Journal
CHILDHOOD-A GLOBAL JOURNAL OF CHILD RESEARCH
Volume 29, Issue 3, Pages 406-422Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/09075682221110767
Keywords
Adolescent girls; agency; empowerment; gender-based violence; child marriage
Categories
Funding
- Azim Premji Philanthropic Foundation (APPI)
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Girls' empowerment programmes are both celebrated as the 'Smarter Economics' of pulling girls and families out of poverty, and critiqued as neoliberal strategies for delivering gendered equality through responsibilised selves. These opposing views are conceptualized within institutions of the Global North. By analyzing a girls' empowerment programme in south India, the authors argue that agency is a relational quality embedded within social relationships.
Girls' empowerment programmes have been celebrated as the 'Smarter Economics' of pulling girls and families out of poverty; and critiqued as neoliberal strategies for 'delivering gendered equality through responsibilised selves. These oppositional accounts, conceptualised within institutions of the Global North, present girls as 'victims' in different ways, adopting narrow, liberal conceptions of agency and empowerment. Analysing a girls' empowerment programme from south India, we argue that agency is a relational quality embedded within social relationships. Based on this understanding, we present the ethical need and possibilities for going beyond frameworks that individualise empowerment and position it as 'rescue' and 'responsibilisation.'
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