Abstract
The research integrates feminist and gender anthropology with decolonial theory in order to develop a critical approach applied to care work within services dedicated to women’s agency and empowerment. The fieldwork was based on participant observation and ethnographic methods of inquiry such as semi-structured interviews and focus groups and was carried out in a center for women’s socialization, orientation and support in Northern Italy between 2022 and 2023. Among the aims of the study is the formulation of permanent qualitative evaluation tools for professionals in the socio-educational sector, allowing to question roles of power, decision-making margins and spaces for participation for all the subjectivities involved in projects of individual as well as collective change. Feminisms and the intersectional perspective underline the ordinary pervasiveness of inequalities and the patriarchal roots of oppression structures that permeate the daily practice of professionals who develop care activities. A multidisciplinary and inclusive vision was applied to the concept of “well-being” in order to make visible potential forms of discrimination in accessing services. The notions of need and autonomy were problematized allowing to give new meaning to projects and promote awareness of existing asymmetries. The anthropological perspective, combined with a critical and decolonial gaze, aims at questioning the construct of “empowerment”, deconstructing care relationships. At a small-scale level, an engaged and applied research can be a valid tool to build alternatives and prevent discriminations precisely thanks to an intersectional and decolonial gaze as a useful reading key to face the reproduction of multiple levels of oppression.
Presenters
Miria GambardellaMSCA Doctoral Researcher, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Empowerment, Discriminations, Agency, Intersectionality
