School of Social Science Seminar Series: Contesting a development category - Female headed households in Samoa
Event Details
- Date:
- Friday, 03 April 2009
- Time:
- 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
- Room:
- 329
- UQ Location:
- Steele Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://socialscience.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=104898
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Rochelle Stewart-Withers
- Phone:
- 52020
- Email:
- r.stewartwithers@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Social Science
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Contesting a development category: Female headed households in Samoa
Speaker: Dr Rochelle Stewart-Withers, School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Female-headed households are well entrenched as a development category in conventional development thinking, planning and practice. The idea that female-headed households are a worthy target for poverty alleviation strategies is driven home as part of the poverty alleviation agenda and the desire to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
This premise suggests that the category female-headed households can be universally applied, and given the acceptance of the poverty alleviation mandate and the MDGs in the Pacific it also suggests that the category female-headed household has applicability in the region.
By drawing on particulars, specifics and locality this paper seeks to explore female-headed households as a development category in the context of Samoa.
It is thus shown that the category of female-headed households was not well understood within Samoa because neither villagers nor policy makers labelled women in this way. Rather, women were recognised in relation to the cultural framework of fa’asamoa which situates them in terms of their position within their family, their natal village and the wider community.
It is also shown that female-headed households are not always the ‘poorest of the poor’. The relevance of female-headed households as a category of development and female-headed household policy is therefore brought into question. The importance of contesting development rhetoric is emphasised.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
Event Tools
Share This Event
Print
Email
Share
