Philanthrocapitalism and the languaging of empowered women in the Global South

1 Introduction

(IU) (the university) is a golden opportunity. So we must use properly. They who give us donation will assess us, so we must do well, and we need English to do well. (Yasmin)

These words were uttered by Yasmin (anonymised), a former factory worker and one of the student participants in our study, at a focus group meeting that the first author (Sudha) conducted with students to understand their experiences at an international women’s university (IU, hereafter) in Bangladesh. IU, as an independent (i.e., private) university that follows an all-English curriculum, had set as its mission to empower Asian women from socio-economically less privileged backgrounds and transform them into change-makers through an education in English. All the students at the meeting were former factory workers from the ready-made garment (RMG, hereafter) industry in Bangladesh who had been carefully selected for having potential to benefit from such an education model.

At IU, the RMG students received further support from their factory employers who, as partners in their education, paid their wages during their five-year long residential education to sustain their dependent families in the villages. In exchange for the investment made in them, the women believed that they had to perform in certain expected ways to become desirable and worthy citizens of such a programme. Yasmin spoke for all her factory colleagues and articulates their experience of the struggles and challenges they faced. While expressing a deep sense of gratitude and obligation to her benefactors for providing the “golden opportunity”, her words also revealed the effect the governance from above had on them: the pressure to perform well in a highly competitive environment; the fear of failure; and, most importantly, the anxiety about having to perform well through the medium of English – particularly poignant for students like Yasmin who came from Bangla medium schools and struggled to rise to the expectations of institutions where the discourse of English as the language of social and economic empowerment and international development was taken for granted.

The factory workers’ 5-year long residential education comprised three components, namely: Programme for Promise (PP, hereafter), involving a Pre-Access intensive English course; Access, entailing a bridging course in preparation for the degree course; and a three-year undergraduate course. As a whole, this education offer constituted the nexus that brought together a powerful network of institutions that included: the government of Bangladesh; the RMG (ready-made garment) industry; a group of multinational philanthrocapitalists such as the IKEA-Stichting Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Foundation, the Open Society Fund, Goldman Sachs, L’Oreal, Nike, among several other local and international business employers; and the university with its influential Board of Trustees made of international figures who also acted as the main fund raisers for the university across the US, UK and Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Altogether, they contributed to shape ideas and practices associated with the discourse of women’s empowerment at IU, in line with the government’s priorities

on improving the condition of women and on strengthening the quality of education as means of advancing national development and desires to host and support the university in Bangladesh (The University Charter).

In return for its official support, the government of Bangladesh demanded a commitment from IU to reserve at least 25 % of the seats for Bangladeshi women students, with the expectation that they would bring about social and economic change to the country. Following a political commitment to women’s empowerment embedded in “national development” goals set at the United Nations, the government played a key role in 2016 when the university set up PP, a programme considered by the Vice Chancellor of IU as a marker of uniqueness in catering to the English needs of socio-economically underserved women, unlike other private universities in Bangladesh. Indeed, PP would become the most advertised initiative of the university at the time of the fieldwork, appearing widely covered by national and international newspapers.

In so doing, the multi-million RMG (ready-made garment) sector was identified as a source from which to recruit socially disadvantaged women; this sector would not only provide the students, but more importantly continue to pay the salaries for five years as part of their so-called “corporate social responsibility” (CRS, hereafter). The factories themselves were too publicly reported as having a golden opportunity for the RMG industry to support their workforce and improve their reputation, after the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 that killed more than a thousand workers, mostly young women, due to negligence. But not only that, besides the political backing, their CSR initiative would also gain recognition among the international corporations and, in addition, their workers at the university were deemed to serve as their “good ambassadors” in gratitude for their financial support, as reported by the Director of PP in one of his interviews with the first author.

As for the corporate philanthropic foundations, PP became a strategic element in wider agendas concerned with the development of women in South Asia. Stichting IKEA Foundation, for example, one of the seed donors of PP, sponsored the RMG learners with full scholarships for five years through a joint agreement with the university envisioned as a pathway to “create a generation of leaders for the region” (Development aim – IKEA Agreement). The enmeshment of such corporate understandings of women as a valuable resource, rather than as victims, and particularly how this is imagined to be accomplished by the university in its endeavours to empower women through an English education, was also well reflected in speeches by the IU’s Board of Trustees published in brochures and videos on the university website. Accessible to students, stakeholders in education and prospective donors, such speeches were powerful indicators of the discourse of corporate success and why, in their perspective, women were worth investing in.

One such promotional video was that of the Vice Chair of a leading international corporate firm whose powerful delivery and their sheer status as a successful strategic analyst established a firm corporate role model for other stakeholders and for the students to aspire for. As they put it:

…Numerous studies have shown that the return on the dollar is higher for educating women than for men because women are more likely to pass on the education philosophy to their children and the rest of the community. My other passion is getting more women into the economy… using half that population more efficiently makes sense… (IU website)

Against this background, it could be argued that Yasmin’s account further above demonstrates an internalisation of the promise of higher education through the medium of English as the key to unlock a better future, regardless of the specific local conditions that she inhabits in Bangladesh. Certainly, this resonates with the blooming of applied linguistic research that over the last few decades has critiqued the global spread of English in higher education settings for its effects on the loss of national languages (Ferguson 2007) and, more generally, for its impact on the pursuit of linguistic justice (Soler and Morales-Gálvez 2022; see also Jeong and Lindemann 2024). And yet it is not clear what the local ecology is that makes English such a valuable object of attention to all the above-mentioned stakeholders at IU, nor do we know the specific effects that this object has on students like Yasmin who aspire to “become empowered” through an education that is imagined as appropriate and necessary to empower women.

With the aim of shedding further light on these issues, this article examines more closely how philanthropic ideas of English and women’s empowerment become institutionally entrenched with languaging practices and subject-making processes in the context of higher education in Bangladesh. In what follows, we first trace today’s focus on the empowering of women in Bangladesh back to the historical conditions that followed its independence, with a view to the enmeshment of ideas of women’s empowerment, English, structural adjustment programmes for national development and the emergence of corporate actors operating globally (Section 2). With that in mind, we introduce an ethnographically-informed sociolinguistic approach that investigates how such ideas contribute to the institutional ordering of everyday practices and subjectivities at IU (Section 3). Later, we zoom in onto PP a key socialisation space for our participants to socialise each other into communicative ways of doing and being recognised at IU as emblematic of the social persona of an “empowered woman” (Section 4), followed by further discussion on the consequences of such practices and their implications for scholarly work preoccupied with the study of language, higher education and late capitalism (Section 5).

2 Development, empowerment and English – women at the centre

The conceptualisation of human beings as capital and investment in Bangladesh can hardly be disentangled from long-standing histories of colonialism and capitalism in so-called economically “under-developed and developing countries” (Stromquist 1993). As a relatively young nation-state that separated from Pakistan in 1971 and which previously had gained independence from British colonialism in 1947 as part of India, Bangladesh’s independence has, indeed, coincided with a wider push towards neoliberal globalisation that has resulted in large scale privatisation and deregulation and a lure for economic development and participation in international global markets. A key engineering feature of these transformations has been the setting of the Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) for 2000–2015, and then Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2016–2030, in which women’s upliftment is one key strategic area, thus drawing the attention of the international aid-givers and providing timely opportunities for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives (see also Summers 1992).

