New Writing in Critical Development Studies – serie

Renowned feminist development scholar Wendy Harcourt offers the first incisive open access overview of how the lively feminist debates on care, in both minority and majority worlds, are crucial for critical development studies.Adopting an intentionally open and readable style to ensure its technical terms are understood, each chapter starts by narrating nonfictional, on-the-ground stories—stories selected from different places, peoples, and histories—in order to show how care is understood in feminist economic debates on key subjects such as social reproduction analysis; interspecies relations in posthumanism; environmental justice in feminist political ecology; and reciprocity and accountability in postdevelopment and decolonialism. In each chapter, these sketches are then fleshed out through a critical survey of influential thinkers and activists who adopt ecofeminist, feminist political ecology, critical indigenous studies, transition studies, postdevelopment, and decolonial approaches to development. This book—alongside the illustrations, vlogs, and social-media messaging that accompany it online— provides researchers, students, practitioners, and activists with the tools to explain why care is such a crucial concept for critical development discourse.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Renowned feminist development scholar Wendy Harcourt offers the first incisive open access overview of how the lively feminist debates on care, in both minority and majority worlds, are crucial for critical development studies.Adopting an intentionally open and readable style to ensure its technical terms are understood, each chapter starts by narrating nonfictional, on-the-ground stories—stories selected from different places, peoples, and histories—in order to show how care is understood in feminist economic debates on key subjects such as social reproduction analysis; interspecies relations in posthumanism; environmental justice in feminist political ecology; and reciprocity and accountability in postdevelopment and decolonialism. In each chapter, these sketches are then fleshed out through a critical survey of influential thinkers and activists who adopt ecofeminist, feminist political ecology, critical indigenous studies, transition studies, postdevelopment, and decolonial approaches to development. This book—alongside the illustrations, vlogs, and social-media messaging that accompany it online— provides researchers, students, practitioners, and activists with the tools to explain why care is such a crucial concept for critical development discourse.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Drawing on extensive, in-depth ethnographic work in Mexico, Madeleine Belfrage demonstrates in this open access book how Global-North-dominated reproductive health programs help to govern women’s bodies and how Latin American feminists are responding with new, innovative ideas and routes to abortion access.Belfrage takes us on a journey through abortion access routes in Mexico, where the state refuses to guarantee access to abortion and women face intense gendered violence and other structural barriers. Here, we find, grassroots feminist activists are operating outside international reproductive health programs to provide information and pills so people can carry out abortions safely at home. By using Latin-American grassroots feminist concepts to understand these practices, Belfrage helps decolonize Global-North-dominated understandings of bodily autonomy and abortion care, and ultimately turns a critical eye to the ways the very systems that seek to advance women’s rights risk undermining reproductive freedom. In so doing, she makes important, globally relevant interventions into debates around abortion politics, reproductive justice, and bodily autonomy.At a time when abortion access is facing new restrictions throughout the world—including in places such as the US, which used to offer better protections—this book could not be more timely or necessary.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Drawing on three years of interviews and work with a small-scale farming-activist group in Cape Town, South Africa, this open access book provides a close look at how working-class activism affected equality of water access during the 2017 – 2019 drought, and in turn sheds new light on efforts across the Global South to advance food sovereignty through agroecology.This side of the story is completely lacking from other accounts of the drought, which rely too heavily on an administrative or technical perspective. Here Matthew Wingfield shows how a group of environmental activists used the drought to highlight their concerns over unequal access to water and the misuses of water for large companies and commercial farms. In so doing, he provides new, granular insights into the intersecting issues of land access, water access, and other kinds of natural resource use, and thus suggests some new directions applicable throughout the Global South for how working-class activism and small-scale farming can reorganize the connection between water and land in a country characterised by historical dispossession.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Based on 45 in-depth interviews offering first-hand accounts of the decisions and stigma attached to abortions among unmarried women in India, Janice Lazarus shows how Brahmanical patriarchy influences abortion discourses and experiences, and in so doing, highlights how caste, class, and gender intersect with the legacies of India's population-control and family-planning policies.In an important contribution to the existing scholarship on sex and abortion in India--which focuses predominantly on married women, sex-selective abortions, and legal frameworks--the wealth of original stories Lazarus gathers here show, on a deeply personal level, what it means for unmarried women to engage in sex, get pregnant, and have abortions within the pervasive, ongoing patriarchal environment that considers out-of-marriage sex taboo. What comes out of all this is a picture of abortion stigma as a social process that is embedded in hierarchical social structures of caste, class, and gender, and that works as a mechanism to sustain and maintain these hierarchical systems. These findings are important for postgraduates, researchers, and policymakers interested in public heath, feminism, gender and sexuality, sociology, and development studies.

Drawing from the experiences of civil society organizations (CSOs) over two years in Bulawayo, this open access book provides a comprehensive framework to analyze human rights based approach (HRBA) operationalization for sexual rights of men who have sex with men (MSM) in Zimbabwe. Extensive fieldwork and employing social movement theories create a foundation for exploring the intricate dynamics of global funding rules, political contexts, and internal constraints within organizations, shedding light on their impact on HRBA implementation. The narrative uncovers the deliberate strategies employed by the government to hinder HRBA operationalization, alongside glimpses of hope offered by dissenting voices within traditional, religious, and judicial spheres. Through vivid ethnographic accounts and interviews, the book navigates the challenges faced by organizations, revealing their resilience in adapting HRBAs to fit their unique context. A significant highlight is the exploration of the intermediary partnership model's role in influencing HRBA operationalization, offering fresh insights into donor-recipient dynamics. This book is an essential read for scholars, activists, and policymakers interested in understanding the complexities of human rights advocacy and the quest for sexual rights amidst socio-political turmoil and resource constraints in Zimbabwe.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.