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Compare: A Journal of Comparative and InternationalEducation

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Doing the ‘work of hearing’: girls’ voices intransnational educational developmentcampaigns

Shenila Khoja-Moolji

To cite this article: Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2015): Doing the ‘work of hearing’: girls’ voices intransnational educational development campaigns, Compare: A Journal of Comparative andInternational Education

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2015.1084582

Published online: 10 Sep 2015.

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Doing the ‘work of hearing’: girls’ voices in transnationaleducational development campaigns

Shenila Khoja-Moolji*

Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA

There is an increasing focus in transnational campaigns for girls’education and empowerment on highlighting the voices of girls from theglobal south. These moves are made in response to feminist critiques ofsaid campaigns for not attending to the diverse, multiple and complexlived experiences of girls. This article engages in theorising these pre-sent encounters and suggests alternate methodologies for engaging withgirls. It argues that eliciting/granting voice to marginalised groups (suchas girls from the global south, in this case) involves doing the ‘work ofhearing’; devoid of this, the voices become a mere add-on. Focusing onan engagement with girls in Pakistan, the author theorises that thepractice of hearing entails attending to the seepages and excesses ofgirls’ voices – or, that which exceeds dominant codes – that point to themultiplicity of their investments, commitments and visions of good life;being open to new terms of development that are identified by the par-ticipants themselves, terms that may not align with prevalent ‘bestpractices’; and being cognisant of the weight that Eurocentric knowl-edges carry, which often makes the work of hearing indigenousknowledges difficult.

Keywords: girls’ education; girls’ empowerment; development practice;Pakistan; human rights

Introduction

We observe an increased effort in recent times by transnational campaignsfor girls’ empowerment and education (such as the Nike Foundation’s GirlEffect or Plan International’s Because I am a Girl) to attend to the voices ofgirls. These endeavours have emerged in the aftermath of mounting critiqueof such campaigns for not taking into account the diversity and complexityof girls’ experiences and instead re-producing the White, middle-class girlas the ideal girl subject (see Bent 2013; Hickel 2014; Lesko, Chacko, andKhoja-Moolji 2015; Switzer 2013). These efforts have taken various forms,from featuring the voices and stories of girls from the global south oncampaign websites (see Girls’ Voices project of Girl Effect; ‘Hear Our

*Email: ssk2143@columbia.edu

© 2015 British Association for International and Comparative Education

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Voices’ of Plan International’s Because I am a Girl; and the Malala Fund’sblog) and hosting international conferences (see G[irls]20 summit) to themore recent call for girls across the world to contribute to the ‘Girl Declara-tion’ and, hence, participate in building a global consensus around girls’rights. However, even a cursory analysis of such engagements with girls’voices shows that they are often a mere add-on; that is, girls’ voices aredeployed only to re-amplify the already-established consensus around possi-bilities and limitations for girls in the global south, and often serve to rein-force the solutions/programmes already in place. I illustrate this by brieflyhighlighting the Girl Effect’s Girls’ Voices project, which features voices ofgirls from 14 countries to shape the Girl Declaration. I argue that instead ofshowing the multiplicity of girls’ desires and investments, such projects re-articulate Brown and Black girls as homogenous, knowable categories. Theyre-center the White, middle-class girl subject as the ideal by showcasing thevulnerability of Brown and Black girls as victims of their own families,communities and cultural practices. Hence, such efforts of attending to girls’voices, which are often invoked as feminist, do very little to disrupt thebinaries of empowered/disempowered and free/victimised.

In this article, however, I am more concerned with engaging in a theo-retical reflection around the work of eliciting and hearing the voices ofmarginalised groups, and conceptualising an alternate methodology fordoing such work with girls in the global south. What does it mean toembark on a project that seeks to highlight the voices of, or grant voice to,marginalised members of society? What kinds of responsibilities does suchan encounter place on members of the dominant group? What are the ethicsof such an engagement?

I reflect on these questions by re-examining my own work with girls inHyderabad, Pakistan. In 2011, a colleague and I organised a series ofhuman rights education camps with a focus on women and girls’ rights. Ihave critiqued my own pedagogical and curricular practices elsewhere(Khoja-Moolji 2014) – I, too, much like the Girl Effect campaign, engagedwith girls only to hear, and re-articulate, Eurocentric knowledges aroundpersonhood, community and citizenship. In this article, however, I re-turn tothe girls to enact a different practice of engagement, one that attends to theseepages and excesses of their voices to signal their differently-lived anddifferently-constituted investments and desires. Specifically, I take up theshort essays that the participants produced in the Urdu and Sindhi languagesat the conclusion of the camps, and examine them against the grain, payingattention to that which exceeds normative and privileged scripts of women’srights discourses. My examination shows that even as the girls rehearsed/repeated the dominant narratives – such as deploying the language of‘rights’ to name and identify their needs, highlighting that women shouldhave a choice to engage in waged-labour and identifying a lack of supportfrom families, communities and men as the key hindrances – there were

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excesses and seepages that signaled different kinds of alliances and invest-ments with these same ideas and entities. I elaborate three such examples indetail. This practice of re-turning, re-reading, and re-listening enables me totheorise key elements of what the ‘practice or work of hearing’ might entail,especially as it relates to development practitioners working with girls inthe global south.

The allure of girls’ voices

In 2013, the Nike Foundation and the United Nations Foundation embarkedon creating the Girl Declaration, a set of demands produced by girls them-selves (girleffect.org). The impetus for this call to action is to ensure thatadolescent girls are included in the post-2015 development agenda. As partof this campaign, both Girl Effect (Nike Foundation) and Girl Up (UNFoundation) feature stories and voices of girls from across various countrieson their websites. Headlines such as ‘This is our movement’ (girlup.org)and ‘Let’s make this the moment the world listens to girls’ (girleffect.org)signal to the readers that these campaigns are led by, and for, girls. Hence,even though the demands of the Girl Declaration (which prioritises fiveareas: education, health, safety, economic security and citizenship) alignwith already-universalised human rights agendas, including the priorities ofthe Millennium Development Goals, through visual and aural texts, theynow appear as areas identified by girls themselves, as opposed to bytransnational corporations and foundations.

I first decided to research and write about girls’ voices when, whilebrowsing the Girl Effect’s girls’ voices website that features the voices ofgirls from over 14 countries, I came across the voices of girls fromPakistan. In recent years, nations and communities in the global south havebecome the sites in and through which the discourse on girls’ education –which calls for the education of girls because educated girls have the poten-tial to address wide-ranging issues from poverty and health disparities toterrorism and violence – has been articulated (see Khoja-Moolji 2015 formore). While both Brown and Black girls are marked as ideal sites ofinvestment, specific chains of reasoning and sturdy tropes are operative inrelation to Pakistani girls. Whereas the threats for Black girls in Africainclude AIDs and teen pregnancy, for Pakistani Muslim girls, such threatsare located in Brown men, Islam and their cultures. Hence, the figure of theuneducated Pakistani girl draws simultaneously on sedimented ideas aboutthe victimisation of Muslim women, dangerous Brown masculinities, failedstates, as well as the promise of education and construction of girls asembodying futurity. Girl Effect’s girls’ voices website then incites its read-ers/listeners to participate in these discourses. It features writings in locallanguages, their translation in the English language and an audio clip ofeach girl’s voice. Six Pakistani girls were featured on the website and I

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started listening to the audio clips, bypassing reading the Urdu text and itsEnglish translation.

As I listened, I could sense that several of the girls were reading a scriptand only a couple of sentences by each were highlighted in the clips. Manyof them also narrativised what is already known about the lives of girls inPakistan and Muslim girls at large; that is, the loud discourses. For instance,Laila (age 17) noted, ‘I want my “community” to give me permission toleave home just as they give permission to boys’; Ayat (age 18) said, ‘Iwant that the curse of dowry should be eliminated from society. And, Iwant to make boys aware of girls’ rights so that they can protect the rightsof girls so that society can progress’; Anum (age 17) explained, ‘I want toabolish negative discrimination, because we girls and women are not infe-rior to anyone else. And I want to move ahead;’ and, Adeela (age 13)noted, ‘I wish to study a lot and I want that the children whose parents donot send them to school should send them to school to get education.’Collectively, these girls’ voices re-affirmed the audience’s certainties aboutthe victimisation of girls in Pakistan, that their communities/families/boysare key hindrances to their development, and that girls themselves want thesame rights that transnational organisations have been advocating for dec-ades (that is, to have an education, to work in the public sphere and havebetter health facilities). The performance of these voices, then, reinforcedthe history and authority of Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect campaign.

I paused for a bit, however, when I reached Sumbul’s (age 15) audioclip. Not only was the clip mismatched to another girl’s photograph and text(Fareeha), her words also did not confirm Girl Effect’s broader discoursesabout Pakistani girls and their communities and families. While the captionunder Fareeha’s photograph said that, ‘education is a must for girls toimprove their social status,’ the audio, which was Sumbul’s, gave me a peekinto a differently-lived subjectivity. Sumbul said:

My name is Sumbul and I live in Islamabad, in G72. And, I am 15 years old.I want that since I did not study, my brother and sister are able to study. And,I left school at the age of 12, so I want that my siblings get an education sothat they can stand on their feet [become economically independent] and sup-port my parents and make sure that they [the parents] do not become upset orbecome sad; that they become their shade [the word ‘saya’ is used here tosignal protection], and even in their old age give them support [the word usedis ‘sahara’, which is a more involved way of supporting than the Englishtranslation into ‘support’].1 (girlsvoices.girleffect.org; tag 48)

