Rethinking Agency

Sumi Madhok is Lecturer in Transnational Gender Studies at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science.

• List of Abbreviations. Glossary. Acknowledgements. 1. Developmentalism, Agency and Rights: An Introduction 2. Action, Agency, Oppression: Reformatting Agency for Oppressive Contexts 3. Producing Subjects and Subjectivities for Development: The Women’s Development Programme, Rajasthan 4. Rights and the Politics of Developing New Subjectivities 5. Political Rights and Developmentalism: Three Self-Representations 6. Afterword. Bibliography. About the Author. Index

This innovative book establishes Sumi Madhok as a leading figure in debates around agency and development. Her critique of the action-bias in contemporary understandings of autonomy gives new meaning to the notion of ‘rights-talk’, and is likely to shape discussion in years to come. This wide-ranging work contributes to both feminist and development literatures, and to the conceptualisation of developmentalism as well as to that of agency.— Anne Phillips, Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, London School of EconomicsThis important book brings together critical theoretical and ethnographic insights and puts forward a radical new conceptual framework for thinking about agency and autonomy and in so doing challenges the dominant modes of thinking about developmentalism. [It] will make a decisive contribution to critical debates on gender, agency and development.— Shirin M. Rai, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick