Panel Title: Gender, Politics, and Development
Panel Code: RC07.03
Track: RC07 Women and Politics in the Global South
Date and Time: 15 July 2025, 11:00 UTC+9
Room: 3F 317C
Convenor: Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan
Chair: Dr. Simone R. Bohn
Discussant: Dr. Anju Gupta
Volunteer Rapporteur: Diana Chacón

Panel Overview

This panel explored the gendered dimensions of development policy, practice, and resistance across multiple regions and institutional settings. Drawing from diverse methodologies and disciplinary traditions, the presenters engaged with questions of power, marginalization, and transformation. Topics ranged from the technopolitics of urban governance and campus-based feminist activism to the intersections of caste, care work, and climate vulnerability. A shared thread running through the presentations was the tension between exclusionary institutions and the resilience and creativity of feminist actors working to subvert them.

Paper Presentations

1. A Black Unicorn in the Academe: A Testimonial of a Black Feminist Scholar in Political Science

Presenter: Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein

Dr. Hossein delivered an impactful testimonial on her lived experience as a Black Caribbean feminist economist working in Canadian higher education. Using Audre Lorde’s poem The Black Unicorn as both metaphor and anchor, she reflected on the systemic exclusion and epistemic violence faced by Black women in academia. She detailed her early background in international development and her decision to return to university as a mature student, only to encounter a deeply racialized and gendered environment.

A key intervention in her presentation was the creation of the Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective (DISE Lab) in 2017, an initiative aimed at building culturally diverse, community-centered economic models. The Collective, now comprising over a dozen feminist scholars, conducts research and advocacy to challenge the whiteness and elitism of mainstream economic theory. She also described how institutional racism manifested through administrative retaliation and selective union protections. Despite experiencing a human rights violation and a reverse discrimination claim from a PhD student, she continued to center Black feminist scholarship and teaching as tools for justice. Her parting message was one of solidarity: build community, speak truth, and disrupt exclusion through collective teaching and activism.

 

2. Gender in the Datafication of Smart Cities in the Global South

Presenter: Dr. Geeti Das

Dr. Das offered a rigorous and deeply theoretical examination of how smart city technologies and data infrastructures marginalize women, queer people, and informal workers in Global South cities. She argued that smart urbanism operates through an “epistemic politics” that privileges legibility, predictability, and data extractability. Using frameworks from Ananya Roy and Naeem Inayatullah, she showed how informality is not merely a condition but a political strategy used by states to govern selectively.

She explained how machine learning systems tend to "see" objects and movements rather than relationships or contexts, thereby rendering invisible the care work, kinship ties, and informal networks that underpin women’s urban livelihoods. Continuous sensing and surveillance technologies, particularly in the transport and public safety sectors, promote male-dominated notions of public space and ignore feminist urban research. Informal economies, often central to women's economic survival, are erased or criminalized.

Dr. Das further argued that smart city governance introduces new bureaucratic regimes that are overwhelmingly male and technocratic, creating additional barriers to participation for gender minorities. The "smartness" paradigm, she warned, is frequently exported as a solution without attention to local needs, often displacing existing democratic practices. Her call was for feminist engagement with infrastructure politics to reclaim urban futures centered on care, equity, and collective life.

 

3. Understanding Climate Change Perception and Impacts Among Female Subsistence Farmers Living with Physical Disabilities in Kaliro District, Uganda

Presenter: Dr. Lisa Thorley

Dr. Thorley presented a grounded qualitative study that gave voice to an often overlooked group in climate discourse: rural women with disabilities. Conducted in collaboration with Rosemary Nakijoba from Muteesa I Royal University, the research involved nine in-depth interviews with women with physical disabilities and albinism in Uganda’s Kaliro District. These women were subsistence farmers whose lives and livelihoods were increasingly disrupted by erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods.

Her presentation highlighted multiple intersecting vulnerabilities: women with disabilities are more likely to live in isolated areas, lack access to health services, and face stigmatization and violence. The interviews revealed a deep sense of disempowerment, particularly in relation to food insecurity, water scarcity, and the physical strain of farming in extreme heat. One participant noted that walking long distances to collect water or reach markets became a major challenge, with no infrastructural alternatives provided.

Dr. Thorley also examined how climate adaptation programs, including those run by the NGO IDIWA, often fail to reach women outside of organized networks. She critically reflected on the ethical dimensions of conducting research as a white foreign scholar, emphasizing humility and reciprocity. The study called for more inclusive, participatory approaches to climate resilience that center disability, gender, and local knowledge.

