Doctoral Dissertation Improvment Grant: Gendered Responses to Development and Climate Change: Women and the Ganges River

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Doctoral student Georgina Drew, with the guidance of Dr. Dorothy Holland, will undertake research on local interpretations of, and gendered socio-cultural responses to, ecological change in water resources. Her investigation will be conducted in the Indian Himalayans along the primary tributary of the Ganges River. Using a comparative ethnographic approach at different sites, from river's melting glacial source to the district capital of Uttarkashi, she will investigate local responses to development and climate change. She will pay particular attention to women's activities, discourses, and mobilization efforts, and their relation to the work of environmental initiatives, such as those coordinated by social movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Analyses will assess the extent of, and the potential for, women's inclusion in debates about natural resource management in a case where the future of a resource of great symbolic, religious, and economic importance is in question. The researcher will employ a wide range of social scientific methods. These include semi-structured interviews, surveys, focus groups, observation of daily practice, event-based participant observation, and elicitation of life histories. Multi-media documentation will incorporate audio, photo, and video recording. Using the method of photo voice, disposable cameras will be distributed to women so that they can collaboratively document their perspectives on the river as well as their experiences in social movement and NGO processes. The research has both theoretical and practical significance. Through the exploration of women's resource-related knowledge and concerns, it will broaden interscalar analysese of how global processes are experienced at the local level. The focus on women's physical and discursive mobilization efforts can also be employed to strengthen gender inclusion in environmental initiatives. Research insights will have relevance for policy formation in the Himalayas and elsewhere throughout the world where contestations over changing water resource availability are emerging. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.