Going Beyond Intersectionality: Recasting Children’s Gendered Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya as a Multiplicity and an Interference

Date
Thursday 27 Feb 2020, 13:00 - 14:00
Type
Seminar
Room
4.01
Location
International Institute of Social Studies
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Elizabeth (Eliza) Ngutuku
Elizabeth (Eliza) Ngutuku

In this Research in Progress Seminar, Elizabeth Ngutuku will discuss gendered experiences of child poverty in Kenya beyond intersectionality.

ABSTRACT:

Despite the usefulness of an intersectional approach in analyzing various axes of marginalization, some notable disquiet has emerged around its ability to capture complex perspectives in gendered marginalization. Some scholars have argued that intersectionality does not cater for the dynamism and contingencies of experience with arguments that relations are often seen as stable. There are questions on the methodological difficulties with some noting that it is difficult to establish the number of intersections or how to pay attention to them.  Further, some scholars have noted that the intersectional approach is additive and assumes that marginalization is linear. There are therefore calls for methods that go beyond intersectionality and that enable us to capture contingent and messy relations of marginalization. I take these perspectives as points of departure in presenting children’s gendered experience of poverty and vulnerability in Kenya. I draw my arguments from my one-year ethnographic research where I used rhizomatic methodologies in capturing children’s non-linear, complex, and fluid lived experience of poverty and vulnerability.  I go beyond an intersectional reading of gendered challenges and identify non-linear connections between diverse relations, identities, processes, structures, norms in programmes of support and other embodied characteristics that define gendered experience. In so doing, I recast this experience as a multiplicity. I argue that while gender is a useful category in understanding children’s experience, this relationship needs to be understood beyond intersectionality.  In calling for a methodological shift in understanding this experience, I also note that intersectionality is useful in as long as it enables a perspective on how these factors and processes interfere in the lived experience of differently and dynamically located boys and girls and their caregivers.  

About the speaker

Her PhD research is on children’s lived experience of poverty and vulnerability in Kenya. She has utilised Rhizomatic methods to capture the complex experience of child poverty beyond multi-dimensionality.

Elizabeth is also an interdisciplinary researcher and development professional with over 20 years of experience in social development, research and social policy. Her main research interest is in how gender interacts with other identities like age, generation, sexuality, social class and space to influence development outcomes for (young) women, children and youth.

She has carried out various research on Social protection, poverty and vulnerability, Gender and   agricultural value chains, Early Childhood Care and Development and Adolescent sexual and Reproductive Health, mainly in the Eastern Africa region.

Elizabeth holds a Master of Arts Degree in Development Studies, Specialising in Women, Gender, Development from ISS, and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Anthropology from the University of Nairobi

More information

The Research in Progress seminars provide an informal venue for presentations of ongoing research by ISS scholars (including staff and PhD researchers) and other scholars from the wider development studies community.

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