Julie Hemment Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs.
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=41646
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Gendered Interventions
1. Muddying the Waters: Participatory Action Research in Tver'
2. Querying Democratization: Civil Society, International Aid, and the
Riddle of the Third Sector
3. Gender Mainstreaming and the Third-Sectorization of Russian Women's
Activism
4. Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Setting up a
Crisis Center in Tver'
5. A Tale of Two Projects
Conclusion
Julie Hemment is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
First-hand account of social activism and the politics of development in
postsocialist Russia
Julie Hemment's engrossing study traces the development encounter through
interactions between international foundations and Russian women's groups
during a decade of national collapse. Prohibited from organizing
independently under state socialism, women's groups became a focus of
attention in the mid-1990s for foundations eager to promote participatory
democracy, but the version of civil society that has emerged (the "third
sector") is far from what Russian activists envisioned and what donor
agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and Participatory Action
Research, Hemment tells the story of her introduction to and growing
collaboration with members of the group Zhenskii Svet (Women's Light) in the
provincial city of Tver'.
"This is the detailed, careful, respectful study of the day-to-day problems
of East-West exchange that we all crave to have. Hemment offers nuanced
descriptions of the multiple contradictions for NGOs, which are asked to
perform miracles and struggle heroically to bring gender justice to new
democracies." -Ann Snitow, New School for Social Research, founder of the
Network of East-West Women
"[A]ddresses issues crucial to our understanding of democracy, civic agency,
and Western aid programs. It offers a coherent discussion of how gender and
women's activism are shaped by-and can still transgress-the harsh reality of
the post-communist 'brave new world.'" -Elena Gapova, Centre for Gender
Studies, European Humanities University
"Dr. Hemment has produced a beautifully constructed text that provides a
vibrant account of how an action research approach can be enacted in a
cross-cultural research context." -Hilary Pilkington, Professor of
Sociology, University of Warwick
|