PI: Robin L. Turner, Associate Professor, Butler University
Grant Amount: $2,500
Project Abstract: Reworking Tradition analyzes the gendered politics of representation and traditional governance in southern African democracies, where monarchs, chiefs, clan leaders, and other traditional leaders preside over courts and meetings, mediate disputes, facilitate development, and sometimes allocate communal land and other collective resources. Their governance can reproduce, reform, or challenge norms and practices privileging men over women, elders over youth, and longtime community members over more recent arrivals. How do women chiefs and traditional councilors govern? Do these women leaders seek to represent women, and if, so, how? How have traditional community members responded to women’s governance? I use interviews with women traditional leaders and in women-led traditional communities to address these questions. This Centennial Center grant will underwrite a last round of field research in the North West province of South Africa focused on how women traditional leaders and their communities have navigated the coronavirus pandemic.