Designing for Empowerment with Rural Women in Bangladesh

Abstract:
Women’s wellbeing, economic participation, and equitable access to information and technologies, among others, are often challenged in patriarchal social settings. However, designing with rural women in low-resourced postcolonial spaces has many socio-political challenges. My doctoral work focuses on understanding the rural social setting in Bangladesh- a developing country in South Asia, and the challenges that rural Bangladeshi women face in their life. Through my work, I aim at supporting rural Bangladeshi women’s empowerment agenda by designing technologies. I draw on existing STS, development sociology, postcolonial studies, and feminist literature and bridge them with existing HCI, CSCW, and ICTD feminist work in many postcolonial spaces. Then, I introduce some key findings from my four-year-long ethnographic work in rural Bangladesh, connect them to existing theories and design assumptions, and discuss how many of them might fall short if directly applied to support women’s empowerment in this space.