Moreover, as one of the first countries to fully avail of the Structural Adjustment Programmes, Bangladesh has also endured economic adjustments that followed the measures for global economic transformations offered by powerful international financial institutions led by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to facilitate the debt crisis. Given that the requirement to repay loans which soon proved beyond its capacity, the country has faced further economic adjustments in the form of privatisation and de-regulation that have been widely regarded as leading to the weakening of the State (Karim 2008). As a result, Bangladesh has been reported since its independence to rely excessively on foreign aid, in addition to having powerful policy makers and privileged elites that enjoy colonial connections, being highly patriarchal, and comprising a large population of the world’s poorest people (Lewis 2011). It is in such historical and political economic conditions that the weighing of human beings in terms of human capital and investment can hit women the hardest, as studies in Women’s Development in South Asia have shown (e.g., Nadeam and Rayamajhi 2013).

Some of the tensions associated with such adjustments and their related consequences are well attested in the replacement of the “women’s development” keyword with that of “women’s empowerment” in the international circles, at the time of the setting of the MDGs, a shift in the international development discourse which has brought about the mainstreaming of gender inequalities and feminist concerns (Nazneen et al. 2011). Consequently, the concept of women’s empowerment has become entrenched in the development economics discourses and policies of the local government, the donor organisations, the NGOs as well as the local women’s organisations in Bangladesh. Yet, and while being increasingly assigned the centre-stage since the 1970s, the feminization of labour has also been critiqued as enabling the capitalist generation of funds and foreign currency needed to pay off the national debts accrued from the restructuring loans, as exemplified by the export of nannies, maids and entertainers from the Philippines and Thailand to wealthier countries such as Singapore and to Europe, or by the exploitation of young women through cheap labour in factories in South Asia (Alam and Matin 1984; Kabeer 2005; McCarthy 2017; Stromquist 1997).

Meanwhile, Friedman’s (2013) call to re-invent philanthropy after the global financial crisis of 2008 has seen the emergence of “philanthrocapitalism” (Bishop and Green 2015) as “the integration of market motives, motifs and methods with philanthropy, especially by HNWIs (high net worth individuals) and their institutions” (Haydon et al. 2021: 371). Deeply anchored in the US and spreading across the globe, practitioners of this model of philanthropy include high-net-worth individuals such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros, but also mega foundations and multi-national corporations like Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Stichting IKEA Foundation, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and Nike. With well-intentioned aims to save the world from poverty by making good what they perceive as the failings of governments and the welfare systems, these organisations and individuals argue that their responsibility does not stop with just giving, as in traditional philanthropy, but rather should go beyond via intervening and investing to transform and encourage international economic growth and development in the areas of health, agriculture, and more impactfully in women’s education and empowerment. As such, this new model of philanthropy has been described as a “neoliberal artefact” (Mediavilla and Garcia-Arias 2019: 870), subjected to measurable objectives and quantifiable results for increased efficiency (McGoey 2012).

In Bangladesh, efforts to integrate with global market conditions and to raise economic growth standards set by the international aid organisations have led policy makers to focus, since the 1980s, on women’s empowerment as the “magic bullet” (Kabeer 2005) to resolve issues that were thought to hinder economic growth – e.g., poverty, illiteracy, increasing population and poor health and hygiene. By way of echoing the type of rhetoric that was rife in the World Bank, the UN and in the government policies, women have been described as “our most valuable resource” and empowering women as “feeding a community” (Prügl 2015). This trend followed the report on Economic Development (1992) by L.H. Summers of the Office of the Vice President of the World Bank who stated that “investment in the education of girls may be the highest return of investment available in the developing world” (p. 10), a claim supported with statistical evidence of reduced fertility rates and improved children’s health and education. However, and while Bangladesh may have exceeded its targets in primary and secondary education of girls (more than boys) between the years 1990 and 2016, bringing down, as anticipated, the numbers of child and neo-natal mortality (SDGs Bangladesh first progress report, 2018), the direct educational gains for the students attending school have presented a rather mixed picture of some economic gain but little improvement in matters of choice (Arends-Kuenning and Amin 2001).

