Fieldwork as a Feminist Methodology in Economics

April 16, 2024 ritwikapatgiriLeave a comment

What is a feminist methodology? Academicians and scholars of gender and feminist studies have focused on feminist research methodology since the introduction of gender studies as a course in universities.Feminist methodology has developed as a result of several objections towards traditional positivist research. Theory and methodology can be seen to be closely interrelated in a dialectical relationship wherein a feminist methodology can validate feminist theory and indicate the need for modifications. Many of the social sciences have theories that speak about human beings. But theory is rooted in reinforcing of experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of men. Even if women are being studied, the perspective and mode of the study have remained masculine, representing the dominant culture. As a result, research outcomes often end up justifying the status quo and the existing power relationships and myths about oppressed and other vulnerable communities. For instance, neoclassical economics has tended to reproduce gender stereotypes by portraying behavior in the marketplace (considered to be men’s domain) as guided by rational pursuit of self-interest, and behavior in the household (seen as women’s domain) to be governed by altruism.

Photo: Women in rural Assam weaving a mekhela chadar, which the women use for their own consumption but also try to sell whenever possible. There is a thin line of separation between work and leisure for most rural women.

Traditional science, moreover, maintains that the researcher and the researched are in different spaces. Positivist social science research requires the researcher to be value-free, neutral, and uninvolved, thus, maintaining a hierarchical and non-reciprocal relationship between the research subject and the research object. Maria Mies describes women researchers in such situations to be trapped in a “schizophrenic situation”, one where the researcher has to constantly repress, negate, or ignore her own experience of sexist oppression and have to maintain a so-called rational standard of the male-dominated academic world. Such an approach further hinders exploring areas like women’s perception of their own work, which have remained “hidden” due to andocentric biases. Mies’ historic work on the lace makers of Narsapur details such “hidden women” through the example of official Census data. While her estimate of women lace makers was about 100,000 in the area, these women were not recorded in the official Indian census statistics of 1971. The 1971 Census enumerated only 6449 persons as being engaged in household industry in Narsapur taluk, making the 100,000 women “invisible” despite the Census definition of the household industry covering exactly the type of work that these women did! Women workers, thus, remain invisible by official statistics by not including them as workers, even with abundant empirical evidence of their productive work. It is important to mention here that to conduct “objective” quantitative research, one does not necessarily have to be detached and unconcerned about the topic. Having a strong opinion on women’s work being hidden or invisible historically does not necessarily mean that research decisions will be any more biased thanif those opinions are not held.

Condensing the Gaza crisis

March 22, 2024 kjayasuriyaLeave a comment

The Gaza crisis has underscored the deep fractures of domestic politics in Western Europe, the US and Australia. It is as much a domestic political crisis as a conflict in the Middle East.

What is the nature of this crisis? Well, it is not one but multiple crises that are condensed around the Gaza war. Now condensation is an interesting concept – first used by Freud to show how a single idea or dream stands for multiple associations and ideas. We can think of the Gaza crisis as a political condensation of several multiple and intersecting crises and their different temporalities. It condenses a series of fracture points: the crisis of representation, an increasingly authoritarian response to the political conflict, the unravelling of the international liberal order and the politics of race and class. It reinforces a shift to what the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas termed authoritarian statism which is the intensification of authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly democratic institutions and processes.

First, it is now fashionable to apply the term decolonisation to global politics but this decolonization is always seen as ‘out there’ and distinct from the politics of class. Instead, I want to argue the Gaza crisis has brought decolonisation back home to the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney and New York. It is often forgotten that many of those on the streets are demanding not just a ceasefire in Gaza but a political voice that is marginalised. And let’s not forget that this plays out in the register of both class and race. Many – but by no means all – of those in the streets are the new migrant working class and Gaza is an expression of their political discontent. The social theorist – Stuart Hall – famously said that race is the medium through which class is lived and in the Gaza crisis we see an intersection of class and race. It is return of the political time of colonial politics but this time in the metropolis of the old colonies. This class and domestic dimension is often forgotten in the sanitised version of decolonisation that circulates within academia. Again, the Gaza crisis condenses existing political fractures.

