Re-visiting Gender in Development: Complex Inequalities in a Changing Asia

The study, Re-visiting Gender in Development: Complex Inequalities in a Changing Asia is a collaboration between fifteen researchers, who have come together to re-visit the concept of gender in a rapidly changing Asia. The major aim is to examine multiple, intersecting and complex dimensions of identity and difference, and formerly unacknowledged sources of social power from institutions and their emerging discourses. Although interlinked, the sub-projects have grouped themselves according to four thematic groups: 1. Environment and Resources (Becky Elmhirst, Babette Resurreccion, Shanti Thambiah) 2. Power, Policies and Practices (Smita Mishra Panda and Ragnhild Lund, Kyoko Kusakabe, Philippe Doney, Cecilia Milwertz, Wang Fengxian), 3. Justice and Human Rights (Jhulikha Hussain, Noraida Endut), 4. Changing Gendered Livelihoods (Ingrid Rudie and Rashida Shuib, Merete Lie and Ragnhild Lund, Zaireeni Azmi). The project outcomes are presented in the book, ?Gendered Entanglements. Revisiting Gender in Rapidly Changing Asia? (2015). This book addresses how gender has been changed, both as a normative process influencing social roles and relations and as an object and/or a concept of research, thus representing a call for grounded, multi-dimensional and ?moving? feminisms. The authors confront gender as an increasingly more complex concept than the present ways and approaches with which gender and development ? largely as a field of practice ? has been framed, applied, and understood. Our work in this book resonates with this stream of recent scholarship as we attend to and underscore the neutralization and simplifications associated with gender and ?women? within the field of gender and development practice, which have sidestepped the complex workings of gender and power on the ground, and which have failed to serve the ends of gender equality in a more holistic sense. In addition to local and regional based work, three forthcoming articles on the methodology used in this project will also be published in referee journals: One on collaborations, power dynamics and co-production of knowledge, which focuses on the dynamics of the collaborative process; one on re-thinking the field and the role of fieldwork, which considers the way in which we understand ?the field? and ?fieldwork? in research on gender, and on gender and development; and one on re-politicizing and re-positioning gender in a development context, which is focusing on one of the themes that originally motivated the project by asking what we have learned in the course of the research process and what that actually means in practice. The project outcomes have been presented in International conferences (ASEUK, International Geography Union, American Association of Geographers) and conferences and seminars in the Asian region.

This research project aims to primarily re-visit the concept of gender in a rapidly changing Asia that offers changing economic, political and social conditions in various contexts, in order to offer new pathways for the transformation of gender inequalit ies in developing contexts. The project allows researchers to critically grapple with new ways of understanding gender in development contexts in an effort to more holistically address the emancipatory and transformative agendas of feminism and developmen t, with a conscious effort at incorporating ways in which gender is understood and produced by people in the rapidly changing Asian region. Thirteen researchers from different Asian and European countries have teamed up to critically examine the concept of gender in light of more specific objectives that address emerging development issues in Asia. In different ways they are addressing issues of equality, rights and development with respect to 1. Environment and Resources, 2. Governance and Gender Mainst reaming, 3. Justice and Human Rights, 4. Gender and Changing Subjectivities.