In the context of prevalent discourses about Pakistani girls, which positionthem as threatened objects – threatened by their ‘communities’, ‘families’and practices of ‘dowry’ – Sumbul’s words give a glimpse into the differentpurposes of education (supporting her family, as opposed to simply advanc-ing herself to access waged labour or accumulate material possessions), and

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construct the family as a hospitable site of living. Her voice then seepedthrough the collection of girls’ voices and pointed toward different invest-ments and desires. It called out to the listener to pay attention to it; to notassimilate it within the broader Girl Effect discourse that marked Pakistanigirls’ parents, families and communities as hindrances and, instead, viewthem as sites of support and belonging, whose development and welfarewas paramount to the girls. Sumbul wanted her siblings to have an educa-tion so that they could contribute towards improving the quality of life oftheir parents. How might we then attend to such seepages? What kinds ofethics of hearing might listeners enact when hearing/reading/engaging withthe voices of girls?

Girls’ voices in transnational campaigns

Transnational campaigns for girls’ education and empowerment are oftencomposed of broad coalitions and sponsored by a diverse range of actors/organisations. These include the philanthropic arms of private corporations(such as Nike Inc., Intel, Google, Johnson & Johnson), international non-governmental organisations (such as Plan USA and Save the Children),governmental aid arms (such as USAID, CIDA, DFIT) and non-for-profit,private foundations (such as the NoVo Foundation, which is chaired byPeter and Jennifer Buffet, the son and daughter-in-law of the Americanfinancier Warren Buffett), among others. A key criticism of such broad-based campaigns has been their lack of attention to the lived, multiplerealities of girls (see Hickel 2014; Lesko, Chacko, and Khoja-Moolji 2015;Switzer 2013). Thus, many transnational campaigns now explicitly highlightthe voices of girls by way of advancing a ‘girl-centred’ approach todevelopment and deploy girls’ voices as ‘evidence’ of the efficacy of theirprojects. However, Moeller (2013) argues that in the process of generatingconsensus around girls’ potential to address poverty (or what is popularlycalled ‘the girl effect’), girls are often transformed into data. In her ethno-graphic research with the Nike Foundation’s programmes in Brazil, Moeller(2013) observed that the organisation’s M&E practices read girls as sourcesof knowledge to facilitate change within other organisations and govern-ments. She argues that, ‘the actual young women in the program I studiedand their education were not the end goal’ (Moeller 2013, 620). Similarly,Wells’ (2015) analysis of Plan International and Save the Children’s keydocuments shows that a circular logic is operative within international non-governmental organisations whereby evidence gathered internally serves tolegitimise further projects; girls’ voices solicited by such organisations, then,indeed, play a critical role in providing legitimation.

In addition, interest in the voices of girls has also been facilitated by theemergence and consolidation of girlhood studies or girls’ studies as a sepa-rate field of academic study, with journals, readers, academic departments

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and special interest groups explicitly designated for the study of the girl.2

Here, knowledge is produced not only about the history of the emergenceof this category of subjective experience, but also its multiple performancesand the ethics of conducting research with girls. While much work has beendone about and with girls in the USA, England, Canada and Australia,scholars in the field are calling for more attention to girls in the globalsouth (see Moletsane, Mitchell, and Chisholm 2008).

Conceptually, one of the underlying assumptions behind centring thevoices of those who are marginalised is that it ensures that programmes,policies and the broader educative enterprises align with their needs anddemands, as opposed to those of the dominant groups. Often, the intentionof highlighting the voices of girls in transnational campaigns, for instance,is to signal that their concerns are understood and that attention is/will bepaid to them. This move hopes to equalise the playing field, so that thedominant voices do not monopolise the conversation. Hence, performancesof voices – especially of the marginalised – are seen as a critical way tofoster democratic participation (see Boler 2004). However, questions aroundwhat constitutes such participation, whose voices are foregrounded andwhose are made inaudible, what kind of content is performed by the voicesor why must speech be privileged in the first place are rarely addressed. Arange of educational philosophers and theorists have raised these questionsin order to direct attention to the multiple performances and uses of thevoices of the marginalised. DeCastell (2004), for example, inquires into thetheory of change that informs the contemporary centring of ‘voices’. Shetraces it’s grounding in ‘talking cure’, which insists that hearing silencedvoices can fix everything. For deCastell, however, talking without protecteddiscursive environments fails to secure equity and inclusion. If one fore-grounds the relations of power within which the marginalised are to speak,it becomes clear that speaking back to power is often not possible for many.Indeed, de Certeau (1984) has argued that one must pay attention to ‘theprotocols of encounter’ that mediate which group exerts power during saidencounter. According to him, when ‘voice’ is granted, as opposed to beingcaptured, it is the dominant group that continues to be the actor, framingthe discourse and, hence, the history. Likewise, in the context of thetransnational campaigns for girls’ education, when the dominant groupsreserve the ability to select, feature and display the ‘voices’ or ‘stories’ ofgirls from the global south, the claims around equalising the playing field orunderstanding the other through the other’s performance of voice seem lesstenable.

In fact, scholars such as Mayo (2004) and Jones (2004) contest the verycentring of voice because it lodges agency fully within the speaker. Mayo(2004) argues that such a focus on speech/voice abstracts it from the widerstructural inequities within which it is grounded. Likewise, Jones (2004)inquires into the desire for dialogue and the fantasies of unity and inclusion

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that surround it. To her, this desire is an effect of Western assumptionsabout the speaking subject and public participation over other modes ofbeing – such as silence or affective knowledges – and is grounded innotions of democracy achieved via rational debates across different groups.However, Jones finds that such desires for speech are not accompanied by asense of responsibility on the part of the listeners. She thus views them as amanifestation of the Western craving for coherence, authorisation and evenredemption that do little to destabilise sedimented relations of power, butcan instead be read as strategies of surveillance and neo-colonialism. Thisline of reasoning has also been pursued by postcolonial scholars who see inthe desire for the voices of the marginalised, another kind of violence. HomiBhabha (1994), for instance, argues that the colonizer’s demand for narra-tive – ‘What is it like for you?’ ‘Tell us about yourself’ – is a ‘strategy ofsurveillance and exploitation’ (Bhabha 1994, 98–9), which ultimatelysecures the authority of the colonizer or the supremacy of the dominantgroup. Thus, it is critical to interrogate how, when and why the voices ofparticular groups are elicited, granted or centred.

Given this background, how development practitioners and researchersengage with voices of the marginalised, especially in contexts that areinformed by deeply unequal relations of power, becomes a question ofethics. It places significant responsibility on those who enter these relation-ships with relative positions of strength. Jones (2004) has proposed that adifferent kind of ‘work’ is required from members of the dominant groupsif they indeed want to move towards fulfilling the promise of democraticparticipation. She denotes this as ‘the work of hearing’ (64) and elaboratesthat:

… what is ultimately most significant to dialogue is not the talking by themarginalized, but the hearing by the dominant group. The ‘actor,’ the onewho ultimately determines the success or failure of the dialogic encounter, isthe dominant … (65)

I take my cues from Jones (2004) to theorise what this practice of hearingmight look like in the context of educational development projects with/forgirls in the global south. I do so by (re)turning and (re)listening to thevoices of adolescent girls with whom I worked in 2011. I take their textualproductions to be a performance of their voices and listen for that whichseeps through and evades the discourses – on women and girls’ rights inPakistan – privileged during the pedagogical space/time of the camps. Myapproach is informed by Bhabha’s (1990) theorisation of ‘excess’. ForBhabha, ‘excess’ signals that which exceeds normative categories of repre-sentation and, hence, shows the very fragility and made-up-ness of saidrepresentations: what evades categorisation hints at possibilities that refusecapture and compel a re-thinking/re-feeling. I take up the concept to explore

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that which seeps through normative discursive environments to highlightalready-existing, but often unremarked, invisible and unwritten modes ofthinking/being/feeling. This approach enables me to illuminate the diverseways in which individuals and communities live out their desires andinvestments.

Approaches and methodologies

In 2011, I, along with a colleague, organised a series of human rightseducation camps called ‘Women Leaders of Tomorrow’ in the province ofSindh in Pakistan. The camps were attended by over 120 girls between theages of 16 and 21 from two rural villages and the small town of Hyderabad.Participants belonged to the same faith tradition that also has strong socialgovernance institutions, making the task of marketing and recruitment quiteeasy. They came from low- and middle-income families and all were eitherenrolled in secondary school or university at the time of their participation.The aim of the camps was to introduce students to the history of humanrights, its documents/declarations and what they might afford in relation towomen’s and children’s rights in Pakistan. As mentioned earlier, I havewritten elsewhere about the curriculum and pedagogy of the camps, cri-tiquing the ways in which we, the educators, re-articulated the claims thatthe dominant discourse on human rights makes about Muslim women andmen; namely that Muslim women are victimised by Muslim men, theircommunities and nations, and that human rights discourses provide a crucialmeans for women to progress and achieve emancipation (Khoja-Moolji2014). In this article, I focus specifically on the writings that the participantsproduced at the conclusion of the camp, which were later published in theform of an anthology (see Khoja-Moolji and Jaffer 2011). The explicitguidance for these writing assignments was that it should connect with thebroader theme of the camp – human rights – but could take up any topic,language (Sindhi, Urdu or English) and format (prose, poetry, images, etc.)of the participants’ choice.

At least half of the participants chose to write in English, while theothers selected Urdu or Sindhi. In this article, I attend only to the writingsin Urdu and Sindhi, for several reasons. First, most of the participants whochose to write in English did so to practice their essay writing skills. Mycolleague and I, therefore, edited those essays significantly by way ofinstruction, and hence it is likely that are our biases seeped across as wemodified sentence structures, diction and grammar. Assignments submittedin Urdu and Sindhi did not require similar editing. While I did read themonce to ensure that they met the requirements of the anthology, I onlyundertook minor edits around spellings and grammar.3 These writings wereby far the stronger and more coherent. Second, as a scholar with commit-ments to postcolonial theories, I believe that it is critical to pay attention to

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non-European language systems in order to highlight other discoursesaround human dignity that exist alongside the discourse of human rights.Languages provide one means of accessing such ideas.

In terms of methods, I entered the texts with the express intention ofreading against the grain, listening for excesses and tracing that whichevaded the dominant discourse of human rights. My aim was to subvertnormative forms of knowledge production by attending to that whichescaped privileged categories. Therefore, instead of coding for recurringideas, I looked for those that were hidden or buried under dominant codesand themes. This entailed reading the texts closely, and identifying con-structs and words that eluded the neat discursive productions of the humanrights discourse. In doing so, I align with feminist scholars who cross disci-plinary and methodological boundaries to engage in politicised intellectualprojects (Mupotsa 2010). In addition, following Bae and Ivashkevich’s(2012) advice to have an empathic engagement with girls with whom oneundertakes research, I engaged the texts with a sense of honesty and empa-thy, to resist assimilating them into my own assumptions about Pakistanigirls and their wellbeing. Indeed, DesAutels and Waugh (2001) haveexplained that feminists engaging in ethics should foreground asymmetricrelations of power and deconstruct privileged discourses. Therefore, re-turning to the textual productions of the participants of Women Leaders ofTomorrow entailed re-entering the texts with the explicit intention to actu-ally listen for the girls’ own investments and desires, seepages, excessesand multiplicities. This exercise, however, was not aimed at discovering thetruth of the girls’ experiences or lived realities. Instead, I was interested inexploring that which already existed alongside the loud voice of humanrights – what I had missed the first time. In a way, then, this article is moreabout the responsibility of hearing that resides with development practi-tioners/researchers and members of the dominant groups, than about thegirls themselves.

In this vein, it is also significant that I outline my own investments inproducing knowledge about Pakistani girls in a Western academic journal.In Object Lessons, Wiegman (2012) explores the political desires that ani-mate the production of, what she calls, identity knowledges – institution-alised academic projects aimed at the study of minoritised identities alongthe axes of gender, race, sexuality, nation and so on – and cautions:

Lets not pretend … that objects of study matter only because of what wewant from them, or that what we want from them is adequate to the ways inwhich they inhabit and transform how we grasp the world. The issue at stakeis more simple, if confounding: What am I without them? (8)

That is, I share a relationship with both my objects and methods of study(Wiegman 2012).

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I am originally from Hyderabad, Pakistan, and moved to the USA toobtain higher education. My graduate research, teaching and writing hasbeen focused on exploring the opportunities and challenges for Muslimwomen, with a geographical focus on countries of South Asia and theMiddle East, as well as the American diasporas. Over time, I have becomeincreasingly invested in the wellbeing of Muslim men and boys as well, asI no longer see my commitments to women and girls as de-linked frommen and boys. Said differently, systems of gender and sexuality necessarilyinclude men/boys. Hence, as a self-professed feminist, I have commitmentsto, and a political investment in, de-stabilising certainties about Muslimwomen, girls, men and boys. Across most of my scholarship, I do so pri-marily by tracing the histories and politics of social and cultural productionsand representations of Muslims. Specifically, a key line of inquiry for mehas been to highlight the politics of knowledge production about Muslims;that is, to explore the implications of the contemporary convergence on theMuslim girl and her corollary, Muslim men (note that it is often not Muslimboys, but Muslim men), on the lives of those who self-identify as Muslim,as girls and as men. I do not intend to speak for those I imagine as margin-alised by these discourses but I do trace the institutional arrangements andsocial and economic processes that produce and consolidate unequal rela-tions of power. In doing so, I hope to take away the neutrality that is oftenlinked with contemporary enterprises of development aid, internationaldevelopment projects and venture philanthropy, insofar as they re-inscribecolonial relations of power. My hope is to keep extending the borders ofthat which is seen as habitable and thinkable subjectivity. I realise that sucha project will never be complete or finished; thought will always have itsun-thinkable. Therefore, I sit comfortably at the margins, hoping to keepextending them, always making visible the excesses that, when incorporatedinto the thinkable, compel me to keep making other excesses legible.

Hearing multiple voices, investments and commitments

Altogether, I re-viewed 20 texts produced by the participants of WomenLeaders of Tomorrow, either individually or co-authored with another par-ticipant. They consisted of short essays as well as poetry. Below, I highlightsome of the themes that point towards commitments, investments anddesires that are often made inaudible in and through privileged scripts ofwomen’s rights discourses. I then theorise my practice of hearing anddelineate some of its key elements.

