Tuesday 11th Jan

Sudha Vepa, UCL Institute of Education

My thesis focuses on the impact of global capitalism on a women’s empowerment programme in higher education in Bangladesh. The topic has warranted a nuanced attention ever since world organisations and philanthropic foundations have directed their attention to women in so called developing countries to accelerate economic growth. Drawing on a sociolinguistic ethnographic approach, I investigate the trajectories of empowerment of three women from socio-economically underserved backgrounds studying at the focal university which endeavours to empower women and produce future leaders by offering leadership skills and English language as part of a liberal arts education. In so doing, I adopt Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and subjectivation with the aim of illuminating the tensions between a moral obligation to transform and the promise of social mobility. Through an analysis of stance-taking and affect as communicative social practices in daily interactions and narrations, I demonstrate how the women come to understand that learning English and developing leadership skills entail working on themselves to become desired. I argue that the women’s construction of ‘becoming empowered’ shapes and is shaped by the discourses of women’s empowerment they are engaging with, sometimes showing alignment and sometimes contestation. My study of their trajectories also details an interplay of capitalist logic and inequalities of class, patriarchy and coloniality which complexly shape their subjectivities.

The aim of the session is to identify and construct linkages present in the web of extracts that I have chosen from two of my data analysis chapters in my thesis. The extracts from the first chapter focus on discourses at the institution level and those from the second on the trajectory of one of my student participants. We will work on the linkages appearing in the data through stance-taking as a communicative social practice. The intention is to arrive at one finding (or more) about whether/how capitalistic values are being internalised under neoliberal governance, if there is one such, in the daily life of my participant and her uptake of it all.

In the seventh session of our CCM Seminar series,  we hosted Sudha Vepa who presented her PhD project titled  Language, Identity and the Empowerment of women through HE in Bangladesh –  a critical analysis of discourse. She also brought a piece of data for analysis.

Please find the session recording below.