The Ironies of Participatory Analysis and Facilitation

            Participatory research methods, similar to those of the Gender Analysis Matrix (GAM), outlined by Smyth (69-70) seem to be very popular in mainstream development organizations and processes. Other participatory information gathering activities for the purpose of gather information to base development projects off of include problems and needs matrixes, community maps, seasonal calendars and other activities. The idea of these activities seems to not only serve the immediate means of gathering the specific information necessary to make a community map or a seasonal calendar, but to allow for participants think collectively as a group hoping that the knowledge they share with each other could create a greater community consciousness and cohesion that may foster greater community participation and leadership in development projects and initiatives.

            The role in this type of activity for an outside agent (such as a member of a development organization) is ideally to serve as little more than a facilitator of dialogue and communication between community members by assuring a space for dialogue to occur, asking questions that would lead to relevant conversation and debate and assuring that various participants are able to speak and that the meeting achieves most of its objectives according to the set time that they have to work. Smyth (69) states that this role can be filled by development practitioners who do not have any specific training in research in gender or community issues but are just able to encourage conversation amongst community members that reveal answers to the questions at hand and be able to assure that the information is documented in a way that is useful to the community participants and the development agents as well. This process appears make community participants themselves in control of information and the development process while development practitioners are merely facilitators of their own development. Smyth states that some problems of this process are when gender inequalities and other community inequalities are reflected in the activity, but states that a good facilitator would try to assure that these marginalized participants speak and express themselves during the course of the meeting.

            While working as a Peace Corps volunteer, all of the volunteers were encouraged to implement Participatory Analyses for Community Action (PACA) tools in the communities we worked in at the beginning of our service in order to have a better understanding of the communities and to initiate or strengthen processes of community organization and development. I was initially skeptical of these tools, thinking of them as simply “fact-finding” activities to keep us busy and assure we did something in our first couple of months. However, in one activity I conducted a year into my service, a community mapping activity, I heard someone, where, after seeing all the identified resources and enterprises that they had labeled, stated that maybe they weren’t “as screwed” as he thought they were. This showed to me the importance such activities can have as a revelatory activity for community members as they see ideas, resources and opinions of the community identified in a group setting. However, having been part of such processes, and seen them performed by others, the idea of the facilitator being little more that that seems quite theoretical for in fact the “facilitators” often have a great impact on what is said, who speaks and what information is deemed important to document. The stated or assumed promises of action by a development organization following an activity like this could cause community members to assure the development agents are told what they want to hear. Also, the development agent as facilitator is often quite able to silence the opinions of one person or group of people, over emphasize others and ignore topics deemed important by the community through their questions and time management. An interesting, and humorous, analysis of the apparent oxymoron of development agents’ practices of “facipulation” can be read here: http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/2011/02/16/24-facipulation/

Japan's Social Woes and How This Affects Japanese Women

The country I focus on for most of my research is Japan, especially Japan in the postwar era.  Zhou’s post reminded me that Japan faces its own economic and social issues due to its declining population.  Japan’s current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has gotten a lot of attention recently for his proposed economic plan nicknamed Abenomics. One of the provisions of this plan is to improve the conditions for women in Japan.

Despite being categorized as an affluent developed nation with the third largest economy in the world, Japan is also known for ranking rather low in terms of gender equality. Nobue Suzuki mentions here how Japan’s ranking in the women’s gender empowerment index has been dropping.

In addition to that, Japan has been dealing with a declining birth rate since the 1970s. The birth rate has dropped well below the amount required to replenish the population. Since immigration is also limited, the population has been dropping slightly since 2005.

The current prime minister’s plan to provide more support to women seems to fall short for the most part.  As this article points out, providing more day care options for mothers only addresses part of the problem. Abe’s vision for women in Japan seems to ignore key cultural factors that have contributed to the continued marginalization of women in Japanese society.

