Empowerment or alienation? Teaching gender and development in postcolonial contexts

This paper explores how culture, religion, gender, and the politics of knowledge production were entangled in the mission, policies, and practices of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh. The article contributes to documenting how decolonisation efforts in women’s education and empowerment play out in an institution located in the periphery and established with an explicit mission for women’s empowerment. The article critically looks at the (sometimes) contradictory discourses, desires, and agencies at the student, community, staff, and institutional levels, along with the power dynamics and reproduction of colonial and postcolonial practices and legacies in the context of operationalising gender and development (GAD), highlighting the paradoxes and challenges that arise from such endeavours. Finally, this case study highlights how pedagogies of community building at the institutional level become integral in responding to such tensions and conflicts and in countering the alienation from culture and religion that global practices of GAD often create.