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.

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.

An acknowledgement of women’s work in economics – hits, misses, and a long road ahead

October 10, 2023 surbhi kesarLeave a comment

By Rosa Abraham and Surbhi Kesar

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard University, for “having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. Goldin is now one of three women who have been awarded the prize, and, more importantly, this is the first time that the prize recognises research that makes a fundamental distinction between economic outcomes of men and women. Her work makes significant contributions to both the empirical and theoretical aspects of the theme, particularly in the context of the US.

Empirically, she applied innovative ways to unearth data for women’s labour market outcomes in the US at a time when the labour force surveys only collected this information for men. This allowed her to uncover the long-term trend of economic outcomes for women. Her work revealed that there was no linear relationship between economic growth and development and the women’s labour force participation. Instead, bringing together cross-country evidence and historical data, she empirically established a U-shaped relationship between women’s employment and economic growth. This implies that at low levels of economic growth, larger share of women tend to participate in the labour market, largely in agriculture. However, with economic growth and a sectoral shift away from agriculture, women’s participation faltered. Goldin argued that the “income effect” — the rise in household incomes alongside economic growth along with the increasing use of technology in agricultural activities — may explain women’s initial withdrawal from employment. However, beyond a certain level of economic growth, women’s participation rose as their education levels increased and as more white-collar emerged by replacing the factory jobs that are often stigmatised for women.

The labor of land

January 17, 2023January 16, 2023 ramasalladieng1 Comment

Contemporary land grabs and agricultural investments have generated huge attention. The transformations in land tenure, production and social reproduction in the aftermath of land rushes have generated a rich literature. A central question is about labor, and its implications for structural transformation and agrarian futures.

Extraversion, exports and the labor question

In Senegambia, the intersecting pressures of food, land, and capital were historically linked to the quest for new labor and cash crops (cotton, then groundnut, followed by fresh fruits and vegetables) in frontier markets for Europe. Some of these transformations have been widely documented by Egyptian economist Samir Amin, Senegalese historian Boubacar Barry and American historian Sven Beckert. In 1819, the Ndiaw Treaty between France and the leaders of the Waalo Kingdom (in northern Senegal) was signed, allowing France to set up three agricultural bases in northern Senegal for export. This agricultural colonization project failed mostly because of the resistance of the inhabitants of the Waalo Kingdom (the Waalo-Waalo) and the inability of French colonial leaders to secure land concessions they thought were automatically and permanently transferred to them through the treaty. The Waalo leaders, who managed the land on behalf of their community, understood otherwise. This conflicting interpretation on how land is governed became a recurrent source of conflict.

Another problem was the shortage of labor—the Waalo-Waalo refused forced labor and preferred to cultivate their subsistence crops rather than those for export. This refusal led to the return of clandestine slave trade and related abuses. The insecurity created by Waalo’s neighbors and the resistance of merchant capital added to the failure. These are key to understanding how various historical dynamics have sedimented to make the Senegal River Valley Region (historical Waalo) the site of the land rush that began in 2007-2008, especially for the production of export fresh fruits and vegetables.

Revisiting this rich history offers us a better understanding of relations of exploitation and contemporary resistance to extractivism by a number of communities in this region. It is a reminder of the violence of primitive accumulation, a violence that is ongoing. Tanzanian historian Issa Shivji puts it well:

The early encounter of Africa with Europe was not commercial involving the exchange of commodities, but rather the unilateral looting of human resources. African slavery was neither a trade, nor a mode of production. It was simply a robbery of a people on a continental scale perpetrated over four centuries through force of arms.

Despite the subsequent attempt to develop new crops in 1826 in Saint-Louis, merchant capital eventually prevailed with the failure of agriculture. As a result, post-colonial leaders “inherited a country organized by and for merchant capital” after 1960 as Catherine Boone puts it. In the same vein, Koddenbrock, Kvangraven and Sylla note how merchant capital subsequently established colonial and post-colonial structures of extraction.

Beyond processes of land acquisition, it is important to pay attention to how land becomes capital and how agricultural workers are included, excluded, or rather adversely incorporated into these agri-food networks.For instance, in her 2011 essay on land grabbing in Southern Africa, Ruth Hall provides a useful typology of agricultural transformations from subsistence to capitalist imperatives. Besides models that are based on the displacement of primary producers and the establishment of large export-oriented agricultural estates, Hall emphasizes “commercialization in situ” and “outgrower” schemes whereby petty commodity producers and other land users are incorporated into commercial value chains. This is a further invite to go beyond eurocentrism and methodological nationalism in our analyses of the genealogy of capitalism and of processes of exploitation.

Layers of compounding pressure: the gendered experiences of rural migrant youth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

January 9, 2023January 10, 2023 elizabethdessieLeave a comment

“I have lived everything there is to be lived in this city. Now I need to leave because all that is left for me here is misery and I want a better life for my child.”

It is with these words that Tizita, a 21-year-old mother-of-one from Gojjam in northern Ethiopia, described her dismay at life in Addis Ababa when I interviewed her in 2022. After living in the Ethiopian capital for eight years, she had had enough. Tizita was set on moving to one of the Gulf States, a part of the world from where many of the women she met on the street had returned from and were planning to re-migrate to. Having previously worked as a domestic worker in Addis Ababa, and having learnt that sex work was the only way to make “real money” in the city, the young woman remained focused on meeting the fundamental purpose of her migration project: transforming her life.

