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This paper rethinks development through feminist foreign policy, showing how state-led agendas privilege technocratic gender priorities while civil society advances decolonial and care-centered visions, exposing persistent epistemic hierarchies that constrain transformative development.

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This paper examines feminist foreign policy (FFP) as a site where contemporary development priorities, knowledge hierarchies, and claims to expertise are produced and contested. Drawing on a qualitative feminist research design, the study analyzes how development-related issues are prioritized by governmental and non-governmental actors from the Majority and Minority Worlds in international FFP spaces. The analysis is based on systematic coding of discourse from all of the International Ministerial Feminist Foreign Policy Conferences between 2022-2025.

Policy issues are categorized by frequency and actor type to trace which development concerns become legible within institutionalized feminist policy settings. The findings reveal a persistent divide in how development is imagined and operationalized. Government actors tend to emphasize technocratically manageable and politically palatable priorities—such as gender equality frameworks, multilateral cooperation, political participation, and gender-based violence—while civil society actors, particularly from the Majority World, foreground structurally transformative development concerns, including long-term funding for women’s rights organizations, decolonization, and care-centered economic models.

The paper argues that while FFP opens new spaces for feminist engagement in development policy, it often reproduces hierarchical knowledge regimes that privilege state-centric and technocratic forms of feminist expertise. By mapping whose development priorities shape feminist policy discourse, the paper contributes to feminist and decolonial debates on reimagining development as a plural, contested process oriented toward epistemic justice and genuinely transformative collaboration.

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Being attentive to the everyday lives of women workers allows us to (re)visibilize layers of activist strategies and opens up opportunities to learn from the unique ways in which they mobilize.

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Being attentive to the everyday lives of women workers allows us to (re)visibilize layers of activist strategies and opens up opportunities to learn from the unique ways in which they mobilize. Through extensive fieldwork with women labour organizers and workers in Bangladesh, I explored the ways in which activist belonging was continuously cultivated and how these strategies mimicked the activities of social reproduction. Building on the materialist reading of affect (Hennessy, 2009, 2013; Hardy and Cruz, 2019), dissident friendships (Chowdhury and Philipose, 2016), and communities of care (Francisco-Menchavez, 2018; Tungohan 2023), and situating these concepts and frameworks within scholarship on class consciousness and social reproduction, I show that women’s organizing experiences highlight the importance of activating the communities that women embed themselves in – be it biological, friendship or other fictive kinship – for the development of class consciousness and sense of belonging with workers. I argue that just as social reproductive labour is the necessary and invisibilized counterpart to productive labour, the mundane, everyday, affective organizing is the necessary and invisibilized counterpart to women’s labour activism and the building of a community of activists. These theoretical insights were developed, in part, because of a methodological commitment to the critical ethnographic tradition, one vested in generating analytical frameworks from marginalized, yet creative agents of change. The various methods I adopted – in particular, participant observation, site visits, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews – were selected to learn from, and for, women workers and organizers organizing for social change.

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Amid an ongoing World Bank project at a post-colonial, climate-vulnerable World Heritage site in The Gambia, I employ feminist political ecology to examine how everyday life is a continual negotiation for dignified livelihoods under intersecting conservation and development pressures.

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Development interventions, in legitimizing ‘technical fixes’ and community-based approaches, have often framed cultural heritage as a linchpin for sustainability due to its spatial and temporal continuity. State-led governance systems shaped by geopolitical pressures of conservation and climate adaptation agendas thus tend to privilege Eurocentric and capitalocentric visions, positioning heritage as a ‘development apparatus’ that renders local communities mere stewards of tourist-oriented sites, thereby reproducing dependency on Western aid and expertise. In doing so, they disregard practices within socio-natural networks of power, flatten the politics and labor of survival, and depoliticize lived realities.

I examine these tensions through ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in a post-colonial, climate-vulnerable World Heritage site in The Gambia, amid a World Bank project that proposes livelihood diversification and resilience for communities in place. I trace overlooked intersectional struggles and vulnerabilities, asking what lies beyond emblematic notions of gender inclusivity and capacity building, and why uneven distributions of agency and power persist despite repeated interventions. Livelihood transitions and growing dependencies on technocratic heritage-, climate-, and aid-based interventions then surface as stemming not from cultural, ecological, or individual preferences, but from shrinking livelihood options, as agrarian and local economies are eroded by global influences. Employing feminist political ecology, I foreground locally lived experiences, especially of women, navigating precarious survival amid project delays, out-migration, remittances, informal economies, and resource conflicts—framing ‘resilience’ not as a technical achievement but as a plural, political negotiation for dignified livelihoods, centering the intimate everyday and intersectional agencies within overlapping regimes of climate, conservation, and development.

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I analyze how a transnational reproductive governance system informs advocacy for decriminalizing abortion in India, which is led by foreign-funded NGOs who are constrained by state laws, donor conditions, and limited support from the Indian women's movement.

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This paper examines NGO-based advocacy for abortion decriminalization in India. Concurrent to a wave of abortion decriminalization globally, abortion activists and scholars argue that decriminalizing abortion is the key to expanding safe abortion services and abortion rights are an indicator of democracy. In India, the abortion law was liberalized by the state during the height of population control; consequently, abortion has not been politically contentious, and the law has historically been liberally interpreted. Moreover, abortion has also not been a site of social movement mobilization and abortion advocacy has primarily been undertaken by foreign-funded NGOs. In the current moment, NGOs are operating under constrained circumstances, given growing state hostility to NGOs and decreasing funding for advocacy work. Given the constraints on NGOs, and the absence of political contestation around abortion, why has decriminalizing abortion become important for NGO-based abortion advocates, and how does their advocacy take shape? I examine how a transnational system of reproductive governance involving the state, donors, and international advocacy networks influences the ideologies, strategies, and actions of NGO-based abortion advocates, giving rise to a 'transnational episteme' among abortion advocates. This paper is part of ongoing doctoral research.

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This paper explores how distributive epistemic injustices imposed by (neo)colonial and gendered powers within smallholder pig farming contexts in northern Uganda contribute to the endemicity of parasites such as the pork tapeworm, as well as further marginalises the already marginalised knowers.

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Critical discussions on hermeneutical and testimonial injustices have been gaining more traction within the field of Global Health, particularly within the global South context. However, the complex impact of more distributive epistemic injustices—understood here as the exclusion of marginalised and gendered bodies from formal education systems or from receiving health-preserving and holistic (scientific or health) knowledges—on knowers, their realities and even their credibility, are matters that have yet to be fully foregrounded within said field. This oversight is especially evident in conversations on Neglected Tropical Diseases such as the zoonotic parasite Taenia solium (pork tapeworm) that it is found to be endemic in many districts in northern Uganda. This paper argues that the access to epistemic goods that are vital to holistically addressing the parasite is controlled by deeply ingrained power (neo/colonial and gendered) dynamics and prejudices existing within the smallholder pig farming context in post-conflict Acholi land. So much so that those who are (labelled as) marginalised/othered—most often the women pig farmers—within these contexts are continuously excluded from receiving, forming, contributing and utilising protective knowledges on and against T. solium. Additionally, in this work, these injustices are seen to connect and transcend temporalities, spaces and bodies in ways that result to the further marginalisation of the already marginalised knowers. This paper offers a more tangible dialogue on the often-theoretical discussions on (distributive) epistemic injustices by being grounded on the empirical work of a larger PhD project conducted in two Acholi districts in northern Uganda.

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This paper challenges linear conceptions of development from feminist and decolonial perspectives, centres bodily survival and social reproduction as a non-deferrable ethical starting point,exposing how developmental discourses legitimise harm and rejects modernity as the endpoint of gender justice.

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This paper adopts feminist and decolonial perspectives to challenge understandings of development as a linear, teleological temporal process, and in particular critiques the normative violence of temporalised labels such as ‘modernisation’ and ‘underdevelopment’ in gender related debates. The paper argues for grounding development in the ethical primacy of bodily needs related to survival and social reproduction, highlighting their non-deferrable nature, everydayness, and structural vulnerability, thereby exposing how developmental discourses justify the neglect and harm of bodies in the present through promises of a better future. Building on this, the paper cautions against a central paradox inherent in development: namely, that gender equality and the protection of bodily needs are often situated within a temporal framework of ‘not yet developed’, through which they are continually deferred and rendered conditional. By rejecting ‘modernity’ and linear stages of development as the endpoint for evaluating gender justice, and by rethinking development while remaining attentive to specific economic and political conditions, the paper advances a negative ethical stance that places limits on the moral overreach of developmental temporality over bodily needs, thereby opening up new theoretical possibilities for feminist and decolonial imaginaries of development.

