Empowering women Parshads in Dehradun Municipal Council

The need for capacity building of municipal councillors, particularly women, is well established. This article outlines an approach to “empowering” women municipal councillors by expanding their possibilities for “self-becoming.” Drawing upon empirical research on the lived experiences of women parshads (municipal councillors) in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, it suggests a series of interventions that correspond to particular needs and opportunities at different stages of their term. Theories of social change and the literature on adult pedagogy further inform the design of effective learning opportunities

Called by the Soul: Becoming a 'Developer' in Medan, Indonesia

State-led community-driven development programs invite orang biasa (ordinary people) to become ‘developers’. Located between society and the state, this positioning offers certain possibilities for being and becoming: possibilities that may have been unobtainable to many prior to their involvement. This paper examines processes of self-becoming among volunteers in one such program in Medan, Indonesia. Rather than turn to analytical devices that indicate the disciplining of development subjects, I draw upon volunteers’ own understandings of personhood to reveal the program as a site for the enactment and realisation of a possible self. Volunteers are ‘called by the soul’ (terpanggil jiwa) to undertake this work. They respond to the affective and emotive signals of the heart (hati) that align the diri (self) with the jiwa (soul). In tracing their ‘becoming’ within the program, I hint at the implications for new forms of urban sociality in Medan at a time of shifting state-society relations in Indonesia

Affective registers in qualitative team research: interpreting the self in encounters with the state

AbstractPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to enhance understandings of personhood and self-becoming through an affective reading of field notes and interview transcripts in cross-cultural research teams.Design/methodology/approach – A research team in Medan, Indonesia, captured the affective and emotive aspects of a research scene in field notes that were subsequently shared. Through prompting and elaboration, researchers were able to reveal the pathways from affect to emotion and thought, and the influence of past affective pedagogies in interpretations of the scene.Findings – Team research can enhance the interpretations of the “self” by drawing upon the diversity of affective registers of researchers. Paying attention to, and discussing in detail the ways researchers are affected in the field provided analytical insights as to the processes of self-becoming made possible within a particular encounter. These insights also added analytical value in team interpretations of interview transcripts.Research limitations/implications – Hierarchies within teams, communicating across different languages and the difficulty of sharing personal and embodied responses are barriers to using affective registers in team research.Originality/value – The authors’ experiences highlight the value of a purposeful strategy to share and interrogate affective responses, and demonstrate that affective registers are an overlooked resource in qualitative research teams.Keywords Emotion, Team research, Affect, Subjectivities Paper type Research pape