Development, popular education and feminisms : mending the gap through praxis

Abstract

This thesis addresses the issues and intersections of where development, feminisms, and popular education meet both in theory and in practice. It is argued that, at the intersection of these three diverging fields, we see methodological issues, practical contradictions, theoretical debates, and resulting implications for praxis. For all three, a complicated array of theories look at their functioning, and the result has been an apparent division between theory and practice. This argument is supported through an examination and evaluation of development theory and practice, critical pedagogy and liberatory-transformative (popular) education, and feminist post-structural/postmodern and radical debates. This work offers a new approach to looking at women in the process of development by using a liberatory-transformative learning process: the Integrated Feminist Gender And Development approach. This approach is argued to be that which can provide the basis for a development process that is truly radical feminist, liberatory, and transformative. The hope is that educators, feminists, and development practitioners will discard frameworks that de-politicize and fragment struggles for social transformation, and will instead focus their attentions on truly radical, feminist liberatory praxis. The conclusion of this thesis includes a consideration of how the original argument can be translated into action: what might be the contexts in which the new approach will succeed; and what the shift toward praxis might mean for the realm of academics.