Empowered to Contest the Terms of Empowerment? Empowerment and Development in a Transnational Women’s Education Project

Abstract

The contemporary paradigm of international development invests in individuals and communities as the main agents of development. In this paradigm, education is presented as the central avenue for individuals and communities to generate resources and networks to empower themselves. Some development and feminist scholars have critiqued this intense preoccupation with empowerment for being a tool of neoliberal global governance, which produces self-governing actors oriented toward the market. Instead of approaching development and empowerment paradigms as solely “good” or “bad,” this ethnographic study examines how paradigms of education and empowerment are approached, translated, and contested in the day-to-day lives of the subjects of these paradigms. This analysis reveals a nonlinear and uneven impact of self-governing empowerment discourse in a women’s education project in Pakistan and highlights how the development and empowerment discourse can become a site for dissenting voices and opinions.