Development, education and gender: challenging the empowerment rhetoric from an ethnographic study in rural Nepal

ABSTRACT Education and gender have become central issues within development discourses and practices in Nepal, under the powerful idea that school enables equality for women, collective wellbeing, and the nation’s development. While hegemonic approaches to development are being increasingly challenged, critical contributions focusing on the education-gender intersection are still scarce. Drawing on data from an ethnographic research in a Himalayan village and school, this paper analyses the forms of knowledge, styles and relationships within learning processes in/outside the school, and its implications for the gender regime (re)production. Findings challenge the idea of schooling as an empowering tool for women by showing not only the coexistence of contradictory or differentiated models of transmission and acquisition of culture but also of contents, meanings, and its value change, in a Nepal governed by and within the paradigm of development.