Learning Gender and Development: GEOG 6430 Class Blog

A few days ago, I saw “The World Before Her”, a documentary that follows the lives of two young women in India. The first woman, Ruhi, is a contestant on Miss India- a national beauty pageant and describes herself as a modern woman. The second woman,Prachi, is a youth leader in a Hindu fundamentalist training camp and believes in preserving the sanctity of what she refers to as traditional India. In telling this story, the documentary depicts the complex and conflicting relationship between tradition and modernity in India. Not unlike Ruhi and Prachi, I, having lived in urban India for most my life, have often found myself caught between these two seemingly dissimilar worlds that every Indian must navigate. However, the truth is that “traditional” and “modern” Indian women have more in common than one might imagine. With the help of our readings over the past few weeks, I want to demonstrate how capitalism and reductionism have made tradition and modernity problematic c...

Just 118 years to go to close the gender gap

Today, Twitter newsfeed caught me eye with the Euronews tweet “Just 118 years to go to close the gender gap” and the link. Of course, I followed the link to find out this article by Isabelle Kumar (2015) . It features Global Gender Gap Report, which was published last week at the World Economic Forum. “The news is not terribly encouraging. There are an additional quarter of a million women in the global workforce since 2006 and we women now earn what men did a decade ago. At the current rate it will take 118 years to close this gap completely!” (Kumar, 2015). Somehow this report remained largely unnoticed by most of the major media we tend to follow. Here it is . There’s a lot of statistics and visuals you can find in the report including country rankings, country profiles, as well as different tools to comprehend gender gap among 145 national economies under analysis. One of those tools is really funny. This is age calculator that prompts you how old you will be by the tim...

9/11, Islamphobia and it's Impact on Security and Gender

Marchand (2009) discuss the impact of 9/11 on the development projects and excluding gender out of the development programs as security issues made its way on the top of development agenda. On the discussion about 9/11, I came across with the below articles on Islamophobia and its impact on security and gender. Ø Rubin, Alissa. 2016. From Bikinis to Burkinis, Regulating What Women Wear. New York Times, August 27. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/world/europe/france-burkini-bikini-ban.html?_r=0 Ø Chrisafis, Angelique. 2016. French PM Suggests Naked Breasts Represent France Better Than a Headscarf. The Guardian, August 30. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/30/france-manuel-valls-breasts-headscarf-burkini-ban-row It is interesting and at the same time shocking that how such actions are coming from the top level and promoting a culture of hatred through politicians’ speeches or Policies ba...

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