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This paper employs poststructural policy analysis to understand contestations of knowledges related to construals of child marriage as feminist ‘problem’ vs. development ‘problem’. It explores the emergence, domination, resistance, and subjugation of knowledges governing child marriage in Indonesia.

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Child marriage had been known as a feminist issue in Indonesia since the 'problem' was voiced in the First Women’s Congress (1928). Yet, child marriage emerged as a development ‘problem’ in the 2010s since international NGOs began to produce knowledges on the topic. Different ways of knowing what kind of ‘problem’ child marriage is exemplifies different ways of governing. This paper employs “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) poststructural policy analysis to understand contestations of knowledges influencing anti-child marriage governance in Indonesia.

In the National Strategy on Child Marriage Prevention (2020), child marriage is represented to be a ‘problem’ of risk threatening re/productive potentials of children. The currently dominant view is supported by development, scientific and technical knowledges on public health, economics, and statistics. However, child marriage inadvertently becomes a legitimiser for global development goals to govern almost everyone in the whole population. This not only entails state accountability but also responsibilising at-risk children, families, and communities through capacity building programs.

The feminist movement, with human rights and justice knowledges, poses a resistance to the development approach. Child marriage is categorised as sexual violence in the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes (2022); unlike in other countries where it is associated with child labor/slavery. Hence, child marriage is re-created into a criminal ‘problem’ to be solved judicially, whereby the sole responsibility of the state; in opposition to traditions that see marriage as a solution to sexual violence. Nonetheless, both feminist and development approaches ostensibly leverage subjugated knowledges through ‘participatory’ policymaking.

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Based on research in Nepal, this paper shows how male outmigration and climate stress increase women’s visibility in irrigation governance without real authority. It identifies mechanisms sustaining patriarchal control and questions participatory reforms under overlapping crises.

Paper long abstract

Rural livelihoods and communal resource governance in South Asia are being reshaped by climatic and socio-demographic changes driven by male outmigration. Although existing literature suggests that men’s absence creates opportunities for women’s empowerment through greater visibility in decision-making spaces, there is limited evidence on whether this representation leads to genuine agency.

Drawing on empirical research from Nepal, using FGDs (7), KIIs (30), and semi-structured interviews (120), this paper argues that increased female representation and labour contributions in irrigation management have not translated into meaningful governance authority.

The analysis identifies five mechanisms that maintain patriarchal control: (1) entrenched gender norms and land–financial structures; (2) “remote patriarchy”, where absent migrants retain authority; (3) intersectional caste and class disparities; (4) institutional erosion following climate disasters and youth outmigration; and (5) climate-related despair and the loss of agrarian futures, which weaken incentives for long-term governance engagement.

By examining gendered decision-making power in water governance in the context of climate change and mobility, the paper shows how demographic change, ecological stress, and gender norms interact to produce visibility without power. The findings contribute to debates on climate mobility, the feminisation of agriculture, and water governance, and highlight the limits of participatory reforms under overlapping crises. By foregrounding women’s everyday labour and decision-making practices that remain largely unrecognised within formal governance structures, the paper situates these findings within broader debates on epistemic justice in development.

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This paper provides a reflection on whether doctoral research provides the scope to enact decolonial feminism, examining decarbonising academic practice and developing vulnerable, collaborative methods through a study of women’s agency and structural violence in Bangladesh’s climate crisis

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the possibilities and limits of pursuing decolonial feminist praxis within doctoral research, using the present study of women’s agency and structural violence amid the climate crisis in Bangladesh as a contextual point of departure. It interrogates the structural, ethical, and methodological tensions that shape doctoral work undertaken within institutions still marked by colonial, extractive, and carbon‑intensive logics.

The first line of enquiry asks to what extent doctoral‑level research can meaningfully be understood as decolonial feminism when it is embedded in academic systems that reproduce hierarchies of expertise, knowledge extraction, and uneven access to resources. The second explores how doctoral researchers might contribute to the decarbonisation of academic practice, reflecting on the contradictions of conducting climate‑related research from within infrastructures that remain materially entangled with the crisis, not to mention when pressurised by the expectations of funders. The third develops the notion of vulnerable research methodologies - approaches that embrace discomfort, acknowledge complicity, and foreground care, repair, and collaborative meaning‑making with participants in the Global South.

