Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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Entangled Ecologies: Exploring Affective labour, Gender, and Environmental Subjectivity among the Tharu Women of Uttar Pradesh, India through Time Use Perspective
Shiksha Dwivedi
ABSTRACT:
This paper foregrounds the entangled nature of labour, time, and power in the everyday political ecology of Tharu women of Terai landscape in Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh, India, particularly the inhabitants of Dudhwa forest which was declared a National Park and Tiger Reserve in 1978 and 1987, respectively. This mixed-method study employs a gender-disaggregated time-use survey and ethnographic research. Based on data collected from 250 time-use diaries using recall method in paddy sowing season and ethnographic research conducted intermittently from the year 2022 to 2025, this study investigates how Tharu women’s meta-industrial affective labour that sustains not just their household but also the forest ecology, is embedded and constitutive of their embodied materiality. It reveals their everyday negotiations with patriarchy, bureaucracy, and the forest. Situated within a feminist political ecology framework, this paper combines time-use data, collected through stratified random sampling technique, categorised and analysed as per the International Classification of Activities for Time Use Statistics (ICATUS) 2016, with qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews, focused group discussions, and thick description. The paper highlights that the analysis of time-use and labour among the Tharu does not only reflect the gendered nature of labour, but also actively contributes to the production of Tharu women as environmental subjects. By situating the study’s findings within a feminist political ecology framework, this paper argues that the embodied material reality of Tharu women is a crucial terrain for their everyday politics of belongingness and resistance.
Keywords: Environmental subjects, Everyday politics of resistance, Feminist political ecology, Forest rights, Mixed-method study