ABSTRACT
There are several studies on (a) child health (more particularly, on childhood morbidity, child survival, child mortality); (b) women’s autonomy; as well as (c) social capital, and yet not much work that places them in a spatial framework is available, particularly in the case of India. Also, women’s autonomy has often been conceptualised in narrow and rigid terms. Of the several studies that have examined the interface between women’s autonomy and child survival (Durrant and Sathar 2000; Ghuman 2003; Hossain et al. 2000; Jejeebhoy 1998), most ‘have taken women’s autonomy as an objective circumstance and rely on the face validity of survey indicators of this construct’ perhaps because of the ease with which statistically verifiable demographic data are available (Ghuman et al. 2006: 2). Even as women’s autonomy gets conceptualised in more expansive ways, the contextualised specificities in which individuals and/or households are located have been sorely missed. Of late, however, the ‘spatial turn’ in social science research invoking the role of locational specificities in impacting upon people and their autonomy has brought location upfront as one of the explanatory variables (Cattell 2001; Drukker et al. 2003; Macintyre et al. 2002; Montgomery and Hewett 2005; Popay et al. 2003; Wen et al. 2003).
