Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Women Navigating Globalization: Feminist Approaches to Development (New Millennium Books in International Studies)

This up-to-date text offers a clear and cogent introduction to women in development. Exploring the global structures and processes that impede or support the empowerment of women, Jana Everett and Sue Ellen M. Charlton use a feminist lens to understand contemporary gender roles. Without such a lens, they argue, our understanding of globalization and development is incomplete, resulting in flawed policies that fail to improve the lives of millions of people around the globe. After a set of introductory chapters that conceptually frame the issues, the authors then investigate women's struggles within and against globalization and development through powerful case studies of sex trafficking, water, work, and health. These chapters, by using specific examples, develop the concepts of structure and agency, levels of analysis, and feminist approaches as tools to help students understand the complexities of development and alternative strategies. Through rich interdisciplinary analysis, Everett and Charlton explore the individual and collective strategies women have used to improve their lives under globalization and weigh how effective they have been. Their book will be an essential resource in women's studies, political science, political economy, anthropology, sociology, and development studies. Review Everett and Charlton have written a clear, comprehensive analysis of globalization and development examined through the lens of feminist analysis. They begin with conceptual analyses of their terms, soundly documented and referenced with key studies. They embrace multiple forms of feminism as practiced differently in diverse world areas. The authors provide a balanced emphasis on top-down structures that shape lives and on the agency that women bring, individually and collectively, to their situations. Everett and Charlton ask and answer their key questions at different levels of analysis, from local and regional to national and international. In four chapters, before their conclusion, they offer innovative applications of these concepts in four areas and eight places: human trafficking (Russia and Bangladesh), water (Peru and South Africa), work (Brazil and India), and women's health (Chile and the African Union) . . . [T]hese experienced researchers/authors . . . analyze the material in a sophisticated yet accessible way, which will be of value to upper-division or graduate students and academics. The book is as comprehensive as Mary Hawkesworth's Globalization and Feminist Activism. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.--CHOICE Everett and Charlton, pioneering feminist scholars of international development and comparative politics, provide a dynamic analysis of the mixed blessings for women of neoliberal globalization--that is, the capitalist marketplace operating within and across spaces of limited governmental regulation. Their writing is conceptually sound, clear, and accessible, with case studies on work, water, health, and human trafficking. While attentive to the big picture of institutions and public policies at national and international levels, the authors highlight women's agency in struggles to make a better and fairer world.--Kathleen Staudt, University of Texas at El Paso Women Navigating Globalization is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the complex interplay between gender relations and globalization that neither neglects the importance of local sites and struggles nor ignores their relevance to international policy. Everett and Charlton adopt a 'gender-plus focus' showing the imperative of addressing gender inequalities and injustices in relation to injustices based on race, class, nationality, sexuality, and disability as part of any development scenario--whether that relates to the problems of human trafficking, the management of natural resources such as water, the quality of work, or the conditions for health and well-being. Un