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Afterword: Reading counter-narratives to gendered inequality in education transnationally
Abstract
Across the globe, women are struggling to overcome social and cultural confines, while creating new opportunities for their gender, by becoming leaders in research and career fields from which they have been historically excluded. This afterword responds to and builds upon contributors’ trenchant articles that highlight social, economic, and technological changes that women are making across cultures. Many women are still battling to gain basic human rights. Accordingly, researchers featured in this special issue bring attention to the inequalities that still exist for women worldwide while raising questions about how new shifts toward extreme conservatism and nationalism may impact women’s rights in the near future. As puzzled over by post-development scholars such as Ong, Hoogvelt and Sassen, in this era of neoliberalism it is now often difficult to decipher programs and organizations that are truly working toward positive changes for women in the developing world from those that are focused on their own self-interests. Throughout history, governmental and social structures have been designed to favor men, but women are now finding ways to make their voices heard through innovatively taking advantage of new communication technologies in both the developing and developed world. We join with contributors in highlighting women’s tremendous investment in change, discussing issues of gender and technology, as well as the work being done by women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. The contributors maintain that in order to create more opportunities for women, progressive researchers, policy-makers and activists must continue to collaborate connecting substantively to the struggles of women for a better life while working toward interdisciplinary solutions that address the ongoing inequalities that constrain their present and future circumstances.
... Narrative theoretical lenses have been useful to understand contestation over meaning as well as acts of resistance inside organizations in the management field (Boje, 1995;Boje et al., 2005). Particularly, counter-narratives have been also valuable to shed a light on political and post-colonial issues (Boukhris, 2017), cultural studies (Sosa, 2009), social activism (Dixton, 2014), public policy (Naess and Vabø, 2014) and education (Schneider, 2014;Godwin, 2015;McCarthy and Tomlin, 2017). However, both as a theoretical lens and as a methodological approach, counter-narratives are barely used to understand the collective rhetorical practices that help to tackle issues related to social exclusion. ...
This major collection of essays, a sequel to Modernity at Large (1996), is the product of ten years' research and writing, constituting an important contribution to globalization studies. Appadurai takes a broad analytical look at the genealogies of the present era of globalization through essays on violence, commodification, nationalism, terror and materiality. Alongside a discussion of these wider debates, Appadurai situates India at the heart of his work, offering writing based on first-hand research among urban slum-dwellers in Mumbai, in which he examines their struggle to achieve equity, recognition and self-governance in conditions of extreme inequality. Finally, in his work on design, planning, finance and poverty, Appadurai embraces the "politics of hope" and lays the foundations for a revitalized, and urgent, anthropology of the future.
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life-how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls 'the specter of uselessness' haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an 'iron cage.' Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of "reform."