Webinar | Grassroots Women as Worldmakers: Towards a Global Politics of Redistribution

Women’s grassroots political resistance and their role in worldmaking is often marginalised in historical accounts, however women’s local solidarity practices are increasingly central in development discourse. In 2006 the World Bank adopted the ‘gender equality as smart economics’ framework which has been embraced by a variety of development organisations, philanthropic foundations, financial institutions and corporations to promote projects, products and services aimed at offering market opportunities and financial instruments to women. 

In this scenario new digital technologies are celebrated for providing affordable and available tools to facilitate women’s economic activities and allow them to improve their own, their community’s and country’s wellbeing. Drawing on law; development, global political economy and feminist decolonial debates, this talk will illustrate the progressive integration of women’s grassroots practices in development discourse and discuss how claims of inclusion, autonomy and resilience are used to justify the over-reliance of the global economic system on the unpaid work of women at the lower end of the income distribution. I will argue for the need to adopt a radical global politics of redistribution and reflect on what this entails in the new digital economic order.