Katy Jenkins

Peruvian community health promoters: expanding the spaces of health voluntarism.

This paper emphasises the importance of recognising the global South as a key site for understanding the patterning of geographies of health voluntarism. Feeding into a broader critique of neoliberal health and development policies, the paper explores what a case study of health promoters in a popular settlement in Lima, Peru, can add to our understanding of practices of health voluntarism rooted in distinct places, emphasising the uneven and gendered nature of such voluntary activity. In particular, the paper considers the ways in which urban community spaces are negotiated, inhabited and shaped by volunteer women health workers, arguing that an exploration of these everyday practices provides a more nuanced picture of the role of voluntarism in healthcare provisioning under neoliberal regimes.

‘Eventually the mine will come’: women anti-mining activists’ everyday resilience in opposing resource extraction in the Andes

This article explores the experiences of women anti-mining activists in rural communities in Andean Peru and Ecuador. The article analyses women activists’ experience of negotiating conflicts with large-scale mining companies, as well as within their communities, using the concept of resilience to understand their continued commitment to this work in a context of conflict, intimidation, and violence. Women activists’ resilience is demonstrated in their determination to fight the arrival of mining, despite being among an increasingly small minority of their communities who continue to oppose the mining companies; their commitment to collective action and to occupying their lands; and their tenacity in campaigning against resource extraction while simultaneously recognising that ‘eventually the mine will come’.

Depoliticisation and the Changing Trajectories of Grassroots Women's Leadership in Peru: From Empowerment to Service Delivery?

This paper examines how practices of leadership have been negotiated and have changed over time in the context of a grassroots health promotion project in Lima, Peru. Tracing these trajectories in the context of the evolution of womens organising in Peru informs a broader analysis of the changing role of grassroots women in development projects, feeding into debates around the professionalisation and depoliticisation of grassroots activism and providing new empirical material on gendered experiences of grassroots leadership. The paper recognises the increasing dominance of neoliberal management mechanisms but argues that the depoliticisation of grassroots women leaders is not simply a straightforward trickledown of neoliberal development practices but is produced through the interplay of local socio-political processes and personal biographies of activism with more macro-level development trends and discourses.

Civil society activists and vulnerability in South India: the relational politics of life history methods and development research

Abstract Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as ‘vulnerable’, and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists’ individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists’ experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects’ vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment.

Women anti-mining activists’ narratives of everyday resistance in the Andes: staying put and carrying on in Peru and Ecuador

Abstract This article explores the ways in which activism and resistance are incorporated into the everyday lives and practices of rural women in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes, theorising the nature of women’s everyday resistance in long running social conflicts. Drawing on research with women anti-mining activists in Peru and Ecuador, the article emphasises that their resistance is rarely concerned with large-scale protests, transnational activism, and the spectacular, but rather depends on daily resistance and resilience in, often fractured, local communities. I explore how rural women make extraordinary circumstances, including facing lawsuits and accusations of terrorism, part of their everyday lives, and how they articulate their resistance and situate it in place through narratives of staying put and carrying on, drawing on emblematic notions of rural livelihoods to challenge large-scale mining developments in their communities.