The main purpose of this article is to broaden U.S. scholars' awareness of the similarities and differences of gender literature in another part of the world. In providing this partial review of gender scholarship in India, the authors hope to foster critical reflection on the inequities of global knowledge production and consumption and the role of U.S. academic institutions and scholars in this project. The article is written not by scholars who are based in India but by those who are based in U.S. academies. Given their location, linguistic and cultural competencies, and scholarly expertise, the review, at best, can be described as a glimpse of gender scholarship in India. The four sections of this article feature theoretical and methodological issues, the women's movement, and violence against women in India.

Organizing grassroots groups, particularly among the deeply disadvantaged may require initial facilitation through a leader. This article suggests that such facilitative leadership will adopt a diffused form with increased participation and involvement of members in groups. Thereafter, members are less likely to rely on the facilitative leader for decision-making or collective action. Based on primary data from sanghas organized as grassroots groups through the Mahila Samakhya Karnataka (MSK) program in rural India, the article examines the effects of group characteristics; structure and leadership; and individual participation on the political-cultural empowerment of members. The analyses suggest that older bureaucratic grassroots groups are more likely to be empowering for women members. Members’ involvement in the process of creating, setting up and adopting rules and procedures is significant for change within the family and the community, particularly for the poor illiterate dalit women in this case.

This article examines the ways in which the gendered religious schemas pertaining to career and motherhood are set up and reinforced by the Latter Day Saints (LDS) Church and how these schemas affect the everyday lives of Mormons. We show how gender, class, and region intersect and impact how religious individuals interpret gendered religious schemas. Analysis of qualitative interview data shows that for very religious men and women, the gendered cultural schemas of work and motherhood are distinct and tend to constrain women. Considering the intersections of class with gender, the analysis shows that some middle-class Mormons reject oppositional cultural schemas and value work and career for women. Further, we find that Mormons outside of the cultural stronghold of Utah are more likely to reject Mormon religious schemas that pit career and motherhood as competing ideologies. In fact, some women participants describe being enabled in their careers by Mormon religious schemas.

Scholars have recently called attention to the changing nature of the American university in the wake of the current economic downturn. Considering the transformative nature of knowledge production in the United States, we introduce the concept of intellectual closure in illustration of the unintended outcomes of individual decisions and career trajectories as they operate under the forces of social closure. Intellectual closure is defined as subtle and hidden forms of constraint on individual agency. Intellectual closure includes calculative thinking about how to publish in flagship journals, avoidance of high-risk projects, and preference for short-term projects with more immediate rewards. Structural constraints, specifically within sociology, are enabling the emergence of narrower perspectives and eroding former professional norms as individual decisions aggregate, unintentionally, to constitute a more competitive discipline with narrower definitions of productivity and quality.

Resources received by NGOs, particularly in the developing world, are instrumental in shaping program activities and in establishing, through donors, the hegemony of Western knowledge. Building on earlier work involving the spatial and locational politics of knowledge, I argue that donors providing resources for designing and implementing programs, including that for capacity building, impact the structuring of knowledge to create intellectual realms. Intellectual realms structure knowledge and create bounded spaces in ways that maintain the centrality and power of knowledge producers in the West. Th e donors pre-determine activities to be pursued and utilize, the capacity building initiatives as mechanisms for promoting theoretical ideas and frameworks that conform to knowledge production in the West. Using two cases from rural India, I discuss the ways in which donor priorities can adversely impact local communities and how power relations at the local level and across the local and global levels facilitate the construction of knowledge.Interventions designed by the state and/or international agencies to address poverty and for women's empowerment, particularly in developing countries, are often based on "blueprints." 1 Such blueprints overlook context related social processes and social relations that create and/or reinforce 1 Th e phrase "blueprints" is drawn from Portes (2000).