Investing in the Girl Effect in Brazil: Corporate Development, Girls' Education, and the Transnational Politics of Poverty

Over the past decade, U.S.-based transnational corporations and their foundations have emerged as powerful actors in the field of policy and practice known as gender, education, and development. In partnership with traditional development institutions, including prominent non-governmental organizations (NGOs), bi- and multilateral agencies, and global forums, they are targeting particular girls and women in the Global South as new, untapped resources for ending global poverty and promoting economic development. The particular way they discursively construct their investments in girls and women, combined with the magnitude of their financial portfolios, the strength of their organizational capacities, and the reach of their corporate brands, has been critical to facilitating their entrance and rapidly expanding their influence on policy and practice in this shifting field. Yet, their new role is neither empirically nor theoretically understood. Analysis of why corporations and their foundations are investing in girls and women in this historical moment, how they are doing so, to what effects, and for whom is essential to understanding this emergent phenomenon./nThis study addresses these questions through a critical global ethnography of corporate development in education. It defines corporate development as the practices and processes of corporations and corporate foundations operating in the development regime through the discourse of corporate social responsibility. It investigates one corporation and its foundation's exclusive focus on adolescent girls and their purported potential to end poverty for themselves, their families, their communities, and the world. The study focuses on the transnational relationships between the corporation, its foundation, and three types of institutional partners -- NGOs in Brazil and a multilateral agency and a global forum in the U.S. The research unfolded over two years (2008-2010) of gathering ethnographic data through participant observation and in-depth interviews in the U.S. and Brazil, and builds on six years of collecting and analyzing institutional documents. From classrooms in Brazil to the corporate foundation headquarters in the U.S., the multi-sited fieldwork focused on understanding the underlying logic, social relations, discursive practices, symbolic meanings, and spatial interconnections that constitute corporate investments in adolescent girls./nThis study argues that while corporations and their foundations claim to promote gender equity, inequity is constitutive of their investments in marginalized girls and women in the Global South. These corporate actors are utilizing their consumer brands and creating corporate philanthropic brands to construct particular girls and women as a new efficient resource for global development. Through their employment of an instrumental logic, they maintain, if not potentially exacerbate, unequal relations of power across multiple axes of difference even as they claim to transform them by perpetuating traditionally inequitable roles of social reproduction. These corporate practices thus position particular girls and women as disproportionately responsible for themselves, their families, their communities, their nations, and the multiple problems and contradictions of development. Yet, as the power of corporations and their foundations grows in this field, diverse actors from across social, cultural, economic, and geographic locations -- including educators, NGO practitioners, and development experts -- are quietly, yet actively negotiating, albeit on unequal terms, how corporations discursively position girls and women and structure their interventions./nOverall, this dissertation contributes to the fields of education, feminist studies, development studies, and cultural anthropology by illuminating how corporate development in education positions girls and women as a resource for development through the increasingly entangled discourses of gender equity and corporate social responsibility. In doing so, it analytically centers the corporation for all three fields, and it develops a critical analysis of how corporations are expanding their power and influence over new bodies, institutions, and geographies. Based on its findings, corporate practices in gender, education, and development must be more carefully theorized and regulated to ensure the education, health, and social and economic well-being of all girls and women are promoted because they matter in and of themselves rather than because of their potential value as instruments of development change.

Advisor: Baquedano-López, Patricia