While my research for this course has focused on Filipina migrants in Japan who have a long history with working in bars as hostesses as well as the sex trade, I’ve found that hostess bars underwent a revival around 2009. In 2005, Japanese government passed a law in 2005 to cut down on the kind of short term visas that were used to bring Filipinas into the country to work as hostesses.  I was surprised to find that there was a resurgence in interest among young Japanese women in becoming hostesses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/business/global/28hostess.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

This New York Times article points out how the resurgence in interest in becoming a hostess is partly due to Japan’s economic troubles.  I was surprised to read that even before the economic downturn a few years ago, women in Japan faced such dismal job prospects.  I’ve always been surprised and dismayed at how much Japan is touted as an advanced nation despite the status of women within its borders.  I think this is one reason that economic indicators should not be relied on so heavily to judge a nation’s level of “advancement.”  I’m interested to see what Japan’s government will do in the future regarding its social issues and whether or not Japanese society will change in respect to how women's roles are viewed.

Gender mainstreaming and the military

Gender mainstreaming in the military has been a hot button issues for the last few decades. Recently, there has been a push to open all combat positions to women. This push hit a snag when an army memo written by Col. Lynette Arnhart  addressing the aesthetics of women in their public relation campaign material became public.  Arnhart voiced her concerns about the attractiveness of the woman they chose to use on the army materials.  Her thoughts are summarized in this passage from Jezebel, “In general, ugly women are perceived as competent while pretty women are perceived as having used their looks to get ahead.There is a general tendency to select nice looking women when we select a photo to go with an article (where the article does not reference a specific person). It might behoove us to select more average looking women for our comms strategy. For example, the attached article shows a pretty woman, wearing make-up while on deployed duty. Such photos undermine the rest of the message (and may even make people ask if breaking a nail is considered hazardous duty).”

Arnhart’s point was emphasized by the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command Col. Christian Kubik who decided to add this to the memo, “A valuable reminder from the TRADOC experts who are studying gender integration — when [public affairs officers] choose photos that glamorize women (such as in the attached article), we undermine our own efforts. Please use 'real' photos that are typical, not exceptional.” The effort in which the army wished to address with this pr campaign was to ensure women’s acceptance into all remaining combat positions. The army main use of this campaign was to convince the men these women would be fighting with in their new combat positions that they were capable of the tasks. Arnhat suggests that they should use a photo with a woman with mud on her face because of the very different message it sends.

While admittedly I have no experience with the military, I do think its interesting that in order for the army to achieve its gender mainstreaming goal it further marginalizes “aesthetically pleasing” looking women. It also implies that women in their feminine nature are not to be accepted into the army, but rather women who denounce their femininity and accept a more masculine role will be. In essence, the army’s gender mainstreaming campaign isn’t about gender mainstreaming at all, but rather an adherence to male ideals by women in order to be allowed to partake in combat. Perhaps gender sensitivity would be a more valuable use of time, to construct new ideals of value.  Instead of just viewing value based on gender roles referred to by Lorber and Acker, but based on the talents and capacities of a person as an individual.

http://jezebel.com/army-memo-says-this-woman-is-too-pretty-to-take-serious-1468498528

Having baby--a personal choice or what?

I like our class very much because it covers a lot of topics. But one area that I realized we didn’t talk about that much throughout the semester was “having baby.” I guessed I am interested in this because 1) my dissertation topic is so related to “only child policy” in China, and 2) news regarding the “only child policy” released from the just-ended Communist Party Central Committee Plenum caught my eyes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10451767/China-to-ease-one-child-policy.html As the news noted, the President of China, Xi Jinping, said that China would begin to allow couples to have two children if one of them is an only child, and would gradually change and perfect the family planning policy and boost the population to grow steadily in the long term. But the opinions towards this policy change varied greatly. Experts on the family planning welcomed this loosening of the one-child policy in terms of a scarcity of young people in the future will be a major constraint on the country’s development, while others still feel that China is too over-crowded and that longer lifespans demand continuation of strict limits on fertility. http://www.asiasentinel.com/society/one-child-policy-wasnt/

For me, I found those two pieces of news regarding the policy change interesting because little attention was given to the person who will have baby and that is “woman.” Of course, those two news articles talked about women, in a sense like fertility, but not something like their own will in terms of how many kids they want to have. I guess it almost like a luxury for Chinese women to think about the topic—how many kids they want to have—because of the enforcement of the “only child” from the government. For more than 30 years, Chinese women’s body has been controlled by the government. During those years when the “only child policy” was just launched, a woman would be forced to have abortion no matter how many months she had been pregnant if it was not her first pregnancy. One of my friends used to tell me all those crucial stuffs since his mother works in the local department of the family planning of my city. He used to express how lucky he felt to be “the one” that his parents kept. I used to laugh at his for being sentimental, but then thought to myself that I am lucky to be “the one.”

