Scholarly Works, Center for International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/24278
Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship

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Browsing Scholarly Works, Center for International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED) by Author "Christie, Maria Elisa"

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    Challenges and experiences of women in the forestry sector in Nepal
    Christie, Maria Elisa; Giri, Kalpana (Academic Journals, 2011-05)
    This article asks why there are relatively few women at the Institute of Forestry (IOF) and in the field of forestry in Nepal. It explores the obstacles to entering and succeeding in this male-dominated field from women’s perspectives, and makes recommendations for increasing their participation. Based on “focus group discussions” and interviews with nearly 50 women, the authors considered issues of power and participation relevant to the gendered experience and profession of forestry in Nepal. Obstacles ranged from socio-cultural biases against women, to harassment during field trips, to being assigned purely administrative duties in the workplace. The article draws on theoretical approaches to gender in organizations, masculinities, and gendered knowledge. It calls for equitable, institutional transformation at the IOF that would in turn help graduates to better address social aspects of forestry.
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    Gendered livelihood impacts and responses to an invasive, transboundary weed in a rural Ethiopian community
    Christie, Maria Elisa; Sumner, Daniel M.; Chala, Lidya A.; Mersie, Wondi (Taylor & Francis, 2023-12-18)
    Gender as unequal power relations intersects with global environmental change threatening agriculture-based livelihoods, including land degradation, increasing climate variability, and invasive alien plants. Commonly overlooked, invasive alien plants may have gendered impacts on everyday life that disproportionately affect the less powerful. Drawing on experiences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia’s Oromia region with an invasive, transboundary weed, Parthenium hysterophorus L., this paper illustrates how environmental change interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to shape individual and household-level impacts and responses. We applied a feminist perspective in livelihoods and environmental change research and praxis to explore the intersection of gendered livelihoods and parthenium management in spaces of everyday life. While invasive plants, including parthenium, may be easily perceptible in the field, understanding impacts on livelihoods requires consideration of women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities within the broader household compound as well as intra-household decision-making. Parthenium can be harmful to environmental, animal, and human health, but unduly impacts women’s labor, spaces, and assets, including cows whose milk may be tainted by grazing in parthenium-infested fields. We demonstrate the importance of considering women’s social networks and so-called reproductive space and labor to understand gendered and place-based inequities of climate change. This study reveals intimate connections between environmental stressors and gendered livelihoods. Our findings demonstrate how inequalities can be reinforced by new forms of vulnerability, with response options socially differentiated. We argue that a feminist livelihood lens helps bridge the global scale of environmental change with local scales of gendered livelihood adaptation embedded within broader socio-environmental change.
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    Mobile phones and women's empowerment in Maasai communities: How men shape women's social relations and access to phones
    Summers, Kelly H.; Baird, Timothy D.; Woodhouse, Emily; Christie, Maria Elisa; McCabe, J. Terrence; Terta, Felista; Peter, Naomi (Elsevier, 2020-05-13)
    Mobile phones have been heralded by many as promising new tools to empower women throughout the Global South. However, some have asserted that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) may serve to amplify disparities between more powerful and less powerful people. Few studies have examined which women stand to benefit and under what conditions. This study seeks to better understand the relationships between mobile phones and women’s empowerment by examining diverse women’s experiences within Maasai agro-pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania. Specifically, we ask three guiding questions: (1) How do Maasai women access and use phones? (2) What processes of empowerment do phones support or undermine? and (3) How are these processes embedded in diverse social relations? To address these questions, we use a framework that integrates a Social Relations Approach with a modified version of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. Our team conducted semi-structured and individual-stakeholder interviews with Maasai women in June-July, 2018 to learn their perspectives on phones, social-relations and multiple aspects of empowerment. We analyzed the content of these interviews using deductive and inductive qualitative strategies. These efforts yield multiple findings: (1) women’s access to phones is fluid; (2) multiple pathways to empowerment and disempowerment exist; (3) phones reinforce inequalities; (4) women’s identities are intersectional; and (5) women’s networks remain homogenous. Taken together, this approach and these insights provide a more conservative account of the benefits of mobile phones than many studies and also an important technology-empowerment narrative for development scholars and practitioners.