In addition, the employment of young women in the ready-made garment (RMG) industry as beneficiaries of global firms’ corporate social responsibility programmes at universities such as IU places factories in the country as serving as one of the partners in education. This has been widely reported as a compensation as well as an opportunity to right the bad reputation following the Rana Plaza tragedy which killed hundreds of young female workers due to exploitation and negligence. As stated by an international newspaper in Bangladesh:

Three years on, as experts lament how government, retailers, factory owners and consumers have done little to safeguard workers, a small miracle has emerged from the tragedy and is slowly taking shape… Established in the aftermath of the disaster, [University]’s [Programme for Promise] aims to use higher education to empower women labourers to become leaders and have a stronger voice in shaping the future of Bangladesh’s lucrative garment sector. (Anonymised source)

But education has not been the only signifier of women’s empowerment. English has often accompanied it as a collocation, mirroring wider assumptions that have historically equated this language with economic and political progress (Chowdhury and Kabir 2014; Hamid et al. 2013; Imam 2005; Kabir 2010). Since the 19th century onwards, the association of English with access to power and prestige in Bangladesh, and its subsequent impact on language-in-education policies, are rooted in at least three key dimensions, namely: (a) the British colonial past, (b) its struggle for separation from Pakistan grounded in linguistic and post-colonial nationalism that placed English as the official language and challenged the supremacy of Bangla as the mother language, and (c) the contemporary neoliberal drive towards economic globalisation where English is seen as the language of international trade and communication and of economic and social mobility, including a more recent lure for an American life-style (see also Hamid and Erling 2016).

This is reflected today in the increasing demand for English and for English medium education in the country, with parents who can afford it sending their children to private schools where they believe the quality of education in English is better than in the public schools or resorting to private tuition in English with the hope of finding admission in English medium secondary schools or colleges which will lead to higher employability and economic prosperity – all of it despite the growing literature questioning the direct correlation between English education and socioeconomic mobility (Hamid 2016; Kabir and Greenwood 2017). As a result, MOI (Medium of Instruction) policy has become a major contributor in the division between the public and private sectors in higher education in Bangladesh, with English only being offered in private universities while various combinations of Bangla and English are only available in the public universities, thereby creating categories of English medium and Bangla medium, reproducing hierarchies and a class structure within English education based on imagined levels of acceptable English language competency (e.g., Hamid and Baldauf 2014; Islam and Salma 2016).

As a private university that offers English as the medium of instruction and is equally concerned with the empowerment of women factory workers, IU constitutes therefore a key window into the study of how all these philanthropic meanings on the empowering of women and learning through the medium of English shape the organisation of social life and social relations within PP. But before doing so we first need to detail our epistemological approach in the exploration of such issues.

3 Being and becoming through a language and communication lens

The research collaboration that underpins this article draws on a well-established wealth of ethnographic sociolinguistic scholarship that departs from approaches to categories of language, multi/bilingualism or speakerhood as given, to rather explore how they organise social relations according to particular institutional logics (Codó and Patiño-Santos 2018; Dlaske et al. 2016; Garrido and Sabaté-Dalmau 2020; Heller 1999; Lorente 2017; Martín-Rojo 2010; Pérez-Milans 2013; Rampton 2006; Sunyol and Browning 2024). More specifically, we are interested in the packaging and regrouping of semiotic and communicative practices that are then turned into emblems of figures of personhood associated with certain ways of being and doing. This approach requires engagement with a variety of interconnected conceptual frameworks in language and communication, and for the analytical purposes of this article we highlight two relevant ones, namely: affective regimes of language and discourse enregisterment.

Our understanding of affective regimes of language is inspired by Ahmed (2004, 2010] as she takes issue with approaches to emotions as internal states of cognition that result in response to (external) events or general social circumstances. Instead, Ahmed invites us to conceptualise them as affective orientations towards material or symbolic objects (including metapragmatic constructs about ways of doing, being and speaking) that organise social activities and social life in particular ways, with effects for the social actors involved. She argues that these orientations, far from being just personal experiences, are always embedded in wider political economic relations or “affective economies” (2004). In other words, affect should also be seen as moving among signs, subjects, and objects, and thus mediating between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and collective (2004: 119). This is the case, for example, of “happy objects” as a promise or a hope for a future happy state that does not exist at present and may or may not arrive.

