Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Victoria Bernal (Editor), Inderpal Grewal (Editor), Elissa Helms

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma
 

Genres: Feminism, Academic

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Victoria Bernal is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village, coeditor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism; and editor of Contemporary Cultures, Global Connections: Anthropology for the 21st Century.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

341.2 T3966 2014