 

4. Contagious Media Mobilization: Dynamics of Anti-Harassment Activism on Campus

Presenter: Dr. Wei Chen

Dr. Chen introduced the concept of “contagious media mobilization” to analyze feminist student activism in Chinese university campuses. Her case study focused on campaigns against sexual harassment and illustrated how digital and physical spaces are tactically used by students to circumvent censorship and institutional inertia.

One illustrative case involved a female student who was secretly photographed in a university restroom. She posted about the incident on a student forum, and the post quickly spread across platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Douban. This digital visibility led to offline conversations and eventually a student-led symposium where students demanded accountability from university officials, despite there being no formal invitation or recognition from the administration.

Dr. Chen described how activists used symbolic actions, such as poster campaigns, performance art, and live-streamed dialogues, to build momentum. She outlined three key mechanisms of this mobilization: the dissemination of emotionally resonant personal narratives, the use of semi-private digital spaces to build trust, and the strategic framing of discourse to achieve symbolic power.

The presentation illuminated how campus-based feminist movements in China use both informal networks and performative visibility to create action spaces, even in highly restrictive environments. Dr. Chen emphasized that while repression is real, so too is the capacity for decentralized, emotionally driven resistance that connects individual pain with collective demands.

 

5. Investing in Equality: A Comparative Analysis of Legal and Policy Frameworks for Gender-Responsive Banking in Southern Europe

Presenters: Prof. Dr. Bertil Emrah Oder and Dr. Ilayda Eskitaşcioğlu Karavelioğlu

Dr. Eskitaşcioğlu presented a comparative legal and policy analysis of six Southern European countries, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Türkiye, focusing on how these states promote (or fail to promote) gender-responsive banking practices. Their approach combined a desk-based review of laws, national action plans, ESG frameworks, and corporate reporting by twenty-four influential banks.

They found significant disparities between regulatory ambition and actual banking practice. Portugal and Italy have implemented binding gender quotas and offer certification schemes, but uptake by financial institutions is inconsistent. France has the most robust legal infrastructure, including the Duty of Vigilance Law, but its gender provisions are largely absent from banking regulation. Spain’s progressive strategy has little traction due to poor enforcement. Türkiye stood out as a paradox: while the state has grown more anti-gender in rhetoric, private banks have become more gender responsive due to external ESG pressures.

The presentation emphasized that symbolic commitments are insufficient. Real progress depends on enforceable mandates, meaningful oversight, and mechanisms that embed feminist values into corporate governance. They also highlighted the colonial and exclusionary legacy of many banking institutions and called for transformative change grounded in feminist storytelling, lived experience, and structural accountability.

 

6. Community Health Workers and the State: Intersections of the Care Economy and Social Policy in India

Presenter: Miss Priyanka Patra

Miss Patra presented a critical feminist analysis of the role of community health workers in India, particularly ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) and Anganwadi Workers. These women, often from marginalized castes, form the backbone of India’s rural health system but remain severely underpaid and institutionally invisible.

She traced the origins of these roles through the lens of gendered familialism, showing how state policies assume that care work is a natural extension of women’s roles within the family. Eligibility criteria often require ASHA workers to be married and locally embedded, which reinforces patriarchal norms and limits mobility. Patra drew from social reproduction theory to argue that the Indian state actively extracts care labor from these women while denying them professional recognition, labor rights, or decision-making power.

She also highlighted the expanding scope of their duties, including COVID-19 outreach, maternal health, immunization drives, and nutrition education, often with no increase in compensation. Despite these constraints, many workers have begun to unionize and advocate for better working conditions. Patra’s research revealed how care work is a site of both exploitation and feminist resistance.

 

Discussant Reflections and Audience Dialogue

Dr. Anju Gupta praised the intellectual originality of the panel and encouraged cross-regional dialogue between the cases. She noted that while the contexts differed, the presentations shared a commitment to centering marginalized voices and interrogating the gendered structures of power.

Audience questions were similarly wide-ranging. One participant asked about the role of institutional complicity in the racial marginalization of women scholars. Another inquired into the ethical implications of North–South research partnerships. There were also questions about the tension between informality and surveillance in urban planning, and how digital feminist movements protect themselves from backlash in authoritarian settings. Several attendees reflected on how caste, class, and gender intersect in both labor and finance systems to uphold exclusion.

Conclusion

This panel offered a compelling exploration of the multiple ways that gender operates in development politics. It moved beyond technocratic understandings of policy to highlight the lived realities of those excluded by formal systems, and the innovative strategies they use to resist and reimagine these structures. Together, the presentations underscored the value of feminist research that is contextually grounded, intersectionally informed, and politically committed.