Writing from a position of “sceptical disbelief in happiness”, Ahmed posits that by pursuing these happy objects, we are made to believe that we attain happiness and well-being for ourselves and others, thus often involving the labour of staying on the “right” path as any deviation can cause disturbance to the self as well as to the surroundings. But they can also act as justification for oppression, she warns us. Thus, in turning our attention to happy objects as they affectively arrange and organise activities and social relations we also align with Wetherell (2015) and Kiesling (2018) as they call to analyse affect as a social practice that is semiotically mediated and embodied and which, therefore, is not just purely denotational (see also Kraft and Flubacher 2020; Milani and Richardson 2020).

As to discourse enregisterment, we follow Agha’s work (2007) as he builds on the notion of “indexicality of language” (Silverstein 2003) and its focus on how “people organise communicative resources such that they produce specific meanings” (Blommaert 2008: 16). By way of incorporating a socialisation lens, Agha’s take on discourse register allows us researchers to account for the processes through which members of social groups come to recognise specific sets of meaning-making practices as shared cultural models of action, with these models being indexically linked to the enactment of specific social personae and to the associated stances that such personae perform with regard to circumstances, other social actors, or institutions. Anchored in this approach, we aim to: (1) examine the institutional logics whereby a set of semiotic features become recognised as emblematic of being or doing the “empowered woman” within the PP programme at IU as well as the kinds of moral/social stances (Jaffe 2009) that are associated with it; and (2) identify the linkages between this form of discourse register and the institutional actors and networks that contribute to its standardisation and which capitalize on it.

Our attempts to engage with affective orientations through a language and communication lens such as this is also informed by previous sociolinguistic work that brought out the affective features of late capitalism. For instance, Cameron (2000) documented how besides certain established character traits expected of employees in the service industry such as being enthusiastic, hardworking and friendly with a willingness to take risks, the ability to communicate in gender-specific ways was identified as an essential skill. She described the training and scripting of call centre workers as emotional work. Focusing on the adverse effects of the Structural Adjustment policies imposed on the Global South, Lorente (2017) revealed how the state of Philippines and the private maid agencies used English as a commodity to trade Filipino women as super maids to care for the children of the wealthy in Singapore in order to sustain the families they had left behind. Pérez-Milans and Guo (2020) traced the trajectories of Chinese international students and the emotional pressures that they suffer for a ‘successful’ return home as a technology of hope, and how they subsequently turn to projects of religious conversion as an alternative space for hoping. Park (2017) shed light on the affective consequences experienced by students due to the imposition of an English language policy in higher education in South Korea.

Building on this strand of work, we approach our own research site with a view to understand how the affect of hope is entrenched with wider ideologies of English and late capitalist discourses of women’s empowerment and how the figure of the empowered woman given the right to dream is enacted and made sense of with the participation of philanthropic stakeholders. In line with Ahmed’s (2010) work, but with a lesser degree of scepticism, we take our participants’ pursuit of becoming “empowered” as a “happy object” that pushes them into a particular direction in order to be prepared and develop a “technique for living well” (p. 2), this involving the acquiring of legitimised forms of education and skills at IU (e.g., English language) for an imagined state of social and economic well-being. Thus, we aim to understand how technologies of hope are semiotically and communicatively enacted in the everyday practices of the women in our research, and also how they make sense of their “happy objects” (p. 21) as they pursue the Programme for Promise at the university, despite the struggles and inequalities they experience in Bangladesh.