By situating these enquiries within feminist and decolonial debates on epistemic justice, the paper argues that doctoral research can open small but significant cracks in dominant development and technopolitical imaginaries, even as it remains constrained by the very structures it seeks to unsettle. It ultimately proposes that such praxis requires attention to how these commitments unfold in situated research with women navigating the climate crisis, where their agency, experiences of structural violence, and collaborative meaning‑making intersect with the institutional limits of academia

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Using feminist political ecology, this article reframes Agbogbloshie as a gendered scrap economy where moral economies normalise toxic labour. Masculine endurance and feminised care govern slow violence, enabling digital value chains to externalise environmental and health costs without regulation.

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Agbogbloshie is widely framed in global policy, media, and NGO discourse as a toxic e-waste ‘dump’, emblematic of environmental crisis, informality, and regulatory failure in the Global South. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with scrap workers and vendors, this article reinterprets Agbogbloshie as a gendered and embodied labour ecology organised through long-standing scrap economies and embedded within global digital value chains. Grounded in feminist political ecology, the analysis demonstrates how injury, respiratory discomfort, and toxic exposure are rendered ordinary through idioms of normality and endurance, producing a moral economy in which hazard becomes an expected and even valorised condition of labour, closely tied to masculine identities of provision, responsibility, and entrepreneurial self-making. At the same time, maternal and caregiving bodies inhabit the same toxic environment as burning and dismantling, yet their specific vulnerabilities remain largely unspoken. This silence functions not as an absence of knowledge, but as a gendered technology of governance through which reproductive harm is rendered ordinary and politically unproblematic. Situating these dynamics within global circuits of value extraction and development intervention, the article theorises slow violence, incremental, cumulative harm lived through breath, fatigue, and routine bodily compromise, as a condition that enables accumulation to proceed without enforceable regulation. It argues that gender is not simply an axis of inequality within informal recycling economies, but a constitutive mechanism through which development operates as governance without government, allowing environmental and health costs to be externalised while global value chains remain operational.

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Tracing precarious migrant households over time, this study reveals how gendered labour, care, and crisis reconfiguration unsettle linear development logics, offering a feminist temporal lens on survival and agency in urban India.

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What might development look like if we began not from institutions or indicators, but from the temporal and relational worlds through which precarious households actually survive? Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Bengali Muslim migrant families in Gurgaon, India, this paper unsettles linear and technocratic narratives of progress, women's empowerment, and household decision making that dominate development discourse. Instead, it foregrounds a feminist and decolonial account of how households work as dynamic, translocal, and crisis ridden formations whose everyday negotiations far exceed the analytic frames imposed on them.

Tracing three contrasting household trajectories, one unraveling into permanent crisis, one achieving incremental upward mobility through exhaustive self discipline, and one producing fragile stability through gendered labour pooling, the paper shows that survival depends less on rational planning or individual empowerment than on relational improvisation, gendered bargaining, and continuous reconfiguration of work, care, and kinship ties. These temporal processes destabilize development imaginaries that privilege linear mobility, discrete interventions, or tidy outcomes.

Methodologically, the paper argues for feminist temporal ethnography as a mode of epistemic justice, a way of recognising forms of agency, refusal, and endurance that are invisible within policy frameworks. By centering households' own temporalities such as waiting, deferring, enduring, and recalibrating, it proposes a shift from measuring development to reworlding it, attending to the ethical, affective, and relational labour that sustains life under conditions that the development apparatus itself often produces.

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Drawing on community recipes and artworks, this presentation traces how creative feminist and decolonial praxis and grassroots solidarities open new vocabularies and inclusive infrastructures for disaster justice - combining a focus on climate, social and environmental justice.

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This multi-modal presentation shares recipes, perspectives and artworks from our Resep Keadilan Bencana (Recipes for Disaster Justice) project, a collaborative arts-led initiative led with multiply marginalised communities in Lombok, Indonesia. It reflects on our creative feminist praxis to shift narratives, centre care, and transform power relations around climate change and disasters. We ask how applied and creative methodologies can centre local communities in disaster management and prioritise their lived experiences, epistemologies, and embodied knowledges.

