The Community Work Programme: Investigating labour, autonomy, and the (neoliberal) State through a public employment programme in South Africa

The project I wish to propose will use survey and ethnographic methods in a selected country in the MENA region to investigate the individual experiences, subjective justifications and personal utopias of women and their effect on paid, unpaid, and care work. It will engage findings in dialogue with development approaches to FLFP and Arab and Western feminisms on social reproduction. I thus aim to accomplish three goals: first, to test explanations based on cultural and religious constraints offered by empirical sociological literature for FLFP. Second, to re-evaluate Western feminist accounts of emancipation and social reproduction and contribute to 'decentering' the corresponding literature. Third, to generate a map for further doctoral research, which should account for the heterogeneity of the MENA region, and may incorporate historical and macro-economic factors which determine the availability of appropriate jobs, as well as regional supply-side policy instruments.