4 Programming the promise, becoming an empowered woman – the case of Hasina

As the first stage in the factory workers’ 5-year long residential education at IU, PP constituted a key affective space for the concerned participants to begin socialising each other into desirable ways of doing and being recognised at IU as emblematic of the social persona of an “empowered woman”. In what follows, we trace two meaning-making dimensions that in our data corpus recurrently emerged as salient in making the process of becoming an empowered woman recognisable. These are: the institutional ordering of “keywords” (Ahmed 2012: 51–82) upon which the social life of PP was arranged (Section 4.1.); and the scripting of the desired type of personhood throughout the first year (Section 4.2).

5 Scripts of philanthropy: transformation as self-responsibilisation of southern women

Hasina was selected by IU to showcase a model student from a factory background who transformed into a public speaking figure with leadership potential and who brough about social change. But in doing so her struggles were in turn backgrounded. In other words, the willingness to transform herself into a desired subject was the object of celebration rather than the true achievements themselves. Certainly, at IU, English opened doors to those who could speak it accompanied by the required communicative skills to persuade and lead. Indeed, the reporters from a national English language newspaper interviewed Hasina soon after the event discussed further above, and the former factory woman attracted a great deal of media publicity in the newspaper the next morning. In addition, a corporate member of one of the supporting foundations at IU described her as “a spark, turning out to be a typical product of (IU)”. She was no longer perceived as a victim of social inequalities but, instead, as a resource to raise socio-economic gains.

More importantly, it seems that what Hasina was training herself to achieve was to be seen as “becoming a leader” or a change maker. However, as an emblem of this type of social persona, her frantically busy schedule soon involved having to take part in numerous activities outside classrooms, all of it along with her challenging academic studies in English, particularly academic writing, which ended up having their toll on her mental and physical health within six months of her enrolment in IU. Towards the end of the second semester, her attendance at classes started to drop and she was no longer seen in the clubs and societies where she used to take an active role at the start of the first academic year. She began suffering migraines due to stress and ultimately faced depression when she realised that she could not do all that she had wanted to. Becoming part of an international university had its challenges and she seemed to be under considerable pressure to live up to that social image that she successfully enacted in her new English-medium environment at IU (which she often depicted as Westernised) while, at the same time, meeting the normative expectations required from her as a woman from a traditional rural and patriarchal Muslim community in Bangladesh. But not only that: in addition to dealing with the consequences of realising that learning English did not stop with learning the language, she was also the recipient of constant reminders from her teachers and her benefactors to take advantage of the opportunity that she had been provided, all of which exacerbated her anxiety levels.

As much as the other women studying with her – including Yasmin with whom we opened this article, Hasina’s experiences resonate with wider debates on whether or not the affective orientation of women towards “happy objects” – such as the powerful idea of “becoming empowered” in this context – contributes to make a positive impact on those who are institutionally expected to pursue it, or if rather it brings about a moral obligation to transform that mainly has negative effects for them. Communicatively embodied through specific behavioural templates or scripts, being or doing an “empowered woman” entailed the discourse enregisterment of a set of semiotic features that emblematised such a figure of personhood and which included speaking in English and aligning with moral values of leadership and commitment to social justice through narrative language like the one analysed in Extract 2. But the constant enactment of these templates was a must for our participants to access the promised rewards that come with an international, English-medium higher education which they all had aspired and struggled to enjoy throughout their lives (i.e., social recognition, professional success and socioeconomic mobility) – or otherwise they were to be socially blamed.

The stances that “successful” students and corporate leaders display as role models in their promotional material and at university events conveys IU’s expectations to prospective students and establishes the persona of the corporate leader that is envisaged. In Hasina’s public speech, in particular, we see how role-modelling brings into focus the “extra-ordinariness” (Park 2010: 30) and erases, in the process, the struggles emerged from the structural inequalities and social barriers she had faced – the latter appear as her own responsibility to overcome. We argue that this risks the reproduction of class and gender inequalities and further divisions among women which women’s empowerment is meant to challenge in the first place.

