Critically evaluating rural women’s participation and empowerment : An interdisciplinary feminist framework for research and analysis

Community development is increasingly using participatory processes that aim to be inclusive and empowering. However, researchers have found that such processes can have contradictory effects. Australian research has highlighted the significant leadership of rural women in sustainable community and economic development and in the adoption of new communication technologies such as the Internet. A focus on gender in participatory development may therefore lead to more effective programs and policies. This chapter outlines an interdisciplinary feminist framework for critically evaluating the participation and empowerment of rural women. This framework was found effective in evaluating an Australian project that aimed to enhance rural women’s access to communication technologies and to empower its participants. Its multiple theoretical and methodological approaches are outlined. The framework advocates an analysis of diversity and difference and the macro and micro contexts. Some principles and strategies for rural women’s inclusion, participation, empowerment, and for participatory feminist evaluation are outlined.

Troubling Empowerment : A feminist critique of a rural women and communication technology project

Participatory research methodologies and interactive communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly seen as offering ways of enhancing women’s empowerment and rural community development. However, some researchers suggest the need for caution about such claims. This book details findings from an evaluation of a feminist action research project that explored the impacts of ICTs for rural women in Queensland, Australia, in terms of personal, business and community development. Using praxis and poststructuralist feminist theories and methodologies, this innovative study presents a rigorous analysis and critique of women's empowerment and participation. This study demonstrates the value of adopting a critical yet pragmatic approach that takes diversity and difference, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation into account. This is argued to enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment, participation and inclusion. This book should be of particular interest to researchers, postgraduate students, and others working in the fields of communication, gender, and rural development, and feminist evaluation and ethnography.

Fathoming the fathers in environmental education : a feminist poststructuralist analysis

The purpose of this study is to provide a feminist poststructuralist analysis of the dominant international discourses in environmental education, and how these have been realised in Australian national statements and in state policies over the past two decades, in terms of their implicit views about science, the environment, epistemology and education. The methodology of the study presents an argument for a 'politics of method' in the form of a research approach which reflects the ideology and intent of the study, i.e. an argument toward feminist poststructuralism as a methodology, but with elements of critical feminist research. Part of this methodology involves consideration of the gendered nature of language and discourses, particularly in the sciences. The argument is for the reconstituting of knowledge through feminist standpoint theory and the adoption of standards of 'strong objectivity'. In the spirit of its poststructuralist methodology the study presents three different stories (archaeologies) about environmental education: one told in terms of people, events and their outcomes; one told in terms of the changing views of education and how these were interpreted in environmental education; and the third told in terms of the emergence of ecofeminism as a parallel movement to environmental education and the emerging relationship between these two movements. These stories serve two purposes: to review the relevant literature in these three areas, and to provide the 'data' for later chapters. The discourses of environmental education, particularly those of the 'founders' and UNESCO documents, are then analysed from a poststructuralist perspective, followed by a feminist reconstruction of environmental education which argues for thinking from women's and other marginalized lives as a preferred strategy for environmental education, and develops research principles to explore this possibility. The conclusion reflects on the philosophical and theoretical issues engaged, and the methodological issues addressed, in the study.

Tales from camp Wilde: queer(y)ing environmental education research

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in
environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field’s heteronormative constructedness. These stories suggest alternative ways of (re)presenting and (re)producing both the subjects/objects of our inquiries and our identities as researchers. The contributors draw on a variety of theoretical resources from art history, deconstruction, ecofeminism, literary criticism, popular cultural studies, and feminist poststructuralism to perform an orientation to environmental education research that we hope will never be arrested by its categorization as a “new genre.”

Little boys : the potency of peer culture in shaping masculinities

This study explores the peer group understandings of five male friends between the ages of six and eight years and seeks to examine the ways in which the group’s social dynamics interact to define, regulate and maintain dominant and collective understandings of masculinities. Within a self-selected affinity context, and drawing on their lived and imagined experiences, the boys’ enact and interpret their social worlds. Adopting the principles of ethnography within a framework of feminist poststructuralism and drawing on theories of ‘groupness’ and gender(ed) embodiment, the boys’ understandings of masculinities are captured and interpreted. The key analytic foci are directed towards examining the role of power in the social production of collective schoolboy knowledges, and understanding the processes through which boys subjectify and are subjectified, through social but also bodily discourses. The boys’ constructions of peer group masculinities are (re)presented through a narrative methodology which foregrounds my interpretation of the group’s personal and social relevances and seeks to be inductive in ways that ‘bring to life’ the boys’ stories. The study illuminates the potency of peer culture in shaping and regulating the boys’ dominant understandings of masculinity. Within this culture strong essentialist and hierarchical values are imported to support a range of gender(ed) and sexual dualisms. Here patriarchal adult culture is regularly mimicked and distorted. Underpinned by constructions of ‘femininity’ as the negative ‘other’, dominant masculinities are embodied, cultivated and championed through physical dominance, physical risk, aggression and violence. Through feminist poststructural analysis which enables a theorising of the boys’ subjectivities as fluid, tenuous and often characterised by contradiction and resistance, there exists a potential for interrupting and re-working particular masculinities. Within this framework, more affirmative but equally legitimate understandings and embodiments can be explored. The study presents a warrant for working with early childhood affinity groups to disrupt and contest the dominance and hierarchy of peer culture in an effort to counter-act broader gendered and heterosexist global, state and institutional structures. Framing these assertions is an understanding of the peer context as not only self-limiting and productive of hierarchies, but enabling and generative of affirmative subjectivities.

Feminist Disability Theory: Domestic Violence Against Women with a Disability

Women with a disability continue to experience social oppression and domestic violence as a consequence of gender and disability dimensions. Current explanations of domestic violence and disability inadequately explain several features that lead women who have a disability to experience violent situations. This article incorporates both disability and material feminist theory as an alternative explanation to the dominant approaches (psychological and sociological traditions) of conceptualising domestic violence. This paper is informed by a study which was concerned with examining the nature and perceptions of violence against women with a physical impairment. The emerging analytical framework integrating material feminist interpretations and disability theory provided a basis for exploring gender and disability dimensions. Insight was also provided by the women who identified as having a disability in the study and who explained domestic violence in terms of a gendered and disabling experience. The article argues that material feminist interpretations and disability theory, with their emphasis on gender relations, disablism and poverty, should be used as an alternative tool for exploring the nature and consequences of violence against women with a disability.

Duggaibah, or 'place of whiteness' : Australian feminist and race

Our society operates in such a way as to put whiteness at the center of everything, including individual consciousness--so much so that we seldom question the centrality of white- ness, and most people, on hearing 'race', hear 'black'. That is, whiteness is treated as the norm, against which all differences are measured. 1 Race shapes white women's lives. In the same way that both men's and women's lives are shaped by their gender, and that both heterosexual and lesbian women's experiences in the world are marked by their sexuality, white people and people of color live racially structured lives. In other words, any system of differentiation shapes those on whom it bestows privi- lege as well as those it oppresses. White people are 'raced' just as men are 'gendered'. 2