Hope, agency, and the 'side effects' of development in India and Papua New Guinea : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Manawatu campus, New Zealand
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2011
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Massey University
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Abstract
This thesis is a comparative study of exceptional women organising for social
change through grassroots-level development initiatives in education and incomegeneration
in urban poor areas of Howrah and Kolkata (West Bengal, India) and Lae
(Papua New Guinea). It explores the relationship between hope, agency, and
development by investigating the historically specific circumstances and practices of
women organising collectively as they struggle to create more meaningful lives for
themselves, their families, and the larger communities in which they live.
Research for this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with four
grassroots organisations: two led by Muslim women in Howrah and Kolkata, and two
led by Christian women in Lae. Data was gathered using a diverse portfolio of
qualitative methods and analysed with a common conceptual framework that draws on
Bourdieu’s theory of practice.
This study combines analyses of historical processes, habitat, and structured
social space with in-depth, place-based ethnography to show that as socially embedded
beings, the culturally constructed ways in which we hope and act for development are
lodged in social relations. It illustrates the dialectic relationship between structure and
agency by showing how these active, articulate, intelligent women living in poverty
sometimes reproduce the structural inequalities they are working to transform. This
thesis identifies a number of ‘side effects’ of development, including collective hope
and collective agency, which serve to sustain collective action in the face of adversity,
hardship, and failure to achieve social change. It increases our understanding of
development by offering a critical, comparative mode of scholarship that focuses on
people’s hopes and agency and allows for a reading in terms of possibilities as well as
success and failure.
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Women in development, Urban poor, Community development