Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

107

Development, Social Transformations and New Gender Relations: Africa and the World

RC09 Social Transformations and Sociology of Development (host committee)

Language: English

The different development policies introduced worldwide in the last decades have transformed our societies. Mainly generated by economic growth, these development policies had impacts on different economies, and other areas such as culture, society, identity, and the environment. Gender relations, in particular, have significantly changed. For example, the increasing incorporation of women in poorly paid economic activities requiring an unskilled labor force, and the growing concurrence of men and women around the same jobs because of precarious labor situations have triggered changed gender relations. The public and the private, and the work and domestic spheres have affected men’s and women’s mutual relationships. New gender distributions of tasks both at work and at home, new gender representations, and new social positions for men and women are some of the recent schemes that development often hides. 
This session will discuss transformations in gender relations in the light of the different development-driven strategies of recent decades. It will address the following questions: Which new gender relations can we identify today, arising from the different development policies that have been implemented? How have these development policies transformed gender relations? To what extent are these changes in gender relations the expected outcomes of development? How are these new gender relations currently characterized? This session invites the submission of original papers, using qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. We especially encourage the submission of comparative case studies. Posters: