The Plan ...

Thanks so much for checking out my blog for the summer. For the last couple of summers I've been fairly consistent about posting one or twice a week, so my hope is to do the same this summer. I'm mainly doing research for my senior essays this summer. As a double major, I opted to write two separate ones instead of one giant essay. So here's a brief description of each of them.

1) Gender Asset Gaps
I'm starting out in Bangalore, India where I will be doing research for my International Studies senior essay about gender asset gaps. I'm working on data analysis for the India portion of a three country survey that collects sex-disaggregated data about intra-household asset ownership. The project is sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Millennium Development Goal 3 Fund (the one about gender equality and empowerment of women). One of the long-term goals of the survey is to promote sex disaggregated asset data collection in national and international household surveys. If you want to read more about the project, look here.





The India component of the project is based at the Indian Institute for Management in Bangalore. I'm working with the research team as they start analyzing the data. It's unclear exactly what research question Ill be answering, but the project head has given me some articles about the impact of women's ownership of financial assets on improved childhood nutrition -- so it looks really promising.




2) Politics of Transnational Funding for LGBT Organizations
For my Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies senior essay, I am looking at the politics of transnational funding for organizations of non-normative sexuality and gender expression in India and Uganda. Its a really interesting topic that I've started exploring informally over the last year since the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill became more prominent. To conduct this research, I'm spending some time in Bangalore at Sangama, a sexual minorities human rights group. I'll also visit a few other local organizations and spend a little bit of time in Mumbai at Humsafar Trust. I'll end my summer with a couple of weeks in Kampala, Uganda exploring this topic in a different context.

I'm primarily interested in decisions related to US and European based funding for these organizations. How do donors perceptions match up with realities on the ground? How does donor funding influence advocacy and policy? Is such funding an advancement of human rights or an imposition of queer (neo)colonialism?

Its all ambitious, so I'm flexible, but Ill keep you updated. I arrived yesterday, so more reflections to come.

Best wishes for the summer!
Joan