ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with two interrelated issues taken up in this volume: representations of ‘illiterate’ ‘Third World’ women and research for policy advocacy within the context of international development, particularly that of adult literacy education. It engages with the former in so far as dominant discourses of adult literacy education, international development as well as some feminisms tend to constitute non-literate people in the ‘Third World’, and in particular women, in three distinct ways: liberal modernisation discourse represents them as ‘ignorant’ or ‘ignorant mothers who need to be enlightened’ (Betts, Chopra and Robinson-Pant in this volume), leftist underdevelopment discourse as ‘victims’ (Mohanty 1991) and neoliberal development discourse as ‘potentially rational economic agents’ (Rankin 2001). Though divergent in composition, these three representations have a common troubling effect. The representations make it possible to conceive of and therefore engage with ‘illiterate’ ‘Third World’ women as if they are somehow abstracted from the specificities of the contexts within which they live their lives and within which their agency necessarily finds its specific expression. Turning to the second point, this chapter explores questions of research for political advocacy in its critique of those critical researchers who, albeit countering the dominant positivistic research paradigm and/or the dominant representations of ‘illiterate’ ‘Third World’ women, express no need to negotiate research processes with their research subjects or extend their political interventions beyond the texts they author. Though these critical approaches are important, they can be exploitative: in failing to extend their engagement, such exercises may confirm their subjects’ subordinated position.
