Seeing Like a State or Seeing the State?: The Political Economy of Women’s Self-Help Groups in Madhya Pradesh

(with Arundhita Bhanjdeo, Nivedita Narain, and Michael Walton)

We use guidelines of the state and transcripts of 90 interviews and focus groups among stakeholders in a self-help group (SHG) institutional system in one district in Madhya Pradesh to study how the state interacts with citizens. Our work contributes an in-depth study on the organizational workings of a state-led livelihoods program, as well as on the roles of specific actors in the system and how they see each other. We focus particularly on the “doubly embedded” government-contracted community mobilizers.

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Sexual Harassment on Interracial Women’s Solidarity in the United States

Can making a shared issue salient effect social solidarity among a diverse social group? Does emphasizing intersectionality amplify or fragment social solidarity? How does invoking intersectionality effect political attitudes and behavior for such a social group? I draw on theories of social identity and social psychology, as well as sociological work on intersectionality and gender to design a survey experiment to answer these questions for a particularly diverse social group in the United States: women. The experiment tests whether and how the way in which a prominent women’s issue – sexual assault -- is invoked impacts women’s solidarity, political attitudes, and behavior.