by Devaki Jain, December 2006
One of the deep concerns of today's international women movement is the noticeable disjunction between the visibility, articulation, collective efforts and dissemination of knowledge achiedved between the true revolution in terms of the consciousness of an issue and the reality on the ground. I find many of us are saying the same thing which, put rather simply, is the neglect of gender experience, while at the same time the assault on women due to the macro-policies has increased.
Most of these thinkers and writers go on to suggest that a new path has to be carved in response. In a historical sense, this idea of exploring the future has acquired an urgency that has become obvious in that there are many thinkers, activists and academics, who, albeit from different viewpoints, are using varied methodologies and adopting diverse approaches.
A unity of purpose as well as a call for a fundamental reconceptualisation of society has emerged from these varied voices. The objective is not merely to tote up a balance sheet of assets and liabilities, of achievements and failures, but to move beyond the existing framework itself. .
Taking cognizance of these widespread concerns, the intention of coming together at Casablanca is to attempt to construct a framework which would be more in tune with both the policy and the ground level realities that women, especially less advantaged women, are currently facing. The goal would be to create a document - it could be a memorandum, an advocacy tool, a book - which attempts to build a revised analytical framework for looking at development experience with special reference to women in poverty and their quest for equality and justice.
My basic interest is in building a more appropriate theory, a conceptual framework for enabling women in poverty to walk out of it or not to be trapped in it. My premise is that women's knowledge/knowing can be used to re-order this world order and construct a new theory ... My analysis of Gandhi's technique encourages me to think that an idea, backed by mass mobilization can in fact generate a peaceful revolution. Here the women's movement is the mass, and what I hope we can search and find is the "idea".
What I would like to see happening in Casablanca is the birth of that new idea. It cannot merely be a transformation of an existing theory, but it has develop out of the collective experience of women's thinking, knowledge and lived realities .
Devaki Jain
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