Title: Gendered Governance of Microfinance: Transformation of rural finance in/ by the Indian State
PhD Supervisor: Elisabeth Prügl
Expected completion date: 2025
This research approaches the state across (porous) scales such as the global, national, regional and local to study how the state is constructed, articulated and practiced across scales. This follows extensive fieldwork in New Delhi and West Bengal (the Indian State with highest and expanding concentration of microfinance) to interview women borrowers, debt collectors, state officials and financial actors and elicit the connections and contradictions linking the state and finance in engendering credit practices. The driving questions here are: how expanding microfinance changes the practices and character of the postcolonial state and how microfinance engenders women’s identities and economic activities, and how women borrowers enact, challenge and resist financialised credit practices. This will be done by studying how the state (and finance) are discursively constituted and the effects that this has on borrowers and their (gendered) social relations. This will place the state in a dialectical tension between structuralist and post-structuralist modes of power.This brings scholarship in political theory of the state in conversation with rich empirical evidence that traverses distinct scales to grasp the state and highlight how gendered social relations are constructed as the state and markets intersect and co-constitute with the phenomenon of microfinance. This research is intended as an in-depth study of rural contexts of a historically indebted region (West Bengal) in order to provide rich empirical data that can allow for analysing the broader processes at work in financialisation of rural credit.
Tanushree Kaushal is a doctoral researcher at the Gender Centre and Centre for Finance and Development at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on intersections of gender, state policies and finance, particularly the effects and challenges around extension of financial services to women borrowers and marginalized populations. Her research project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and bridges political anthropology, feminist political theory and international relations. She has experience in teaching graduate-level coursework on gender studies and contemporary finance and has been a research contributor to projects on financialisation of the pharma sector with the Global Health Centre, Geneva and a researcher for the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.
She has previously worked as a consultant for feminist organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Geneva on gender and political economy in Cameroon and West Africa, and has experience working with both government and non-government organizations working on gender and legal protection in India and the Netherlands. She has been an advisor to the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls.