Title: Acts of citizenship
Description: This study ethnographically examines the civic participation of resident women volunteer teachers in slum communities of Mumbai. The women teachers work with Pratham, a large-scale civil society organization engaged in India's country-wide effort for universalization of elementary education in India. Focusing on the lives and teaching engagement of 18 women, the study has used a combination of data collection methods comprising participant observation and informal interviews, survey, in-depth interviews, 'visual voice,' and secondary data. Grounded theory methods have been used for analysis. Theoretically this research is grounded in feminist critiques of citizenship that highlight the concept's normatively male assumptions and association with the public domain. The study frames the women's civic participation as 'citizenship acts,' and claims that these acts are as much about the women's own inclusion (and exclusion) as citizens, as they are about their engagement as volunteer teachers in their communities. It centrally argues that the women teachers participate in a gendered and contradictory civic space that simultaneously frames them as citizens and as non-citizens and non-workers. This space, created through a matrix of organizational discourses, existing cultural discourses, the structural constraints within which the women live and work, and the women's own agency, is premised on the ideology of 'separate spheres' that link women's roles to the domestic and reproductive domain and that of men to the public and productive sphere. The separate spheres ideology allows women to enter the civic space, albeit as women, wherein their participation in public roles as teachers is both regulated and engendered through notions of femininities dominant in their multiple contexts.

Through locating inquiry in the lives and work of women teachers, the study's findings challenge the universalistic assumptions of citizenship and presents women's citizenship as a contested notion. In its conclusion, the dissertation draws on Ruth Lister's concept of understanding citizenship as status and practice, and suggests strategies of how gendered assumptions of citizenship can be overcome through creating 'women-friendly' spaces for citizen action.
Subjects: Women teachers, Case studies, Women in education, Women volunteers in social service
Places: India, Mumbai