For Fikadu, a 27-year-old man from Wollega in western Ethiopia, the strain of life in the city is similar, yet different. Unlike for young women like Tizita, whose income-earning activities are overwhelmingly limited to domestic work, petty street work, commercial sex work and begging, the fractions of the informal economy available to migrant men are slightly wider. Nevertheless, this is not to say that times have not been hard. Having previously worked as a street vendor selling second-hand clothes, Fikadu has had to downscale his work and is struggling to meet the rising costs of food, rent, sending money to his family of origin, and realising his plans for the future:

“Our supplies disappeared and when they were back, the price went up by more than double. That was the end of it. Now I pay for my life here by selling socks, but I don’t let that dismay me. I remain focused on my plans of transforming my life here, and once things improve I will start saving for my own metalwork shop.”

The testimonies of Tizita and Fikadu form part of a longitudinal qualitative research project that maps the livelihood strategies of a sample of migrant youth in Addis Ababa at two points in time between 2018 and 2022. Drawing on these findings, this blog outlines some of the ways in which rural-urban migrant youth between the ages of 15-27 experience and counteract pressure. Through an exploration of migrants’ everyday strategies of navigating the city, findings presented here show how dealing with the intricacies of urban life relates intimately to the lives rural youth left behind and the imaginary futures they aspire towards, the ways in which youth relate to the social and economic responsibilities they carry, and the manner in which subjective pressure experienced by women and men has a compounding effect that further exacerbates the challenges migrant youth face.

The pressure to provide and perform: Anti-feminism, masculinity consultants, and the threat of male expendability in contemporary Nairobi

December 22, 2022December 22, 2022 marioatschmidtLeave a comment

Women are the reason why men have changed because women are hard on men. […] The expectations they come with into a relationship, and generally how they have been brought up, or the life they live, that is what gives some men stress. […] When someone is living with a woman in the house, you find that issues are many because money is little.

Wellington Ochieng, 36-year old labor migrant from western Kenya

During almost three years of ethnographic fieldwork among male migrants in Pipeline, an over-populated high-rise estate in Nairobi’s chronically marginalized east, I heard complaints like Wellington’s almost daily. Migrant men, in my case predominantly Luo from western Kenya who came to Nairobi with high expectations of a better future, bemoaned a life full of pressure caused by the romantic, sexual, and economic expectations of their girlfriends, wives, and rural kin. The blame often lay on ‘city girls’ who were portrayed as materialistic ‘slay queens’who ‘finish’ men by leaving them bankrupt only to suck away the next sponsor’s wealth after grabbing him with their ‘Beelzebub nails’ as Wellington called the colorful nails sported by many Nairobi women. Soon, so a fear expressed repeatedly by my interlocutors, most men would no longer be needed at all and Kenya’s economy would be ruled by economically powerful women who raise chaotic boys brought up without an authoritative father figure. Such fears of male expendability also manifested in imaginations about a future in which more and more men and women would live in homosexual relationships or ‘contract marriages’ that replace trust and love with contractual agreements. When my flat mate Samuel, a student of economics divorced from the mother of his baby son, returned to our apartment after passing the neighbor’s house where a group of women celebrated a birthday, for instance, he just shook his head and sighed: ‘We live like animals in the jungle. Women and men separately. We only meet for mating and making babies. Maybe that’s where we’re heading to.’ Overwhelmed by their wives’ and girlfriends’ expectations, many migrant men who spoke to me in Pipeline decided to spend as little time as possible in their marital houses. Instead, they evaded pressure by lifting weights in gyms, stockpiling digital loans and informal credits, placing bets in gambling shops, gulping down a cold beer in a Wines & Spirits, playing the videogame FIFA, or catcalling ‘brown-skinned’ Kamba women on the roads. Some men who could no longer cope took even more drastic measures involving murder and suicide. One man, for instance, cut the throat of his girlfriend only to try to kill himself, while another tried to poison himself, later quoting the wife’s actions and character as the cause. Anything appeared better than spending time with the ‘daughters of Jezebel’ who were waiting for them in the cramped houses of Pipeline, sometimes demanding migrant men to engage in romantic and sexual practices they were unfamiliar with as expounded upon by Wellington:

When you come to Nairobi, our girls want that you hold her hand when you are going to buy chips, you hug her when you are going to the house, I hear there is something called cuddling, she wants that you cuddle, at what time will you cuddle and tomorrow you want to go to work early? […] you don’t go to meet your friends so that you show her you love her, you just sleep on the sofa and caress her hair, to me, this is nonsense because that is not romantic love, I think that romantic love, so long as I provide the things I provide, and we sire children, I think that’s enough romance. […] Another girl told me to lick her, and I asked her ‘Why do you want me to lick you?’ She said that she wanted me to lick her private parts. Are those places licked? […] Those things are things that people see on TV, let us leave them to the people on TV.

Figure 1: Pipeline

Gendering the debt crisis: Feminists on Sri Lanka’s financial crisis

December 2, 2022November 28, 2022 kanchanaruwanpuraguse1 Comment

By Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Bhumika Muchhala and Smriti Rao

Countless images of women carers flitted through April-July 2022 on Sri Lankan television screens, social media, and newspapers. Carers with young children, mothers with new-borns leaving them with equally young children while they stood in queue for gas or kerosene, children doing their homework on tuk-tuks while their parents got in line for petrol and diesel. Yet, Sri Lankan policy pronouncements rarely mention working-class women. In a country where women comprise 52% of the population, this is astounding. Especially so when the dominant three foreign exchange earners for the country – garments, tea exports and migrant workers to the Middle East – rest on the efforts of women workers.

In the current response to Sri Lanka’s debt crisis, the voices and needs of working-class women are once again being ignored by policymakers, despite the evidence all-around of women intensifying their unpaid labour even as the conditions under which they perform paid labour deteriorate.

As feminist economists, our argument is straightforward: debt justice is a feminist value and principle. And at the core of our understanding of debt justice is the principle that working class women cannot be made to pay for the ‘odious debt’ generated by the recklessness and corruption of (almost entirely male) Sri Lankan political elites.

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Category: Feminist Economics