With due acknowledgement of the university’s well-intentioned mission and altruistic efforts, empowerment becomes entrenched with a capitalist logic naturalised as a maximisation of resources and centred on economic investment and benefit – i.e., with a logic presented as a “good” form of capitalism (see also Nuottaniemi 2024, for a similar rationale linked to “green capitalism”). From the standpoint of the philanthrocapitalists and the international fund raisers, the empowerment of southern women acts as a “silver bullet” to tackle several other social and economic issues, capitalising on women’s resilience as an under-utilized market value. In response to that, the university and the corporate employers aim to make the women more suited for the global market with a skills-oriented education. By supporting such endeavours, the state of Bangladesh hopes to achieve its development targets while the RMG industry strengthens its CSR strategy. The RMG women in turn, as sponsored students of IU, reciprocate reflexively by presenting themselves as benefitting materially and symbolically from such an arrangement, as exemplified by Hasina’s performance of “doing empowerment”.

Although there may have been some immediate financial gain for women from socially marginalised backgrounds such as our participants, which we recognise is also essential, this is not necessarily linked to long-term socioeconomic mobility. Even when studying alongside upper-middle-class, fee-paying, English-medium students through the medium of English with exposure to international standards was envisioned as all that was needed to fill the gap, these women were still largely perceived as rural, non-fee paying, Bangla medium RMG workers. These structural forces were also hardly impacted by an educational rationale that expected our participants to act on themselves as individuals to transform into desirable bodies as changemakers, all of it underpinned by the understanding that empowerment is all about becoming independent and responsibilised subjects, and further naturalised by values of leadership and critical thinking associated with authoritative pedagogical models coming from centres of authority in the Global North – i.e., a US-based liberal arts curriculum. Against the background of these colonial forms of languaging higher education in the Global South (see also Makoni et al. 2022), our question is not if these southern women will make able leaders, but rather if they are allowed to take equal part in decision-making within larger societal configurations – including patriarchal ones.

In pondering this question, we return to the notion of “empowerment” in women’s development studies where it is often conceptualised as relational and subjective, thus implying that power is not always given, as assumed in most women’s empowerment projects, but also taken (e.g., Rowlands 1995). Drawing on a transformative sense of the term, empowerment is from this perspective seen as a process that assumes an awareness of powerlessness and mobility from a less powerful state or subordination to a more powerful or equally powerful state: “empowerment must involve undoing negative social constructions, so that the people affected come to see themselves as having the capacity and the right to act and influence” (Ibid, p. 103). Zinia, another participant in her third year at IU, makes her own critical view on this clear, in the course of a discussion on what empowerment meant to her:

I don’t think just giving or doing job is women empowerment// women’s empowerment means whatever I think I can do/ I can do// it’s not that I am educated so I have to do job// it is my wish/ if I do not wish I should not have to do it (…) but here I saw that people forcing women to do job// *DO JOB, DO JOB {with an angry and irritated tone}

And if women’s empowerment is to be taken as a subjective process, Kabeer (2001) argues, then it is important “to bear in mind the important distinction between women as a socially subordinate category and women as a highly diverse group of individuals” (p. 82), this requiring careful consideration of the diverse individual needs of women to achieve a collective aim of social justice. In contrast, many of the education and employment initiatives by NGOs and the government for women’s empowerment in South Asian contexts, including Bangladesh, with the financial support of international aid agencies, have been projects with partial achievement since they were planned to accumulate human capital from a homogenised body of women mainly, as the literature on development indicates (e.g., Sen 1997, 1999a, 1999b). Similarly, most corporate social responsibility initiatives in the current scenario tend to be quick-fix projects with top-down mechanisms of implementation, limited funds and bound by pre-set targets and company outcomes (Edwards 2008). We hope our account in this article adds to the existing literature by shedding light on the communicative embodiment of these processes and on their effects within infrastructures of higher education.