Gender, Inequality and Agency - The women’s narratives on claiming justice
Description
Agency, as a concept, has been defined and interpreted in various disciplines by social theorists, feminists, anthropologists, social constructivists, human rights and post-colonial scholars broadly as a set of actions, individual and collective, taken by people to confront historical oppression, patriarchy, deprivation, discrimination, inequality and legacies of human rights violations. However, within the broader justice narratives, the notion of agency continues to remain top-down and prescriptive and usually understood through the rights-centric lens, where people are encouraged to exercise agency in an individualized way and by participating in formal systems and enabling activism in the political processes (Bonacker, 2011; García-Godos, 2013). What is not fully appreciated is the capacity of people, individually and collectively, to exercise agency within their everyday living – ‘the ordinary but embedded resistance’ – in their interaction with the society and the state (Rooney and Aoláin, 2018:1). A key finding of my PhD research is that agency for people living in unequal, post-conflict societies, particularly for women, is a wide-ranging and complex concept where their own forms of expressions, behaviours and actions can help create opportunities for constructive change, even amidst the constraints of deep-seated structural hindrances. Agency provides a platform for people to challenge the status quo and discriminatory norms that are usually practised in traditional societies, and which can restrict spaces for recognition and representation. These forms of agency are usually seen through their everyday resistance, where ‘people act in their everyday lives in ways that might undermine power’ (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013:2). Based on critical ethnography methodology and a sample size of over fifty interviews with the victims of conflict from marginalized communities in Nepal, the proposed paper will present the findings on one of my key PhD research questions: How is agency constructed in the everyday life and relations of women within their experiences of systemic structures of poverty, subordination, exploitation and inequalities? The research fieldwork was conducted in Nepal from October 2017 until June 2018 in the capital Kathmandu; in Bardiya, a rural, remote district located in the mid-western region; and in Makwanpur, a rural district in the central part of the country.
Gender, Inequality and Agency - The women’s narratives on claiming justice
Agency, as a concept, has been defined and interpreted in various disciplines by social theorists, feminists, anthropologists, social constructivists, human rights and post-colonial scholars broadly as a set of actions, individual and collective, taken by people to confront historical oppression, patriarchy, deprivation, discrimination, inequality and legacies of human rights violations. However, within the broader justice narratives, the notion of agency continues to remain top-down and prescriptive and usually understood through the rights-centric lens, where people are encouraged to exercise agency in an individualized way and by participating in formal systems and enabling activism in the political processes (Bonacker, 2011; García-Godos, 2013). What is not fully appreciated is the capacity of people, individually and collectively, to exercise agency within their everyday living – ‘the ordinary but embedded resistance’ – in their interaction with the society and the state (Rooney and Aoláin, 2018:1). A key finding of my PhD research is that agency for people living in unequal, post-conflict societies, particularly for women, is a wide-ranging and complex concept where their own forms of expressions, behaviours and actions can help create opportunities for constructive change, even amidst the constraints of deep-seated structural hindrances. Agency provides a platform for people to challenge the status quo and discriminatory norms that are usually practised in traditional societies, and which can restrict spaces for recognition and representation. These forms of agency are usually seen through their everyday resistance, where ‘people act in their everyday lives in ways that might undermine power’ (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013:2). Based on critical ethnography methodology and a sample size of over fifty interviews with the victims of conflict from marginalized communities in Nepal, the proposed paper will present the findings on one of my key PhD research questions: How is agency constructed in the everyday life and relations of women within their experiences of systemic structures of poverty, subordination, exploitation and inequalities? The research fieldwork was conducted in Nepal from October 2017 until June 2018 in the capital Kathmandu; in Bardiya, a rural, remote district located in the mid-western region; and in Makwanpur, a rural district in the central part of the country.