‘Main majboor hoon’ (I am desperate)

Existing alongside essays that portrayed waged-work in the public sphere asa ‘right’ and a ‘choice’ that women should have were articulations of

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waged-work as a ‘majboori’ or a consequence of desperation. This washighlighted in an interview conducted by Anusha with a maid, Shirin, whoworked in six different households everyday, cleaning and cooking, to puttogether a meagre income. In Shirin’s narrative (mediated through Anusha),waged-work featured not as a right but as a form of compulsion in the con-text of an extremely precarious and unpredictable economic environment.Shirin had migrated to the city of Hyderabad after getting married, and hadtried very hard to find work. The only kind of work that she could find wascooking and cleaning in other people’s homes. Explaining her situation,Shirin noted, ‘when a human being is desperate, he/she becomes ready todo any kind of work; I am one such desperate person.’ Shirin detailed theindignity that she and her children faced. While she was thankful to Godthat she and her husband at least had some way of providing for theirchildren, she dreamt of having the choice to avoid doing this work.

Shirin’s narrative about waged-labour complicates Sunita’s essay, wherethe latter argued that, ‘if women want to go out to work after their marriagethen we should provide them the opportunity so they can become economi-cally independent’ and ‘if we educate women then our nation will alsoprogress.’ Sunita, like many other participants from middle-class back-grounds, drew on our lessons about human rights declarations (such as theConvention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination AgainstWomen and the UN Declaration of Human Rights) to call for women’s eco-nomic independence, education and the contribution that such opportunitieswould make to the national gross domestic product/progress of Pakistan.The underlying assumption was that the pre-modern sensibilities of familiesand communities prevent women from accessing educational opportunitiesand/or waged-employment. However, as Shirin’s narrative highlights, poorwomen often do not have any choice in this matter; working is viewed notas a right to fight for but as something that one does for survival. And mostwomen are already working and do so in extremely perilous work environ-ments, without much security. Doing the work of hearing girls’ voices inthis case calls on the listener to suspend her beliefs about the promise ofwaged-work and consider the different positionalities of women and girls; itpushes back against unproblematised articulations of waged-work as afeminist right for all.

Moomal, in her essay, entitled ‘The problems of women in the villages’,highlighted such different positionalities of women. She began her essayemphasising that, ‘all women are not alike. There are differences of raceand color, tribe and caste, rich and poor, village and city. Each woman isdifferent from the other.’ These diverse identities of women directedMoomal to argue that if we really want to understand the problems ofwomen, we have to attend to their differences. Moomal explained that whilewomen in both the villages and cities may be equally hardworking andbright, the former often do not have access to facilities for healthcare,

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education and social services, which limits what they can achieve. Hence,she proposed that women who have access to such facilities should workfor the betterment of other women. Moomal’s essay exhibits a keen under-standing of how women’s lives are shaped by different economic, socialand political conditions, and that projects for their development then, too,have to be similarly diverse. Most importantly, Moomal does not look tosupra-national organisations for help. She calls on other women – womenwho may be better off, much like herself – to help less fortunate women.This ethic of helping and caring was apparent across many other writingsand it is to this notion that I now turn my attention.

‘Madad aur Farz’ (help and responsibility)

Discourses of rights were often tempered by discourses of help andresponsibility. Whenever a marginal population was identified, one whoserights were violated, an alternate population was also described that had theresponsibility to attend to the needs of marginalised peoples. For example,Komal and Anza in their essay entitled ‘Women and their rights’, began byreproaching village women for not being aware of their rights and repri-manded their broader communities for not permitting women to participatein decision-making in their households. They noted that even thoughwomen in the villages ‘worked hard not only taking care of children andtheir homes but also working alongside their husbands in the fields, if theyever serve food late to their husbands, they would be beaten up.’ In theirformulation, women in the villages appear as passive victims of communaltraditions and male violence. However, Komal and Anza quickly moved onto argue that it is ‘city women’s’ (a euphemism for upper/middle classwomen living in cities) responsibility to help women in the villages. Theethic of madad (help) appeared as a critical way for the privileged to attendto the needs of the less privileged. This notion was present across severalother essays as well. For example, Sunita noted that, ‘God has created menand women so they can help each other.’ She explained that the purpose ofmarriage was so that men and women could support each other in the ‘diffi-cult journey of life’. Likewise, Machael and Saba, in their essay entitled‘The Story of an Orphan Child’, highlighted the notion of farz (responsibil-ity) that adults and government agencies had towards orphaned children.

The practices of madad and farz then emerged as critical ethics of howone must engage with those who are less fortunate. Said differently, margin-alised people were to be helped not only because they had the right to acertain standard of living, but primarily because the privileged had theresponsibility to do so. This sense of responsibility was often linked toMuslim ethics, signalled by the myriad citations from the Quran that thegirls used to elaborate their thoughts. Qurat, for instance, in her essay, ‘Menand women are equal’, cited directives of Prophet Muhammad to propose

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that, ‘society should not differentiate between boys and girls.’ Similarly,several other students highlighted the messages of Islam that called forrespecting women and other marginalised groups, such as the orphans, andproviding them with opportunities. Hence, the language of help andresponsibility complicated the girls’ understanding and use of the languageof rights.

