ABSTRACT

Tens of millions of girls worldwide are deprived of schooling on the basis of their gender (Lewis & Lockheed, 2006), although many of them passionately aspire to gain an education. Such has been the case for girls in the villages of rural western China. For over ten years, I have observed 1 in a series of studies the daughters of one village at the very margins of globalization in the mountains of west China. The NongCun [Village] Sisters attended middle and high school between the ages of at least 13 and 17 to 18 years. 2 These girls break with tradition and struggle against extremely harsh conditions to be in school. International development literature and the Millennium Development Goals declare that girls’ schooling is one of the most effective means for fighting poverty, and that through schooling girls are empowered to reduce fertility and population growth and to contribute to the nation’s economic development. However, few “if any evidence of attempts even to define what [empowerment] means in [girls’] own context” exists in mainstream development literature (Mosedale, 2005, p. 243). The series of studies of NongCun Sisters aim to do just that: to identify empowerment in schooling of excluded school-age girls, as well as to explore implications of the girls’ empowerment for social change. In a previous study, Seeberg and Luo (2012) reported on the association between attaining higher levels of schooling and increasing empowerment from the perspective of the Sisters, establishing the linkage of empowerment and schooling. Their lives were plainly embedded in rigid constraints of multidimensional poverty, subject to ample deprivations. This chapter does not focus on measuring empowerment or disempowerment in and through school, but rather

attempts to contribute to a cross-cultural conceptualization of schooling empowerment and its impact on social change.