Paper short abstract:

Drawing on data from Plan International UK’s longitudinal research with girls in nine countries, this paper explores how researchers can use qualitative methods to unsettle dominant discourses in development and respectfully engage with girls’ own visions of what it means to be empowered.

Paper long abstract:

Girls’ empowerment has become a must-have component for international development campaigns and programming in recent years. The ways in which this ‘girl powering’ is conceptualised in, and has grown to dominate, development discourses has increasingly been the subject of postcolonial feminist critique. Scholars such as Khoja-Moolji (2016) have problematised the way that research with girls in the Global South is used in the development sector as evidence or justification for a vision of ‘empowerment’ established by the Global North. In this way, ‘girl powering’ discourses can serve to reinforce neocolonial power structures that enable Northern development actors to decide what it means for a girl to be ‘empowered’ or ‘disempowered’. By amplifying selected voices that fit a certain narrative, development researchers risk contributing to the silencing of girls in the Global South.

We will explore how qualitative research can help to unsettle this dominant delineation of girls' empowerment in development discourse, by reflecting on recent analysis of data from a longitudinal, qualitative study undertaken in nine countries across the Global South. This analysis investigated adolescent girls' everyday acts of resistance to gender norms and, crucially, identified acts of resistance based on the girls' own descriptions of restrictive norms or expectations of behaviour that they experience in their lives. Through this reflection, we seek to contribute to efforts to develop methods for qualitative research that do the 'work of hearing’ girls (Khoja-Moolji, 2016), are open to girls’ own conceptualisations, and ultimately open up more possible ways for girls to be empowered.