Even if the government loosens the “only child policy,” does that mean now it’s women’s turn to decide how many kids they want to have? As one of the news article pointed out, the increase of the job opportunity for women may be a big factor to influence the number of kids that they want to have. Also, raising a child in China has become more and more expensive, in particular in big cities. I don’t know if this is something special among girls in my generation. But when my friends and I were talking about plans like having a kid, all of us agreed that we would give our kids everything of the best. If we don’t have capacity to do that, we don’t want to have kids. I am not sure if this is something special among kids from the generation of “only child” family in cities. But literally, every female friend who has a similar background as I am said something similar like this.

Now my female friends started to go on the path of being a mother. Some have babies no more than one year old, while others are waiting for the due days of their babies. I witnessed how they tried to provide everything of the best to their babies or babies to be. Because of the milk powder issue happened two or three years ago in China, my friends refused to use any milk powder to feed their babies that is produced in China. Some of them asked me to buy milk powder on a quarterly basis and mail them in a huge box back to China. But that was not cheap at all! The international mailing fee ran even higher than the milk powder. When asked if they want to have a second child, some of them seemed to be hesitated. One of my best friends whose baby girl is six month now said, “Yes, we want. But it really depends on whether we can afford it or not.” Again, even if the government loosens the “only child policy,” it doesn’t mean that a second child is always affordable to the couple. Besides their ideology to offer their kids “everything of the best,” the tuitions and fees in a good school in large cities are ridiculously high.

“When will have a baby be a personal choice,” I couldn’t help but ask myself. It is really like how the 2nd wave feminism was saying that personal is still political. I think it is also applicable to the case of Chinese women who want to have babies. :)

The Co$t of Development

Even if you do not follow the news carefully, you have probably heard of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head in late 2012 by members of the Taliban in response to her advocacy for girls’ access to education.  Though her activism nearly cost her life, Malala has risen to international prominence and received many accolades, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and a book deal. Her story is admirable and inspiring, but it is also an exception:  many young girls who dare to go to school risk bodily harm, verbal abuse, or worse, death (Bisika, Ntata, & Konyani, 2009; Chisamya, DeJaeghere, Kendall, & Khan, 2012; Sharkey, 2008) – and they don’t get to meet the queen of England.  

Malala was brave, and so are the many women and young girls around the world who are ambitious enough to demand that their rights be taken seriously. Who demand that they should have access to education, contraceptives, and paid work. Who demand that they should be treated as equal partners in the development process. But what are the costs of these “gains” for women? What price do they pay for “empowerment”?

In a recent article assigned for another class, Staudt (2011) describes the prevalence of male violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where several transnational corporations have established maquiladoras, resulting in more women earning wages. Staudt suggests that this violence, which has increased since the stationing of the maquiladoras, is men’s resistance to economic restructuring, which has weakened men’s control over women as more women enter the workforce. Although I take issue with Staudt use of the term “resistance” to describe the violence against Mexican women, this example, taken together with the examples of violence against young girls who pursue education, illustrates some of the consequences of shifting gender dynamics, particularly under conditions of economic or political distress.

Though none of these examples is necessarily the result of development projects per se, they are representative of some of the changes that occur as the result of development. I do not want to suggest that development always or necessarily has negative consequences for young girls and women. Certainly, there are plenty of positives: more women going to school, more women getting jobs, more women having a voice in politics. Yet, one important caveat I took from this course in general and the Guide to Gender-Analysis Frameworks in particular, is that grassroots, community-based participation in development is necessary for long-term, sustainable, and productive change. As March, Smyth, and Mukhopadhyay caution in the introduction to the text, activists and development agents must find ways of “devising and implementing policies and programmes which do not exclude or harm women, which take their needs and perspective into account, and which may help redress some of the existing gender imbalances” (p. 14). Important, too, is the need to prepare for backlash, to consider the repercussions of changing gender and family dynamics for both men and women (and young girls).