Working with over 150 participants including women, fishers, farmers, former migrant workers, youth, people with disabilities, teachers, LGBTQIA+ people, activists and child marriage survivors, in partnership with 17 civil society organisations, and a collective of artists, our collaboration has generated 131 community-led 'recipes', 123 creative artefacts, four counter-maps of hazard multipliers, and a community archive of local innovations and everyday practices of care, repair, and mutual support. Drawing on these co-produced materials, this presentation traces how creative feminist and decolonial praxis and grassroots solidarities open new vocabularies and inclusive infrastructures for disaster justice - combining a focus on climate, social and environmental justice. It explores how disaster management - and disasters themselves - reproduce and exacerbate extractive and exclusionary development logics—particularly for women, people with disabilities, and rural communities—while everyday local adaptations, innovations, and creativity articulate alternative visions of safety, solidarity, and care. Counter-maps and inclusive infrastructures arising from our work point toward practices that expand epistemic justice, enabling communities to shape the policies and priorities of state agencies, emergency responders and local authorities.

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This presentation examines women’s vernacular understandings of empowerment in NGO-led handicraft WEE programmes in Egypt, arguing that taking these meanings seriously is an epistemic and methodological necessity for rethinking empowerment on women’s own terms.

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Feminist development literature has long questioned what “empowerment” means in practice and how it is translated across contexts. In Arabic, the institutionalised translation of empowerment, ‘tamkeen’, has proven problematic, carrying technocratic meanings that do not resonate with women’s everyday lives. This raises questions about how empowerment is imagined in the design of development policies and programmes, and whose understandings are prioritised in these processes. As highlighted by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme, women’s lived experiences of empowerment should inform advocacy, action, and representation if empowerment is to be meaningful and transformative.

This presentation draws on research conducted as part of the author’s PhD. The research explores how empowerment is understood in the vernacular among women beneficiaries of a handicraft-based Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) programme in Cairo, Egypt, and how these vernacular understandings of the word influence how we, as development practitioners, understand the processes of empowerment in such programmes. Fieldwork was conducted in 2022 across three of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods, employing a multi-method qualitative approach that included focus group discussions, interviews, and ethnographic observations.

Drawing on Levitt and Merry’s process of “vernacularisation on the ground” and a decolonial feminist lens, the presentation shows that ‘tamkeen’ was largely unintelligible to women participants, despite its centrality in NGO discourse. Instead, women articulated empowerment through the locally meaningful concept of ‘kayan’, which captured a non-material, intrinsic sense of selfhood and dignity. The research presents ‘kayan’ as a core outcome of the empowerment process, reflecting a combination of ‘agency’ and ‘power within’.

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This article examines Kichwa Kañaris women from Ecuador, focusing on how they experience and negotiate hegemonic development discourses. From an intersectional, decolonial view, it highlights their agency, resistance, and proposals for a self-defined and collective definition of development.

Paper long abstract

This article investigates the situation of Kichwa Kañaris women from the Quilloac community (Cañar province, Ecuador) and how they experience, negotiate, and re-signify normative and dominant discourses, particularly the paradigm of “hegemonic development.” The analysis is framed within a critical perspective grounded in an intersectional and decolonial approach, which understands development as a discourse of power from which women—especially racialized women—have been historically and systematically excluded.

Drawing on a conceptual framework informed by critical development studies, decolonial feminism, and intersectionality, the chapter analyzes the dynamics of power, gender, ethnicity, and knowledge that shape how Kañaris women understand, define, dispute, and inhabit “development.” The Quilloac community is presented as a complex and heterogeneous space where multiple elements converge, including transnational migration, the ancestral Andean worldview, and the influences of Western modernity. These overlapping forces produce identities and practices that are often contradictory, yet coexist in everyday life.

Through qualitative ethnographic research, the chapter explores the participation and agency of Kichwa Kañaris women across diverse spheres such as education, community leadership, traditional medicine, commerce, and the family economy. Their practices reveal strategies of negotiation and resistance, as well as the construction of alternatives rooted in their own meanings of development.

Finally, the chapter gathers the visions and proposals articulated by these women, centered on collective well-being, cultural reivindication, equality, and the sustainability of community and life. These perspectives point toward a notion of “self-defined development” that directly challenges the dominant hegemonic model.

