Elusive Empowerment: Price Information and Disintermediation in Soybean Markets in Malwa,India

Price information provision and disintermediation have often been considered means to empower farmers, since lack of information and multiple intermediaries are seen as major obstacles preventing farmers from obtaining a higher price for their produce. Using the example of soybean in Malwa, central India, which is a cash crop that links farmers to global consumers, this article argues that the very expectation of disintermediation in the soybean supply chain is misleading. India's position in these global networks puts farmers and intermediaries in Malwa in the position of price receivers: they are unable to influence the global price of soybean or manipulate its local price in any way. In this context, providing price information has negligible impact on the final price obtained by farmers. The potential for empowerment has to be understood more broadly, by mapping out the ways in which power is exercised by various actors in the marketplace — one of which is the determination of the quality of a farmer's crop. This article maps such possibilities by examining how norms regarding quality in soybean are created and enforced, and how they are influenced by broader logics that go beyond the soybean marketplace itself.     

Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): Women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)

Focusing on an ongoing grass-roots campaign of rural women in North India, this article examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways in which grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visions of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. The article demonstrates how a serious engagement with social spaces in grass-roots activism can enable us to overcome the conceptual gaps in feminist theorizations of empowerment and violence, and to apprehend more adequately the nature, content, and meanings of women's political actions.     

Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability

The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are assumed to be available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that the hungry actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Such living frequently involves a creative praxis of refusal against imposed frameworks. Learning from such refusals requires hungry translations that are open and flowing and that are embedded in embodied solidarities that require radical vulnerability. Such translations strive to converse across incommensurable landscapes of struggles and meanings in order to co‐agitate against universalised languages that erase the vocabularies and visions of those who are reduced to hungry bodies. In reconceptualising politics as a shared and unending labour on an uneven terrain that makes perfect translation or retelling impossible, hungry translation becomes a continuous collective praxis of troubling inherited meanings of the social, and of making our knowledges more alive to the creativity of socio‐political struggle. Such hungry translations must fearlessly move between worlds in search of poetic justice and social justice without defining an origin or destination and without compromising the singularities that constitute each community of struggle.     

Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes,products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography

As multiple norths emerge in the so-called souths (and vice versa) and non-government organizations (NGOs) become important partners in knowledge production, it becomes imperative for feminist actors to envision new collaborative methodologies that can simultaneously resist the ‘deradicalization of feminist politics’ in the increasingly corporatized academy as well as in the increasingly donor-driven, professionalized, and state-identified NGO sector. Based on an extensive reading of literature on oral history and critical ethnography, this viewpoint identifies four interrelated areas where reflexive interventions by feminist collaborators working across geographical, sociopolitical and institutional borders can advance such a project: rethinking the relationships between processes and products of collaboration; more conscious interweaving of the collaborative theories and methodologies; producing knowledges that can travel across the borders of academia/NGOs/people's movements; and reimagining reciprocity in collaboration.

¿Colaboración como resistencia? Reconsiderando los procesos, productos, y Posibilidades de una etnografía y Historia oral feminista

Mientras que emergen ‘nortes’ múltiples en los así llamados ‘sures’ (y viceversa) y que los organismos no gubernamentales (ONG) se hacen parejas importantes en la producción de conocimiento, resulta imperativa para que los/as actores/as feministas prevean nuevas metodologías colaborativas que puedan resistir simultaneo la ‘de-radicalización de las políticas feministas’ en la cada vez más corporatizada academia así como en los ONGs que son cada vez más profesionalizados y influido por el estado y donantes internacionales. Basado en una lectura extensiva de historias orales y etnografías criticas, ésta punta de vista identifica cuatro áreas entrelazados donde intervenciones reflexivas por colaboradoras feministas a través de fronteras geográficas, institucionales, y sociopolíticas puedan adelantar tal proyecto: repensando las relaciones entre los procesos y los productos de colaboración; más entretejiendo consciente de las teorías y metodologías colaborativas; la producción de conocimientos que puedan viajar a través de las fronteras de academia/ONG/movimientos sociales; y una reimaginación de reciprocidad en colaboraciones.     

Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: reflections from a journey

If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their own visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise. This article draws upon 16 years of partnership with activists in India and with academic co-authors in the USA to reflect on how storytelling across social, geographical, and institutional borders can enhance critical engagement with questions of violence and struggles for social change, while also troubling dominant discourses and methodologies inside and outside of the academy. In offering five ‘truths’ about co-authoring stories through alliance work, it reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions.