Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses ethnographic research conducted among women organising for community development in urban poor areas of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) and Lae. It looks at their collective hope and agency and the structural factors affecting the social opportunities available to these women.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses ethnographic research conducted among women organising for community development in urban poor areas of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) and Lae. In Kolkata I worked with two groups led by young, Muslim women in some of the poorest slums of the city. The two predominantly Christian groups I worked with in Lae are located in peri-urban areas. Despite different social, economic and cultural contexts, there are similarities in the ways in which these women work to achieve their goals of individual and community development. The kinds of educational and income-generating initiatives they organise around, while being grounded in the present, reveal their hopes for the future and the possibilities they envisage for themselves and their families. When women at the grassroots level work collectively they can achieve a powerful agency, but does this agency lead to realised hope? This paper discusses some of the wider structural factors affecting the social opportunities available to these women, including the pressure placed on grassroots and other civil society organisations to provide community development in the absence of state intervention, and the very real discrimination faced by marginalised groups (such as Muslims) within society.