3 research outputs found
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Performative democratic practice: An ethnographic study of the Women’s Rights Centre in Montenegro
This thesis explores how democratic practice is enacted by non-governmental organisation practitioners in a country in transition and seeks to unpack the embodied experiences of people who are increasingly perceived by international stakeholders and scholars as being important actors in processes of democratisation. I offer an in-depth ethnographic account of the work of practitioners within a women’s NGO in Montenegro, the Women’s Rights Centre, as they seek to enact democratic practice within and through a context of patriarchy and corruption. Whereas the extant literature on democratic practice in relation to NGOs offers insight into the processes of democratisation in countries in transition, it does not, by and large, account for the lived experiences of practitioners as they strive to democratise their societies. Bearing this gap in mind, I turn to contemporary theories of democratic practice, deliberation and agonism, perspectives that explore democracy as participative engagement between people, groups and governments. I interrogate these from a poststructuralist perspective. Specifically, I interpret them through Judith Butler’s theory of embodied performativity, an account of agency within a matrix of re-iterative norms, which is adopted as my theoretical framework. Pursuing a participant-observer research identity, I draw on my own observations generated through a 30-month-long ethnography, 11 of which were spent in the field. I adopt a multimodal discourse analytic approach in analysing the multifaceted and embodied sense of what it means to enact democratic practice as an NGO practitioner. I present three broad democratic practices. The first, embodying democratic practice, surfaces the bodies of practitioners as sites through which democracy is enacted. The second, navigating corruption, illustrates the struggle of practicing democracy within a ubiquitous context of corruption. The third, the aesthetics of assembling, offers insight into how democratic practice can be enacted through the entanglement of different aesthetic mediums, connecting and drawing diverse people into a public assembly
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Feminist Solidarity Building And Working With Difference: The Case Of The Fiji Women’s Forum
The primary purpose of this thesis was to explore how it is possible to establish feminist solidarity amongst women who sit on different intersections of identity categories. The research was inspired by the optimism that gaining a deeper insight into solidarity building might enrich development programmes and projects which currently largely rely on legal and economic remedies in the process of instigating a positive social change, such as gender equality. The theoretical framework used draws on the work of Nira Yuval-Davis on ‘Intersectionality and Belonging’. Intersectionality is a theory which seeks to examine the complex interweaving of material positioning and identity work of women (Crenshaw, 1991; Yuval- Davis, 2006 and 2011). On the other hand, belonging, for Yuval-Davis (2011; 2011a) is a means through which scholars and practice groups may dig underneath the basic concept of intersections to understand why and how women may become affiliated with a particular cause and become emotionally attached to that cause. The Fiji Women’s Forum (FWF), which comprises over a hundred members from 26 different organisations, served as the case study for this research. The methodology used in this research is narrative discourse analysis of field interviews and the data was analysed via a three-stage discourse analysis framework designed by Krzyzanowski and Wodak (2008). Intersectionality was found to be a valuable theoretical lens with which to explore the intersectional identifications of FWF participants. Such an approach particularly highlighted the strength of identification women held with a cross-section of identifications other than gender. Nevertheless, such intersectional analysis in itself did not explain the capacity of the women in this study to generate solidarity. Rather, these intersectional identifications were redefined and reframed into what is referred to as ‘discourses of enabling’. These discourses of democracy, learning and safety are important because they are simultaneously rooted in the context of participants’ contextual, intersectional identifications and adapt these identifications into discourses which seem to enable solidarity building