Supportive families and communities

Feminist scholar Rebecca Dingo (2008) notes that in campaigns forwomen’s empowerment in the global south, local communities, families andnations are often marked as obstacles. We, too, followed this dominantnarrative in Women Leaders of Tomorrow by identifying local communitiesand Muslim men as the key hindrances to Muslim women’s rights(Khoja-Moolji 2014). Our students, in their writings, reproduced such rea-sonings. However, when they moved from the general to the particular, thatis when they discussed specific examples and practical ways of improvingtheir own lives, they often wrote about the same entities (previously demo-nised) as being supportive, and placed their hopes in them. They movedaway from the generalised constructs of ‘family/community’ to actuallyname the local organisations, agencies and people that they believed woulddeliver favourable results for them. For instance, Amber and Kanwaldescribed their local housing society as a ‘tribe’, noting that ‘the peoplewho live here do not have much money but they have big hearts. They livelike a tribe … they work together towards the advancement of their housingsociety.’ Likewise, Anusha, in concluding her interview with Shirin, dis-cussed the ways in which the local faith-based institutions should help poorwomen secure employment and create programmes to help them developtheir skills. Similarly, Misbah, Sahr and Arzu, who resided in a village nearHyderabad, explained that they believed that women should get an educa-tion so that they can return to their villages to participate in its welfare.They articulated the purpose of formal education to serve local communi-ties, the very communities they believed had supported them to achievetheir goals.

Thus, re-turning to the girls’ writings de-stabilised dominant discoursesabout unsupportive communities/families/traditions in Pakistan. It showedthat while girls at Women Leaders of Tomorrow may have participated inthe dominant discourse of girls’ rights by noting that girls and women donot receive support from their families and communities (much like thePakistani participants featured on the Girl Effect’s website that I alluded toearlier), when it came to themselves, they often noted how supportive theirown families and communities had been, and exhibited strong commitmentto their welfare. Even when they critiqued local or faith-based bodies formarginalising their interests, they did so with an awareness about who to

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call on and what to say in order to assert their interests. Most participantsnever doubted the good intentions of local male leadership even as theycalled for more women to be appointed to local governance bodies. Thisoften meant that their actions within the community were more collaborativethan combative.

An interesting case in point was Amber and Shugufta’s poem, ‘AWoman’s Story’, which not only painted an alternate picture of ‘Muslimmen’ but highlighted the complicated lives of women, which evade neatcategorisations. The story began with a girl who did not get to go to schooland also did not learn any vocational skills. She was married at a youngage and imagined that her husband’s home would be much like her parents’where she would be considered a burden. However, she was surprised tofind a comfortable life ahead of her, with a kind husband. She now had allthe happiness in the world. Soon she learned that she was pregnant and, outof fear of having to share her in-laws’ and husband’s love with the baby aswell as impending poverty, decided to have an abortion. When the husbandfound out, he comforted her. She became pregnant again and her child, adaughter, brought her much happiness. She sent her daughter to school,taught her to work hard and become a good human being. Finally, when thetime was right, she married her daughter off. This poem is of interest to mebecause, unlike the dominant discourses that marks girls who do not get aneducation and are married at an early age as failures (see Brown 2012), thispoem hints at different possibilities for girls. It also points to the differentconcerns that women have which mediate their decisions, showing thecomplex ways in which their lives unfold.

Theorising ‘the practice of hearing’

The themes highlighted above based on listening for seepages show that theorientation of the listener plays a critical role in how the voices of girls aretaken up, interpreted and portrayed. Whereas in 2011 I only heard a celebra-tion of human rights discourses, returning to the same voices in 2015 withan intention to de-prioritise my own assumptions, an aim to hear that whichseeped through privileged discourses and an ethic of empathy produced dif-ferent meanings. My listening/reading, however, is not disinterested. Overtime, I have become disturbed by the large-scale incorporation of girls’voices and stories in transnational campaigns for girls’ empowerment/rights/education, practices that seemingly address feminist critiques of these cam-paigns for not sufficiently considering the lived realities and multiplicitiesof girls in the global south. However, as I show in this article, the ethics ofsuch an engagement mediate what happens to the voices of girls. Below, Iattempt a preliminary theorisation of the practice of hearing and what itmight entail for development practitioners, especially those who focus ongirls’ education.

