ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2020-21
ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2020-21
Sandya Hewamanne is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Essex, and the Director of IMPACT-Global Work. She is the author of Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka, University of Pennsylvania Press (2008); Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers: (Un)Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles, Routledge (2016); and Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Contentment, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).
While global assembly lines made rural women of the Global South wage earners, its long-term impact on women’s empowerment and poverty reduction was only speculated on. Sustained ethnographic attention or statistical interpretations are almost non-existent. Focusing on Sri Lanka’s former global factory workers who are now subcontracting for larger FTZ factories, and their robust subversions within and against global capitalist production networks, this research seeks to investigate how a national association of village subcontractors may be developing into a meaningful economic justice movement. Research brings together and experiments with interdisciplinary theories and methods to invigorate, innovate and extend current scholarship in feminist political economy. By manipulating conceptual continuities and contradictions within Anthropology of Global Assembly Lines, Anthropology of Organizational Process, Economic Sociology, and Geography, the proposed ethnography of village subcontracting and transformative politics will re-imagine feminist approaches to political economy in a way that fully recognizes and celebrates marginalized women’s economic decision-making within capitalist market relations. For such subversions can transform gendered social, economic and cultural spaces opening up myriad possibilities for economic imaginations.
Utilizing ethnographic research methods—participant observation, in-depth interviews, observing association meetings, reviewing minutes, and photo narratives, and virtually following the unfolding politics surrounding the association— the project seeks to ignite theoretical re-imagination of context-specific mechanisms of achieving meaningful economic lives.
Using the Sri Lanka case study, the research will challenge current definitions of grassroots economic justice and introduce and test a new approach that I term ‘measured intervention.’ Providing an array of possibilities for future studies of global capitalism the research advances theoretical and methodological horizons and is conceptually and empirically agenda-setting. The project meets many aims of the ISRF by creating new connections between theoretical, methodological and impact activities and focusing on an issue that has strong implications for poverty reduction and economic justice.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].