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This paper focuses on women embroiderers’ embodied craft practices, revealing how gendered labour, skill transmission, and institutional power intersect in rural and sub-urban China, challenging conventional development paradigms and foregrounding everyday, relational aesthetics and agency.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how women’s embodied craft practices constitute a critical yet under-recognised site of agency within contemporary development processes in China. Drawing on in-depth life history interviews with three senior women craft practitioners working within the field of embroidery, the study explores how gendered labour, skill transmission, and institutional recognition are negotiated through everyday craft work amid heritage governance, marketisation, and rural revitalisation agendas. Rather than treating craft as a static cultural tradition or a policy outcome, the paper conceptualises craft as an ongoing, embodied practice through which women engage with power, uncertainty, and socio-economic change. The narratives reveal that agency is enacted not primarily through overt resistance or entrepreneurial autonomy, but through relational labour, affective commitment, and strategic accommodation within existing institutional frameworks. The accounts foreground, respectively, the politics of evaluation and recognition embedded in heritage regimes, the tensions between collective ethics, aesthetic judgement, and livelihood strategies, and the temporalities of craft labour shaped by family responsibilities and intergenerational transmission. Together, these findings challenge dominant development paradigms that privilege formal institutions, productivity metrics, and technocratic expertise. By centring women’s lived experiences and embodied knowledge, the paper argues for a reimagining of development that recognises everyday labour as a key site where power is negotiated and futures are made. Empirically and conceptually, the study contributes to feminist and decolonial debates in development studies by foregrounding craft practice as both material labour and epistemic practice.

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Using feminist political ecology as theoretical base, this paper explores literature from diverse contexts in community forest governance to understand women’s navigation of power dynamics through collective organizing, knowledge negotiation, embodied practice, subtle acts that reshapes governance.

Paper long abstract

Majority of development discourses related to women in community based forest management describes them either lacking agency with victims of patriarchal structures, requiring their rescue and intervention or with an essentialist view, romanticizing them as natural environmental stewards innate with care and nurture abilities. This side often leaves the strategic, sophisticated ways women take to navigate the power relations within forest governance structures for individual or collective causes; when their voices are unheard, their aims not understood and needs are misrepresented. This paper employs feminist political ecology as a theoretical base and to do analysis of secondary literature by capturing the patterns of navigation women deploy despite diverse local circumstances. The research draws case studies from South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America which showcases women amplify their voices when individual credibility is questioned. They form alliances which transcend social boundaries. They use their physical presence, labor and visibility to make claims in other alternative informal spaces, when formal organization of participation become exclusionary. They propose alternative approaches to forest management that emphasize household needs, sustainable ecological usage. They adapt and negotiate in the overly bureaucratized gendered environment, rejecting both dismissive and idealized portrayals, asserting as complex political identities, posing them structural challenges and opportunities too. This research contends that effective forest governance should support and appreciate existing strategic practice rooted in indigenous epistemologies, rather than imposing external empowerment framework without any adaptation to local contexts.

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This paper considers a new concept, “dhadpad” – emerging from marginalised girls’ encounters with education, to respond to this panel’s questions of disrupting linear and teleological temporalities of development and offering a decolonial revisioning of progress.

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This paper, drawn from my doctoral thesis, responds to the panel's questions of disrupting linear and teleological temporalities of development and offering new vocabularies to reimagine progress.

Challenging a popular idiom from India, “Mulgi shikali, pragati zali” (Educate a girl and progress follows) which is echoed in global pronouncements of girls’ education as a “magic bullet” towards social and economic progress, my thesis undertakes a participatory journey to rethink both “education” and “progress” by centring the voices and experiences of marginalised girls who are often silenced within development and education policy.

Using the stories, questions, and insights from a collaborative fieldwork with rural and Adivasi girls in India, this paper critically reflects on the ways in which mainstream pushes for education weaponise girls’ bodies and minds to further a particular teleology of progress linked to historical as well as ongoing forms of colonisation. However, in rereading girls’ struggles to access, participate in, and make sense of their education, this paper proposes the concept of “dhadpad” – from a Marathi term denoting struggle – as a lens to disavow the agent/victim binary and make visible the ongoing negotiations, covert resistances, and collective forms of struggle within oppressive contexts.

Situating this “dhadpad” in education offers an expansive reading of education as a double-edged weapon that is both destructive as well as “de-constructive”, potentially enabling critical and creative deconstruction. In doing so, this paper offers “dhadpad” as a decolonial alternative to “progress” and a necessary interruption to the teleological visions of development.