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Multiplicities of commitments, investments and visions of good life

At the onset, I believe that it is critical that development practitioners whoare invested in improving the lives of girls in the global south engage in areflection about the presence of diverse, plural societies across the globe.There indeed exist peoples and communities whose investments and desiresmay not align with ours, and who have different visions for a good life(Abu-Lughod 2013). And if we really want to make space for diverse waysof being a girl, we have to attend to Bae and Ivashkevich’s (2012) call tohave an empathic engagement with girls, one that is open to differentdesires and investments of girls, messy enactments of girlhoods that includemoving back and forth between dominant and subversive scripts, and per-formances that might evade our own senses of what it means to be aproper/successful girl subject. For instance, the participants at Women Lead-ers of Tomorrow often used the language of human rights in particularmoments to articulate specific needs and shied away from using it for otherneeds. This hints at the facility with which individuals often take up multi-ple discourses simultaneously, which may even seem contradictory. How-ever, it is precisely this complexity that we have to attend to, making spacefor unfinished and incomplete performances. Highlighting this multiplicityentails attending to that which exceeds dominant discourses, and often ourown strongly held commitments and beliefs. It involves being vulnerablebecause any encounter with the ‘other’ who does not hold similar values isbound to raise anxieties, and can be read as threatening.

Shifting terms of development

Doing the work of hearing may mean that new terms of development areidentified by participants themselves, terms that actually may not be easilycomprehensible to us or may not match with our prior assumptions aroundbest practices. In the case of Women Leaders of Tomorrow, for instance, thiswould have meant attending to and nurturing local systems of support,which included faith-based governance bodies, councils, and civil societyorganisations. It would entail strengthening the sites of belongings that theparticipants found most supportive and generative for themselves, such astheir families and religious communities. Practically, this might have com-prised of undertaking projects that aimed to identify the positive ways inwhich communities and families supported the girls; learning more aboutlocal histories, heritage and cultures to become comfortable in the differencethat they embodied; learning and preserving native languages; and exploringthe affordances as well as limitations of new modes of living and being(such as nuclear families and emphasis on individualism) that were takinghold in local communities. In addition, it would have also involved de-pri-oritising the language of rights to actually understand our participants’ ways

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of being that were informed by Muslim epistemologies; after all, ourparticipants were deeply committed to their faith of Islam, which informedmany of their actions and thoughts. This set of practices, however, is inopposition to the most prevalent forms of development practice today,which often attempt to de-link women from local attachments (as Dingo[2008] shows). However, doing the work of hearing with empathy directsthat one must remain open to the shifting and fluid terms of development.

Recognising positions of strength

Finally, while development workers are often aware of their own privilege,we frequently forget the power that our knowledges exercise in relation toindigenous knowledges. Consider, for instance, knowledges about humanrights. Scholars such as Abu-Lughod (2013), Grewal (2005), Hartman(1997) and Ticktin (2011) have highlighted the transnationalisation of thelanguage of rights through powerful technologies of knowledge productionand transmission. Such knowledges carry with them the strength and weightthat indigenous knowledge systems may not and, hence, can have the poten-tial to erase local ways of knowing and engaging with the world. Indeed,anthropologist Sally Merry (2006) has argued that it is Eurocentric assump-tions about personhood and modernity that underlie the human rights dis-course. What is at stake, however, is a radical narrowing of ways of being/living if such erasures are allowed to happen. This means that developmentpractitioners have to be cognisant of the weight that Eurocentric knowl-edges, best practices and recommendations may carry, and do the work ofhearing the knowledges that such systems may be making inaudible. Thismove is already happening within academic circles, as scholars such asConnell (2007, 2014) and Takayama (2014) emphasise the need for centringsouthern knowledges; it now has to be taken up within developmentpractice as well.

Conclusion

Writing about African women, feminist scholar Danai Mupotsa (2010) notesthat she wishes to discover methodologies of viewing ‘the everyday lives ofAfrican women, without resorting to modes of description that emphasisethe long list of oppressions that African women face and therefore also ren-der any alternative modes of narration as inauthentic’ (3). This article hashighlighted that, in relation to Pakistani girls, when we really do the workof hearing we will hear different narratives instead of a long list of oppres-sions and victimisations. We will hear stories of hope, reconstruction andresourcefulness, all of which are equally authentic. These stories may ormay not align with Millennium Development Goals, may hint toward differ-ent kinds of collaborations or may even resist reduction to ‘best practices’.

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However, that is precisely what the outcome of empathetic listening shouldbe. Indeed, shouldn’t we pause when diverse voices are reduced to stable,homogenous narratives? Shouldn’t the unison of voices and systematicity indemands across campaigns such as Girl Effect and Because I am a Girlalarm us? How can girls from radically different geographical locations,histories and political, economic and social environments demand the samerights? In attempts to discover commonality across national, ethnic and reli-gious boundaries, there is a danger of reducing difference to something thathas to be managed, erased and/or made invisible/inaudible. It is the work ofdevelopment practitioners and researchers then to highlight identitarian dif-ferences while at the same time preventing this difference from becoming adisconnection.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes1. Translation into Urdu by the author.2. These include the journal Girlhood Studies; books such as The Modern Girl

around the World; Girlhood: A Global History; The Future Girl; and YoungFemininity, Girlhood, Power, and Social Change, among others; and the estab-lishment of a Girlhood Studies Special Interest Group at the National Women’sStudies Association.

3. My colleague did not read Urdu and Sindhi compositions.

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