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How does our paper contribute to the building of the analytical framework for
DEMOLOGOS?
A disciplining grid to be completed and added to your paper for Vienna.
There are overlaps between categories; still please complete where you can. The grid is
built using the various tables in D1.1; you can always go back to that document if things
are not clear….
1. Which elements of the socio-economic system are explained? This is an open
question.
I would like to explore the possibility of gender discourse in providing new ways of
approaching and addressing a wide range of social and cultural phenomena in
development studies, both analytically and practically. I have organised the paper around
two very basic assertions drawn from contemporary feminist theory in social sciences: a)
firstly that gender is a key relational dimension of human activity and cannot be equated
solely with women (“add women and stir” approach), b) and secondly, gender issues
must necessarily vary from place to place and over time. It would therefore be
impossible to deal exhaustively with all the most crucial gender issues in development
studies. What I attempt to do is to situate development studies broadly within a limited
set of inter-linked, evolving approaches to the study of gender. I begin with a brief
historical overview of how gender emerged as a category of analysis in the literature on
development and how it has transformed the nature of research questions and accepted
knowledge.
2. Which types of explanation? (consult figure 1 in D1.1 before completing; use the
specifications given there)
These categories refer to the original labels shared with the EC. These labels will need to
be used in WP2 and certainly in WP3, even their analytical calibration will benefit from
epistemological pluralism:
- Economic explanation
- Political explanation
- Social explanation
- Socio-cultural explanation
- Institutional explanation
- Articulation between various spatial scales
3. Which analytical themes have been addressed in the paper? (figure 2 in D1.1)
Use the right-hand column to specify the meaning of the themes in the theories, schools,
thematic approaches you are treating in your paper. The suggestions in the right hand
column as printed here will guide you to complete it.
Themes
Special DEMOLOGOS concerns
Scale
• Uneven development -- inequality
in development,
• global economy
Democracy and authoritarianism
Crisis and crisis mechanisms/patterns
Gender Empowerment
• This is not a major issue in any of
these theories
Development and development views
•
•
•
Competition, competitiveness vs equality,
inclusion vs. exclusion
Articulation of sub-systems (complexity)
– spatial
Ideology, discourse and paradigm
Development itself
Engendering development
How benefit and burden of development
are distributed The benefits of
development are distributed unequally
between the North and the South and
between men and women
• The relationship between
reproductive and reproductive
sphere
• Hierarchical relations between the
North and the South
4. What is the economy – Economic ontology?
Economic Ontologies
The need to reformulate the
development in terms of
capabilities and overcome the
fetishism of economic
categories is emphasised, as is
the role of reciprocity and
women’s movements and the
importance of the qualitative
approach (Nussbaum) and
everyday life.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
What is the economy?
Is it self-contained?
The economic and the extraeconomic
Limits of the market; other allocation and
coordination principles
Role
of
distribution,
association,
reciprocity,..
Anti-economism
Fetishism of economic
categories -- foundations of
economic discourse
“Values”: development of
what for what? Quantities vs
qualitative analysis. Scale as a
value (Small is Democratic?)
5. Epistemological questions
Objectivist of subjectivist position of theoretician? The role of reflexivity? The social
embeddedness of scientific practice and theory building? Are we dealing with normative
or analytical theories? With our without predictive power pretentions? (
We are dealing mostly with analytical theories. The paper claims that the discussion on
gender needs to be placed within a more reflexive framework
Sociology of knowledge-construction; link also to ontological questions under 4. above.
This should shed some light on the meaning of categories and concepts within particular
theories.
Historical embedding of theories and approaches – recapturing what has been lost,
hegemonies and exclusions
o Rise and demise of theories within ideo-political and iceo-economic
contexts
o “Synthesis”, re-interpretation of theories
o Theories and historical-geographical dynamics (Hegemony, subsumption,
marginalization)
o Theories and historical praxis
o
Development policies have shifted over time from a focus only on women as biological
units to one based on gender and relational and social dimensions, sometimes including
environmental issues.
6. Methodological dimensions
This section covers a ‘reductionist’ view of methodology: what is the practice of
empirical research for the family of theories, the thematic analysis, you are dealing with?
Critical here is the extent to which a gender perspective can recognize and take account
of different spheres of life beyond the narrowly defined economic arena. Care, for
example, cannot be marginalized. Thus gender allows us to recognize interdependence
(of spheres, but also of people) in the process of exclusion and inclusion, of development
and so on. The paper tried to combine personalistic and structural approaches.