As a final aside, in my research on the costs of development for women, I came across this article on the United Nations Development Programme website. The title, “Violence Against Women Also Hurts Business and Development,” is an interesting one. Does violence against women take on more urgency when it has economic ramifications?

References: 
Bisika, T., Ntata, P., & Konyani, S. (2009). Gender-violence and education in Malawi: A study of violence against girls as an obstruction to universal primary school education. Journal of Gender Studies, 18(3), 287-294. doi: 10.1080/09589230903057183

Chisaya, G., DeJaeghere, J., Kendall, N., & Khan, M.A. (2012). Gender and education for all: Progress and problems in achieving gender equity. International Journal of Educational Development, 32, 743-755. doi: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2011.10.004

Sharkey, D. (2008). Contradictiosn in girls' education in a post-conflict setting. Compare, 38(5), 569-579.
doi: 10.1080/03057920802351333 

I need feminism because….

I need feminism because….

I have just seen that today, It’s a campaign on Cambridge University’s Campus where students are given a board that says “I need feminism because” and they fill out their reason. I have checked this Tumblr page about it (see below) and read a lot of inspiring reasons why do we still need feminist thought. This campaign idea reminded me of a book I started reading by Cynthia Enloe, who is among the first female professors in International Relations field and the book’s title is “Seriously!: investigating crashes and crises as if women mattered” Among the themes that are highlighted in the book is what is taken seriously and that to a long time women in academia weren’t taken seriously.

                The author describes her journey in academia that started in a discipline very far from women and gender studies and one where women’s contributions as actors or educators is invisible which is “ International Relations”. When I reflect on that given that I had a lot of interest in international relations when I was doing my undergraduate degree, but I was as the author described didn’t take women’s analysis in the field seriously ( if I found any). The author narrates the initiation of the women and gender studies in one of the universities she was teaching in and how that came as a demand from students in the university once they heard of it from their peers. That was intriguing for me as you can rarely find a department that was initiated as a result of students request and not as a result of faculty seeing the academic prospect of the department. That idea coincides with the legitimacy concept, one that is of importance in international relations and other political science disciplines, but I am using it here in the context of discipline legitimacy.

The quotes that are on this Tumblr page could be regarded as evidence of the legitimacy of feminism as a discipline in academia. But to what extend can this campaign pressure universities to have more female lecturers or to allocate funds for education on women and gender issues is questionable. Also the question of whether feminism is really legitimate in other institutions comes to mind and if the organizations avoid feminism in their institutions, what are their reasons for that? Finally, what discipline is awarded seriousness is something that comes to mind as a student and that depends for the most part on what employers regard as a serious discipline, and the status of feminism discipline seriousness is questionable. 

                                              References

Enloe, C. (2013). Seriously!: Investigating Crashes and Crises as If Women Mattered. Univ of     California Press.

 

http://awkwardsituationist.tumblr.com/post/52817821994/cambridge-university-students-were-asked-on-campus

 

Egypt is the worst Arab country for women

Egypt is the worst Arab country for women

That was the headline of several news articles and the conclusion of the Thomson Reuters report published this month studying the status of women in the Arab world (which consists of 22 countries) and Egypt is the worse according to their six areas of analysis:

·      Women in politics

·      Women in society

·      Women in the economy

·      Women in the family

·      Reproductive rights

·      Violence against women

Such a report and study methodology made me think about WID and GAD methodologies a lot and where to place such a study within these frameworks as a way to understand how different development agencies address women’s issues in the Arab region in particular.

The methodology that is explained on Thomson Reuters website isn’t written in an academic style, for example they don’t state the type of sampling procedure followed or the theory of analysis used or the ranking process, how did it occur and how did they account for the differences in ranking among the researchers.

