Search

• Education has contradictory implications for young women in north India. • The nature of these contradictions has changed as new forms of patriarchy emerge. • Marriage constrains women's capacity to navigate education. • Long-term research reveals contradictions at a cohort and a household scale. • The Indian Government should invest in improving tertiary education for women. Scholars are increasingly emphasizing the contradictory nature of schooling's social effects, often blending Sen's (2000) insights on education's empowering role with critical sociological work on schooling and inequality (e.g. Majumdar and Mooij, 2011; Morarji, 2014). This paper advances this literature through examining shifts in girls' education in Bemni, Uttarakhand, India. The paper draws on two periods of ethnographic research – in 2003–2004 and between 2012 and 2017 – as a means of tracking long-term changes in the nature of the contradictions that young women experience. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a marked increase in girls' primary schooling in this village and Uttarakhand more broadly. But girls were largely excluded from secondary school, and patriarchal assumptions regarding women's work remained largely unchallenged. By 2012, however, young women were participating in secondary education, seeking paid employment, and felt empowered by their schooling. Nevertheless, key challenges remained. Educated women experienced underemployment, relegation into less favoured university courses, and difficulties navigating marriage markets. In making these points, the paper underlines the value of holding the theoretical ideas of Sen (2000) alongside critical approaches to education, but it goes beyond existing work on the contradictions of education in two key ways. First, it highlights the experiences and voices of young women in the rural Global South, about whom there is currently a dearth of substantive material. I show that the contradictions associated with education among young women are sometimes different to those experienced by men in similar settings (e.g. Jeffrey et al., 2008; Mains, 2012). Second, I argue that the contradictions associated with education can change over time within a single location – an observation that emerges from longitudinal ethnographic research of the type showcased here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Gujarat Solar Park is an archetype of India's sustainable energy transition. • The solar park is mandated to facilitate 'gender positive' outcomes and boasts female empowerment. • Configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have excluded women from employment opportunities. • Corporate social responsibility schemes designed to empower women reproduced caste and class-based social power asymmetries. • Solar park development in India represents an antinomy of a nature-society relation. India is undergoing a rapid transition to renewable energy; the Gujarat Solar Park typifies this transition. In addition to mitigating climate change, the Gujarat Solar Park boasts female empowerment through social development schemes. This manuscript is inspired by the following research question: To what extent are 'gender positive' processes and projects associated with solar development in India realized on the ground? Utilizing mixed methods fieldwork and drawing on literature from feminist political ecology, this paper demonstrates how the modalities of solar park development represent an antinomy of a nature-society relation. New configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have produced a gendered surplus population of landless peasants who are not absorbed into wage-labor employment in the solar park. Further, associated social development schemes actually disempower women, despite mandates of 'gender positive' outcomes by UN-based climate treaties to which this project is beholden. The opportunity to participate in one such scheme for female empowerment was reserved for only women of middle-to-high class status and those of dominant castes, thereby reproducing class and caste-based social power asymmetries. Female (dis)empowerment eclipses 'gender positive' guarantees of the solar park. This study highlights some unintended consequences of sustainable energy transitions in the Global South at the local scale. Designing development interventions related to climate change mitigation that boast 'gender positive' outcomes must be careful not to exacerbate gender disparities and economic exclusion in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]