Contextualizing women’s agency in marital negotiations:Muslim and Hindu women in Karnataka, India

We use 36 in-depth interviews, with 18 Muslim and 18 Hindu women in Karnataka, India, to explore the relationships between women’s educational attainments and women’s exercise of agency in spousal selection and the timing of marriage. We have outlined three kinds of agency, namely, convinced, resistance, and complicit, and the contexts in which they were deployed by our participants during their marriage negotiations. Our examination of the role of education across this spectrum of agential capacities during marriage negotiations suggests that the linkages between education and agency are not straightforward. Rather, the normative context, and how parents and daughters interact with it when fixing marriages, makes the use of agency by the woman and by their parents much more complicated than standard narratives that claim that “modern” education for girls will inevitably enable women to play decisive roles in realizing their personal preferences. Our data lead us to challenge this framework and we argue that the link between education and agency is not always positive and linear, as it widely thought to be

Status of Rural Women in Karnataka (NIAS Books and Special Publications No. SP4-2006)

Since the beginning of the UN decade for Women, women activists and scholars have systematically brought to light the oppression, exploitation and marginalization of Indian women in all walks of life. The benchmark in this respect was the Status of Women in India report of 1974. The role played by economic, social, cultural and political institutions in reinforcing this subordination was highlighted in this report and is now better understood. The growing women's movement in the country increasingly brought pressure on the government and political parties to acknowledge the low status of women, and, more important, respond to women's concerns through a series of preventive and promotive programs and supportive legislation

Women's empowerment: what works

With radical roots in the 1980s, women’s empowerment is now a mainstream development concern. Much of the narrative focuses on instrumental gains—what women can do for development rather than what development can do for women. Empowerment is treated as a destination reached through development’s equivalent of motorways: programmes rolled out over any terrain. But in the process, pathways women are travelling in their own individual or collective journeys of empowerment remain hidden. Revisiting foundational feminist work on empowerment, this article draws on findings from multi-country research programme, Pathways of Women’s Empowerment, to explore what works to support these journeys

Re-evaluation of IIH as the Ideal Terrestrial Analog for Sans: Is There a Better Model to Consider?

While astronauts are returning from long duration spaceflight with multiple ocular signs that mimic those seen in terrestrial patients with elevated intracranial pressure (ICP), evidence has yet to prove a clinically significant increase in ICP during space.1 Preliminary research evidence may even suggest that ICP decreases in microgravity. Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH) has long been considered the ideal terrestrial analogue to Spaceflight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS).1 However, there are several critical features of SANS that do not complement any reported case of IIH on Earth. These findings mandate a closer look at the accuracy of IIH as a terrestrial SANS analog

Gendering Farmer Producer companies at the Agricultural Frontier of India: Empowerment or Burden?

Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) are driving agricultural frontier expansions in India. Their main objectives are to mobilize small-scale farmers to collectivize and organize in order to gain collective bargaining power, in the process empowering farmers and eliminating middlemen. However, they have not established any demonstrable success in achieving these goals. This chapter seeks firstly, to draw transnational connections between agro-ecological transformations in India and larger market/capital expansions through FPCs, contextualized amidst national development goals for farmer empowerment, changing labor patterns, and ecological degradation. In doing so, it will, secondly, explore the gendered dimension of FPCs in India by analyzing how the process of establishing women-only FPCs by using mandatory inclusion as a participation tool can serve to disempower and further burden women. While mandatory involvement of women farmers on their Board of Directors as an empowerment strategy can prove crucial to enhancing women’s decision-making roles, this chapter asks whether such an inclusionary approach remains meaningful to achieve FPC success in a context where external support for women’s empowerment is not provided

Empowerment of intergroup harmony and equity

The impact of empowerment interventions is often short-lived because they are not anchored in changes in the wider social and structural context. This chapter draws its inspiration from social representation theory and social identity theory. Several theoretical propositions are derived from these theories that bear on the effectiveness of empowerment interventions. Drawing on field experiences with Roma communities and young unemployed people in Hungary and Italy, we demonstrate how a focus on intergroup interactions, between minority and majority group members, is central to the empowerment process. In addition, we address the role of power and the means by which power can be dissembled and more equitably shared. Finally, we discuss the importance of placing contextual factors at the center of our analysis and enacting changes in context in order to arrive at empowerment interventions that produce sustainable changes in intergroup harmony and equity

Topography of multiple spanning transmem brane proteins -a photochemical approach

Abstract-A photochemical approach to study the disposition of transmembrane proteins is described. It involves the use of hydrophobic phtoactivable reagents which on photolysis give rise to reactive intermediates like carbenes, capable of undergoing intermolecular insertion reactions. Two transembrane proteins responsible for the transport of anions and glucose in human erythrocytes have been studied using diazofluorene (DAF) as a photoactivable reagent. Isolation of these proteins and analysis of the DAF insertion site indicates several transmembrane segments. The relevance of the photochemical approach in view of limited information made available by biophysical methods is discussed. One of the major problem associated with study of biological membranes is the availability of limited information on the structure of membrane bound proteins. Unlike soluble proteins wherein X-ray crystallography has provided complete three dimensional structure of proteins, the membrane-bound proteins are rarely amenable to X-ray crystallographic analysis (ref.1). These proteins carry out important functions like transport of material in and out of the cell and act as receptor for various hormones. To understand these important membrane associated processes it is critical to understand the structure of these proteins. The integral membrane proteins can be quite large with molecular weights ranging from ten thousand to several thousands. They contain both hydrophilic and hydrophobic amino acids, but unlike their soluble counterparts, they contain stretches of hydrophobic amino acids in their sequence which enable them to span the membrane hydrophobic matrix from once to several times. With an ever increasing number of sequences of integral membrane proteins being made available by gene cloning, the need for obtaining complete structural information on these proteins is being increasing felt. However none of the currently available biophysical techniques provide this information readily. The popularly used method at present is a theoretical model based on hydropathy indices, which provides a two dimensional model of the protein (ref.2). There have been very limited confirmation of such predicted models by any experimental technique and serious doubts regarding the validity of these theoretically predicted models in multiple spanning proteins have already been expressed in The use of chemical reagents capable of modifying proteins have proved quite useful in studying protein structure. These reagents are elctrophilic in nature and react with various nucleophilic sites provided by side chain of polar amino acids like lysine, arginine, histidine and cysteine, found in proteins. However these reagents are of limited use to study the transmembrane segments of membrane-bound proteins, as these segments are composed largely of hydrophobic amino acids. The reagent of choice for studying the hydrophobic milieu should be capable of inserting into C-H bonds. A photochemical approach has been developed to study the topography of these complex proteins (ref.4,5). It involves the use of reactive intermediates like carbenes and nitrenes. The carbene or nitrene precursor is added to the membrane preparation and after a short period of incubation, it is photolysed. The resulting reactive intermediate then inserts into the neighboring molecule providing useful information on the disposition of membrane-bound proteins. While both carbene and nitrene precursors have been used, the former have been found to be much more effective specially for studies related to membranes. Currently there are three basic chromophores which have been used for these studies. Phenyl diazirine and subsequently adamantyl diazirine were among the first carbene based reagents used f o r labeling membrane hydrophobic core (ref.6). This was followed by trifluoromehylphenyl diazirine which was found to be more effective than phenyl diazirine (ref . 7 ) . We have reporte