Revisiting the epistemic terrains of gender, sex, and empowerment through four sites of engagement in India: Introducing a conversation

Abstract

Knowledges that claim to end oppression and marginalization frequently end up feeding the same hierarchies that produce those oppressions. In the academy and in the development industry, it is not uncommon for ‘local’ or ‘subaltern’ knowledges to be positioned as ‘raw data’ to be utilised by the formally certified intellectual or expert, and even presented sometimes as obstacles to development goals that may have been imported from elsewhere. This introduction serves as an opening to a ‘conversation’ among five scholars who have different yet overlapping engagements with the complex terrain of knowledge-making on sex and gender, based on their long-term work in India. The conversation interr..