So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide

January 14, 2024 Developing EconomicsLeave a comment

By Steve Salaita

Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar.

College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.

People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield). The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide. The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable.

Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering? Not really. But we’re not entirely powerless, either. Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world. Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide. Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination. These campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics. And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity—financially, politically, or logistically. It does no good to say that “we” aren’t affected by what happens “there.”

Palestine Changes Everything

December 18, 2023January 17, 2024 Farwa Sial4 Comments

The on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in 2023, marks the end of the façade of the peaceful Western liberal order. At least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. While these countries were subject to the different ebbs and flows of US imperial violence. Palestinians have paid the heaviest price. The historical occupation of Palestine has always been a socio-economic precondition for the cohesion of the G-7 but the current ethnic cleansing can no longer be contained through the usual narrative control tools and an ever intensifying climate of fear promulgated to the ends of silencing and chilling legitimate support for Palestine internationally. As Steven Salaita notes, the genocide has shown us that ‘Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval’, and we continue to bear witness to the genocide for ourselves and for the next generation. The current genocide is the clearest expression of the decrepitude of the Western order in a state of ongoing entropy. What follows shall be bereaved of the usual pretences of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ and thus more naked, brutal and yet more reactionary. The Western order is generating the conditions for its demise. In this, Palestine leads the way. Palestine changes everything.

When economists shut off your water

December 11, 2023December 7, 2023 jethron akallahLeave a comment

*Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.*

By Adrian Wilson, Faith Kasina, Irene Nduta and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There’s no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru tells us, the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington—segregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs—and the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi’s prosperity.

Today’s water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi’s water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city’s groundwater is naturally salty and very high in fluoride. Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors—often salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians—a disparity that research has shown to often be the case in other cities in the global South. As the Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it, in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, “water provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.”

Palestine and the Meaning of Global Antifascism

December 6, 2023December 6, 2023 martinarboledaLeave a comment

Photo: Courtesy of the Laura Rodig Brigade, Coordinadora Feminista 8M.

What is particularly harrowing about the current situation in Gaza not only has to do with the multiplication of war crimes and with the moral and ideological bankruptcy of a Western liberal order that seeks to obfuscate, by all means – media blackouts, censorship, stigmatization, blackmail, etc. – what is already patently clear for most. The resonances with the darkest side of 20th century fascism, in particular, are a clear warning sign. In the words of Israeli intellectual Daniel Blatman: “As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the [Israeli] government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.” Also, a recent essay by Alberto Toscano draws worrying parallels between the Israeli government and fascism in its specifically Nazi variant: virulent racism with biologicist overtones; political operations driven by a totalitarian mentality; contempt for weakness and lust for violence; homophobia and anti-intellectualism.

How to position ourselves in this situation? Or more specifically, what are the consequences that arise from the act of taking a stance? In recent weeks, the war between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front has been discussed as a relevant precedent for understanding the situation in Gaza, and Frantz Fanon as an important interpreter of the Algerian struggle for decolonization and national liberation. However, it is in the foreword that Jean Paul Sartre wrote for the 1963 French edition of The Wretched of the Earth where the ethical question of taking a stance (one of the most recurrent themes in the existentialist philosophy of the time) is powerfully posed. In this text, Sartre indicts the reader for his veiled complicity with colonial violence. In an accusatory tone whose stylistic construction is clearly designed to create discomfort, the author states that not taking sides and simply remaining silent is equivalent to siding with the aggressor. I often find it difficult to write in the first person. However, under the current circumstances I cannot bear to remain silent. I am also not clear about the register in which I should write these lines; what is clear, however, is that it is imperative for me to raise my voice against the genocidal violence and systematic dehumanization to which the Palestinian people are being subjected to.

The three-stage process through which African resource sovereignty was ceded to foreign mining corporations

December 4, 2023November 26, 2023 Ben RadleyLeave a comment

In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free here.