
mostly based on sort of selfish reasons and that if the women weren't there then who was going to
cook who is going to take care of the children who is going to clean and so if it sort of complicated
their lives or created the these these types of reproductive work that wouldn't get done
then it was seen as undesirable like there would be much more resistance than it was like
uh they didn't want women to go however not all men were like that there were men who were helpful
and who wanted women to participate because they thought it's potentially renumerative right they
saw it as potentially an economic opportunity um there was also you know these are oftentimes
combined families with different members so you know sometimes there were other relatives in the
household that enabled women's attendance so it depended on sort of the household structure um as
well as the amount of labor that had to be done like are there small children there for example
thank you carly and and thank you angela for bringing it back to a connection to our our our
own uh regional situation though that was in the 1970s um who knows what the situation is now um so
i think we should move to the discussion we have 10 minutes left now so i'd like to
this is really an experiment we haven't done this last discussion series we did as a webinar
now we're doing this as a zoom meeting so you have the ability to we'd like to ask you to
use the raise your hand function which is under participants so that if we have a lot
of people i can try to call on you in order as if we were actually sitting in the library
see how this works um so if you have something to say even if it's not a question i know several of
you have research in this area and would have something to contribute to our discussion so
um i'm gonna look and see if i notice if somebody raises their hand
okay so she said try using the button so i can see if this works
under participants and you have to unmute yourself
and so it just says invite is that what it is i don't know just go ahead and make a reaction is
this what you mean this yes i think so open the reactions oh it's under reactions yeah yeah yeah
yeah that's clapping that's clapping your hands oh is it oh [ __ ] oh well that's okay we can
uh we can use the clapping the hands function if the raise your hand doesn't work go ahead
i'd love to hear from you okay yeah my question you know again i worked with girls literacy in
an indian basti islam and one of the things i came upon and it stood out for me when you as you spoke
was the fact that women are having to negotiate and what i said in my work
was negotiating patriarchy it would be negotiating with mothers mothers-in-law fathers and motivation
and negotiation kind of sort of worked hand in hand those who were motivated and successfully
negotiated um were able to move ahead so my my question was you know who are they negotiating
with not just men would be i think probably not enough right no it's definitely not just men
that's a really excellent point so the in-laws and the other sort of uh household numbers are
definitely a critical part and it's in fact really interesting because oftentimes the person who is
in the household the most sort of restrictive around younger women is the mother-in-law
who will herself participate in the shg but the daughter-in-law will have to stay back and take
care of a lot of the housework so this was definitely not an uncommon thing and it is
in fact quite interesting that that these sort of more involved shg older women are the ones who are
restricting younger women's engagement thank you okay thank you uh dr susan sumner you've raised
your hand thank you introduce yourself please i just really raised my hand so you can see
that it does work it is under the participant and then you have to lower your hand when you want to
do that but um i don't have a question but carly this has been an excellent presentation my field
is to safety through microbiology and i dabble in doing things internationally so this has been
really good to see how what your work and how it might transfer over to some of the things around
food safety and that type of training so thank you for your study it's been really fun to hear
yeah great thank you for coming anybody else want to want to comment or ask a follow-up question
please introduce yourself
yeah this this is hot hasuna i work with syriad with marisa and
daniel um i actually i was just clapping i was not oh using my hand thank you thank you very much
that was that was a marvelous uh introduction to this type of work thank you yeah thank you
i guess i have a question um carly you talked about your focus um really appreciate
description of your ethnographic methods and your qualitative methods and you touched on
the difficulties of using survey tools and approaches but you also mentioned the pro wea
in your presentation could you maybe elaborate just a little bit more about how you think
we can move forward in combining the best of qualitative and quantitative approaches to kind of
get at these nuances of empowerment yeah that's a good question and i mean i don't want to like
throw survey methods out uh out in the out in the field like i think they're an important tool
i think that uh having more of these mixed methods approaches which are really standard fare
now in evaluation programs as far as i can tell um is really critical i think the other part that
that maybe there could be more advancement on is in terms of really understanding the ways
that uh they sort of not just using qualitative it's kind of this like side box check mark to
include in quantitative like with the quantitative evaluations but really having stuff be more
equally weighted in terms of analysis i think this is imp in particularly important when we're
talking about gender and gender empowerment because a lot of my research shows that this
is all very relationship based and that these transformations are things that are um not things
not things that can be captured so easily in uh structured ways that are like structured things
that have validity in multiple locations so i do believe that there's more scope for qualitative
work when you're looking at this gender empowerment in particular um uh noor i'm was
going to chat you do you want to ask your question i don't understand your question about electricity
so greetings from kabul you know i hope you can hear me yes so so i just wanted to know if there
was an electricity problem but i also wanted to ask you you know where i work in afghanistan
actually we take women for some trainings but there is this law that they have to have their
husband or brother or father or somebody male person to be with them i was wondering if the
experience there is the same you know how the mobility you know i mean afghan women
are not very mobile you know without a male uh accompanying them you know so the electricity
was i was wondering if the areas you were working at there was electricity available because the
story is that there are still 400 million indians without electricity you know in in india yeah so
that was just uh i mean if it's it's a causing or not you know yeah that's a good question
uh so thank you yes thank you for your question uh so there's electricity but it's not very reliable
it's coming and going and coming and going and so it's quite a big problem right because how do
children study if there's no electricity so there is electricity sometimes but not all the time it's
very sporadic uh there isn't so the mobility isn't as restricted and that women are able to leave
like this is part of the negotiations though where there has there was initially much more like
reassurance that these women were going to be only with other women and in these sort of protected
areas they weren't going to like go out and wander around indiscriminately so this is the
thing of that even though they were able to leave their home they still weren't really able to go do
go where they want when they wanted right they could only go to these really like uh prescribed
activities but that's it's a good question thank you thank you so we really are coming to the end
so i'd like to wrap it up so i have a chance to uh thank everybody for attending and thank dr
nichols for your presentation and your entertaining questions we are sharing uh
valesca is going to share a link to our survey our follow-up survey that we really do appreciate you
um filling out are your opinions very important to us um and i also wanted to just give a shout
out to our upcoming event which rather than the monthly discussion series in the next semester
our first event will be the women and gender development discussion virtual conference out of
the theory into the field we had it in person last year and this time of course it will be virtual
so that does allow more people far away without the cost of travel to attend so it has some
benefits that we are seeking to make that as engaging and participatory as possible using
the hoover app and um so please look at wgd.com let's see whatever you put that in there please
wgdconf.org is our website and registration is open and we're open to receiving um abstracts for
posters as well as for students for a four-minute flash talk um which there's information so
please help us spread the word you can uh there's a place in the survey where you can
say if you want more information but really at this point if you want more information
on the conference you should you should register registration fees are very low we're very lucky
to have obtained a nifa grant to support us the national institute of food and agriculture so um
really just trying to trying to make this happen so um that's all i don't think anybody minds
ending a zoom meeting a minute early i'm sure several of you have several more zoom meetings
so thank you all so much for for coming really appreciate it there you go is that raising your
hand now suchita or is that clapping that's clapping okay all right thank you everybody