Regardless, what caught my attention is how they justify the selection of certain individuals to be interviewed and surveyed on the issue the below description:

 “We targeted local, national, regional and international humanitarian, development and human rights organizations, academics, media professionals, health care providers, refugee shelters, women’s shelters, legal advisers and activists, with a strong preference for female respondents.”

It is mentioned here that they have strong preference for female respondents within theses institutions, for me that could be more accounting for women’s subordination. However here the selection bias is one that neglects the voice of the community. Even if those women could be reflecting that voice by one way or another, the experiences of the women in the community who aren’t part of these organizations or who are volunteering in these organizations aren’t counted for. These experiences are important, as we have seen in Playing with fire by Nagar (2006) that even though those women didn’t hold the most prominent positions in the NGO, they brought perspectives to the status of women that are important to incorporate.

References:

Thompson Reuters Foundation. (2013). Poll: Women's rights in the arab world. Retrieved November from http://www.trust.org/spotlight/poll-womens-rights-in-the-arab-world/

Sangtin Writers Collective, & Nagar, R. (2006). Playing with fire. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota press.

A Note about Research Methods

I have been thinking about our conversation a few weeks ago regarding research methods, which emerged out of our reading of the Sangtin Writers’ Playing with Fire. At the doctoral level—or, at least, in my doctoral program—there is tremendous pressure to do research and publish it. I have seen a number of my peers have ambitious dreams of doing meaningful research and writing it up in a way that is unique and innovative only to be thwarted by a committee that expects the writing to follow a traditional format (i.e, introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion/conclusion). It speaks, I think to our discussion about both the appeal and peril of trying to write research in the same way that Nagar and the Sangtin Writers told their stories.   

Recently, I finished a book on qualitative research by David Silverman (2007), a fairly prolific author in the field of qualitative research; many of his books are into their third and fourth editions. What drew me into this book in particular, however, was its title: A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, and Reasonably Cheap Book aboutQualitative Research. Silverman makes it clear from the beginning that this book is his unadulterated opinion about how qualitative research should be conducted. His arguments are relatively benign—he’s not a fan of postmodernism, he prefers a mixed methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and he thinks qualitative researchers who rely solely on individual interviews or focus groups are shortchanging both themselves and their participants by not supplementing the data with observations and document analysis. His analysis takes a turn, however, in the final chapter, where he rails against what he sees as qualitative researchers’ preoccupation with lived experience at the expense of broader cultural analyses. This leads him to the rather damning conclusion that “to the extent that qualitative researchers have largely embraced contemporary culture, their work is largely bullsh*t” (p. 124). He goes on to argue that “experimental writing [such as poetry and ethnodrama] that increasingly populations some academic journals is, strictly speaking, bullsh*t” (p. 139).

While I think most of Silverman’s book is a harmless tirade written by a retired white guy who has the luxury to say whatever he wants, I find this final chapter especially problematic. It is not likely that Silverman is alone in his disparaging of “experimental” or innovative methods for doing and writing research. Yet, these methods are often the most valuable and powerful for research or work that aims to illuminate the voices and experiences of those who are marginalized or disenfranchised. What I found remarkable about Playing with Fire was how poignant those stories were—and how especially powerful they became in light of their absence in the mainstream/academic development discourses with which we had engaged all semester.  Thus, the very research methods that Silverman belittles are actually quite important in understanding the gendered impact of development on individuals as well as understanding men’s and women’s roles in, experiences with, and views of development.

In my search for collaborative and novel forms of qualitative research, I came across a site created by a PhD student in Australia who created the site as part of her dissertation work examining collaborative art and ethnographic practices. Although the site, Side by Side, has been dormant for a few years, it offers a number of interesting stories and links to research and work that strives to tell the stories of individuals, communities, and cultures by having those individuals, communities, and cultures tell their stories themselves. In addition, the PEER (Participatory Ethnographic Evaluation and Research) website describes efforts to engage communities in peer-to-peer interviewing. The site contains documents describing how the method works, case studies, and other resources. Together, I think these two websites demonstrate the potential of collaborative and artistic/poetic research methods/narratives to evoke and inform, but they also demonstrate the long road toward legitimacy and widespread acceptance of these methods by the likes of Silverman and other academics.