feminisms-in-development

by Ann Whitehead

The political project of reasserting feminist engagement with development has proceeded uneasily in recent years. This book examines how the arguments of feminist researchers have often become depoliticised by development institutions and offers richly contextualised accounts of the pitfalls and compromises of the politics of engagement. Speaking from within academic institutions, social movements, development bureaucracies and national and international NGOs, the contributors highlight on-going battles for interpretation and the unequal power relations within which these battles take place. They engage with the challenges of achieving solidarity in the context of increasingly polarised geo-political relations, and advance a diversity of critiques of simplified ideas about gender, and how these ideas come to be interpreted in institutional policies and practices.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, International Development

Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Anne Whitehead, author and historian, was born in Sydney but spent much of her childhood in England and Papua-New Guinea. Because of a peripatetic engineer father, she was educated at eleven schools, including Lincolnshire and Yorkshire villages, the PNG highland goldfields and coastal town of Lae, and boarding schools in Charters Towers and the Queensland Gold Coast. In 1972 she graduated from the University of Sydney with an MA in Australian Literature and later (2001) a PhD in Government and International Relations.