This book proposes a new theoretical framework for agency thinking by examining the ethical, discursive and practical engagements of a group of women development workers in north-west India with developmentalism and individual rights. Rethinking Agency asks an underexplored question, tracks the entry, encounter, experience and practice of developmentalism and individual rights, and examines their normative and political trajectory. Through an ethnography of a moral encounter with developmentalism, it raises a critical question: how do we think of agency in oppressive contexts? Further, how do issues of risk, injury, coercion and oppression alter the conceptual mechanics of agency itself? The work will be invaluable to research organisations, development practitioners, policy makers and political journalists interested in questions of gender, political empowerment, rights and political participation, and to academics and students in the fields of feminist theory, development studies, sociology, politics and gender studies.

This book proposes a new theoretical framework for agency thinking by examining the ethical, discursive and practical engagements of a group of women development workers in north-west India with developmentalism and individual rights.

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Rethinking Agency "asks an underexplored question, tracks the entry, encounter, experience and practice of developmentalism and individual rights, and examines their normative and political trajectory. Through an ethnography of a moral encounter with developmentalism, it raises a critical question: how do we think of agency in oppressive contexts? Further, how do issues of risk, injury, coercion and oppression alter the conceptual mechanics of agency itself?

The work will be invaluable to research organisations, development practitioners, policy makers and political journalists interested in questions of gender, political empowerment, rights and political participation, and to academics and students in the fields of feminist theory, development studies, sociology, politics and gender studies.

At no point in recorded history has there been an absence of intense, and heated, discussion about the subject of how to conduct relations between women and men. This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to these omnipresent issues and debates, mapping the present and future of thinking about feminist theory.

The chapters gathered here present the state of the art in scholarship in the field, covering: Epistemology and marginality Literary, visual and cultural representations Sexuality Macro and microeconomics of gender Conflict and peace. The most important consensus in this volume is that a central organizing tenet of feminism is its willingness to examine the ways in which gender and relations between women and men have been (and are) organized. The authors bring a shared commitment to the critical appraisal of gender relations, as well as a recognition that to think 'theoretically' is not to detach concerns from lived experience but to extend the possibilities of understanding. With this focus on theory and theorizing about the world in which we live, this Handbook asks us, across all disciplines and situations, to abandon our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and interrogate both the origin and the implications of our ideas about gender relations and feminism. It is an essential reference work for advanced students and academics not only of feminist theory, but of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences.

Vernacular Rights Cultures offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of world-making that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights, in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilisations in 'most of the world'. Vernacular Rights Cultures demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights.