by Suzanne Jansen A finished thesis is a tailor-made product: it has that perfect mixture of scientific knowledge embedded in lively ethnographic tales of the field. In my case not only my thesis itself was…
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Liza Koch My day starts at 5:15 because of the noise outside. The sun is rising and people are starting their day. My ‘host mom’ is already fully dressed and almost finished cleaning her house. She pushes her daughter to get ready for school. When I go outside I see the neighbour baking mandasi (comparable to our new year dough balls), she starts around 4 o’clock in the morning to sell them later at the small market 200 meters from here.
Door Ina Keuper Mijn recente deelname aan de algemene ledenvergadering van de vereniging WO=MEN, Women Equals Men, stimuleerde mij om dit stukje te schrijven. Opnieuw werd ik uitgebreid geïnformeerd over diverse actuele kwesties rond genderongelijkheid en de structurele achterstelling van meisjes en vrouwen in Nederland en elders en hoe dat aan te pakken. In een workshop met Jamila Talla van de organisatie Voice of Afghan Women werd ik mij weer bewust van de nare gevolgen van een genderblinde hulpverlening aan vluchtelingen en hoe dat te voorkomen zou zijn. Hieronder zal ik kort iets vertellen over WO=MEN en hoop ik te laten zien dat lidmaatschap van deze vereniging ook voor studenten zinvol kan zijn.
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By Ursula Cats When I started my fieldwork as a Master’s student last year, I had many ideals and I mainly wanted to represent the women I was researching as “agents of change”. What I actually experienced was different. As I wrote in an e-mail to my supervisor Ellen Bal towards the end of my fieldwork: “I can clearly see the restrictions these young women have. I can see that they are active agents, but their impossibilities are also becoming painfully obvious.”
I have always had the motivation to support people who have fewer opportunities than I do. To gain more knowledge on developmental work, I decided to enroll in the Master’s program in anthropology in September 2009. It was not complicated to find a focus for my fieldwork: the women who had fled from Burma to Thailand. The anthropological theories I used, however, did not correspond directly with what I actually saw and experienced. Eventually I was able to gain a perspective based on the stories of the women themselves, which I used in my thesis to shed light on the situation of unrecognized refugee women from Burma.
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